Ch­agua­nas May­or Gopaul Bood­han has re­newed his ap­peal for the crum­bling Li­on House to be saved from ru­in. He said he is ex­treme­ly sad­dened at the lev­el of di­lap­i­da­tion of the his­toric build­ing.

“Hun­dred of per­sons have called the Of­fice of the May­or call­ing for some in­ter­ven­tion by the own­ers of the house for it to be re­stored. A lot of per­sons want to know the his­to­ry of Ch­agua­nas and when they look at the house they be­come very dis­turbed,” he said.

The may­or called for ac­tion by rel­e­vant state agen­cies. He said va­grants are oc­cu­py­ing the build­ing and he has made nu­mer­ous calls to the Min­istry of So­cial De­vel­op­ment to deal with the sit­u­a­tion but noth­ing has been done.

The on­ly build­ing of its kind in the West­ern Hemi­sphere, Li­on House was con­ceived, de­signed and con­struct­ed by the late Pun­dit Capildeo. It is sym­bol and memo­r­i­al to the 120,000 in­den­tured In­di­an im­mi­grants who came to T&T be­tween 1845 and 1917.

Pun­dit Capildeo was born in 1873 in Ma­hade­vadubey in the dis­trict of Som­ra coun­ty of Gorakh­pur, in the state of Ut­ter Pradash, East Cen­tral In­dia. He broke the bonds of in­den­ture­ship and be­came a high­ly re­spect­ed and suc­cess­ful pun­dit, landown­er, busi­ness­man and cane farmer.

Li­on House was mod­elled af­ter a city dwelling in the town of Gorakh­pur and mir­rors the ear­ly Gup­ta style of the 5th cen­tu­ry AD.

In 1924, Capildeo be­gan the con­struc­tion of the build­ing which he com­plet­ed in 1926 and named it Anand Bha­van or Man­sion of Bliss.

That same year, he left on one of his many trips to In­dia. He nev­er re­turned to Trinidad as he died dur­ing that vis­it.