This house in rural West Bengal proves that partnering with nature can help deal with the climate crisis

This couple gave up their high-paying jobs in the United States to become farmers in Bengal, and build a self-sufficient home sans excesses

Contrary to how “home” is conventionally imagined as a bubble of privacy—a term carrying connotations of solitude—it is, more often than not, an institution that lies at the heart of communities. It is a community that builds a home from scratch, too—a detail most often lost to the din of urban living in high-rises.

When Aparajita Sengupta, 45, and her husband Debal Mazumder, 50, returned home to Kolkata in 2011—after pursuing their respective careers as a PhD scholar and a software engineer in Kentucky, United States—they were confronted with the profound hollowness of the non-circular nature of their lives. It was a one-way street, a life bereft of giving back to the community, even nature, what they had been taking from them. “It was in the US that we had become very aware of what we were eating, and, to be honest, we started questioning everything after we began paying attention to the taste of the things we were eating,” says Sengupta.

Nothing there tasted right or flavourful, not even produce bought from grocery stores cooked in familiar spices from home. Eventually, the couple began to investigate what went into their food, which then largely turned out to be lab-produced and controlled by billion-dollar corporations. “To put it simply, our food was poisoned,” says Sengupta, a fact that pushed the duo to review their larger goals and ambitions, leading them to a unanimous answer—farming.

After their return to India in 2012, Sengupta and Mazumder took a plot of land they were offered by a family on lease, on the outskirts of Kolkata. For a year, they ran a community-supported agriculture farm on its premises, which they monikered ‘Smell of the Earth.’ Upon the lease’s expiry, they bought a two-acre plot of land in the neighbouring district of Birbhum, where they set up a home and a farm—also called ‘Smell of the Earth’. Since 2014, they have been its permanent residents.

Building a home with your own hands

Neither Sengupta nor Mazumder is trained as an architect or designer. However, their decisions were certainly not made on a whim. They formally learned the ropes of permaculture design in Darjeeling from an instructor certified in the discipline. Soon after, the couple found themselves building a mud house with their own hands, a process that would take eight months, aided by the participation of the local community.

“In those eight months we made a makeshift palm-leaf cottage with a thatched roof on our home campus and lived there until the house was ready. Debal designed the house and we built it ourselves, sourcing local materials. It’s a very small space with a  footprint of 30 x 20 feet,” explains Sengupta. The home has two floors, with the ground floor being slightly elevated to keep it from flooding during the monsoons. It also has a modern bathroom with taps and showers; the home has fans and lights, but no air-conditioning, despite the searing summer heat of Birbhum where the mercury regularly crosses the 40 degree celsius mark.

“It gets a little muggy during the day, of course, but nothing that’s not bearable. However, at no point did it feel like we are making any sacrifices,” clarifies Sengupta. The idea is to work with nature and not against it, which ordains one to be observant and pay close attention to the patterns of nature. “But might I say, with each passing day, even those patterns are proving to be elusive,” says Sengupta, pointing to the larger climate crisis driven by global warming. 

For their home, however, they were mindful of designing every room along north-south corridors for optimum air flow and natural ventilation, with balconies built in ways that followed the natural arc of the sunlight. “We get the sun in winters but not in summers,” says Sengupta. Moreover, a pond skirting the home is their primary source of water, collecting rainwater that is harvested throughout the year. “We have built the space in such a way that the rainwater, when it rolls down our home’s terrace, flows into the pond. We do not use groundwater at all,” adds Sengupta.

Creating a circular ecosystem

On the day The Established sat down with Sengupta for this conversation, the temperature in Birbhum was 42 degrees celsius, the heat scorching everything in its wake, but not ‘Smell of the Earth’. “In fact, I was just telling Debal that I wanted to take our dog out for a walk and he asked, ‘Do you even know what it’s like outside?’” laughs Sengupta. “To be honest, I don’t even feel it inside the house because it’s made of mud, which is a bad conductor of heat. The evenings are really quite pleasant once the sun has set,” she adds.

Their home, therefore, is a force of resilience—an indispensable quality in the face of a planet getting hotter. The couple, who also have a 14-year-old daughter, barely ever eat what isn’t produced on their land. “We always knew we wouldn’t be a single-crop farm; it would be a mixed farm so that we could fall back on something else if one thing did not work out,” explains Sengupta. “During dry spells and difficult summers, there are years when some vegetables or fruits won’t grow, like bitter gourd or mangoes. We don’t really dwell on that much and be like we have to have something. We consume what is seasonal and adapt with changes,” she adds. Their diet alters with the seasons, with fish procured from their pond, and eggs coming from the ducks they raise.

At the core of their approach lies flexibility, relinquishing excesses, and a spirit of learning and circulating the lessons to build a robust, self-sufficient ecosystem. In the initial six-seven years, the couple did most of the work themselves. Eventually, locals began partaking in the farmwork, some of whom are now employed long-term at Smell of the Earth, while Sengupta and Mazumder continue being hands-on at the farm. “We, of course, earn much less now than what we did with full-time jobs, but we save by eating what we produce on our land, take only one holiday a year, and barely ever eat out,” says Sengupta. “Our earnings are mostly through us selling our farm produce, which is mainly two things: jams and syrups, and rice, from which we also make chirey and muri and sell those too,” she adds.

As a part of building community, the couple has also been conducting residence workshops and courses on permaculture and natural farming. The shorter courses were introduced only recently, with Sengupta and Mazumder having taught over 120 students since 2015.

“For people looking to follow permaculture, there is some education that is required, so I would urge them to get formally educated and then get into it. Even if you want to set up a permaculture garden on your terrace, you need to know where exactly to plant your trees and how much sun they’ll need. Randomly planting them won’t help,” elaborates Sengupta.

She believes it’s entirely possible to adopt permaculture in big cities—spaces the family does not miss any longer—that have turned into heat-trapping machines made of glass boxes. It’s about living with intent, Sengupta reminds us—the kind that helps weather any adversity. And it all starts at home, preferably one that works with nature, and not against it.

All images courtesy of Smell of the Earth

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