In 1997, Ashok Jadhav became the first person in his village to build a concrete house. As a BEST bus driver in Mumbai he spent years saving up to fulfil this dream. Though born in Mumbai, Ashok always maintained strong bonds with his grandfather’s village, on the Konkan coast in western Maharashtra. He now divides his time between the city, where most of his family still lives in a one-room chawl and the village where he continues investing his time and energy.
Last year, he repainted his entire house in colours that resonate idiosyncrasy, echoing the glamour of the metropolis.
Under a purple ceiling, nailed on a golden wall, hang photos of the Buddha and Dr. Ambedkar, side by side, giving an air of nobility to his bedroom. His grandfather followed Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s injunction to Dalits to move to the city and escape social oppression in the village. With him he converted to Buddhism, the most “modern” and egalitarian of religions. But the village that Ashok returned to was not the same his grandfather had left behind. His move to the city, along with so many others, contributed to transform his rural home.
The house he built in the village could never have been constructed in the city where access to land, cost of construction and regulatory restrictions would have made it impossible. But in the village with relatively lesser savings he could most certainly fulfil his urban fantasies.
House full of stories
Anyone mapping cultural patterns, lifestyles, biographies and histories would do well to pay attention to the simple arrangements that make up an ordinary house—one which is always unique, special and full of stories for the person living in it.
Constructing a house is an activity that remains firmly in the hands of the most ordinary villagers. Whether on a piece of land that is owned or occupied, ancestral or purchased, the simplest of lives culminate in some way or the other with the making or shaping of homes. From a basic reed and mud structure, woven with traditional skills, to the use of aspirational and masonic material, home architecture, particularly in rural settings, is controlled by end-users rather than professionals.
Like Ashok, countless people invested hard earned money from the city back into the village.
These investments went to new homes and to develop the local infrastructure, roads and schools. Not everyone may choose to go for a modern aesthetic like Ashok, but they all are influenced in one way or the other by their relationship with the city and its culture.
Ashok’s neighbours, two brothers also from the Jadhav clan, but a different family, have rebuilt their homes recently. They opted for local laterite stone instead of concrete or baked bricks because they felt it endured the weather much better.
The house is built on land that became theirs, thanks to land reforms in the state in the 1970s. It includes a little field where they grow vegetables for their own consumption and some land where the two buffaloes they own can graze.
Silent invader
Amidst this rural setting, however, the urban influence keeps creeping in from all sides, like the reverse of “vegetation breaking through tough concrete” in the city. The Jadhav’s brothers’ house is modelled on the Mumbai chawl, a colonial housing typology once built in the city to house mill workers. The house is built around one large corridor with three rooms on either side opening into a common living space, facing the front, which resembles the balconies and corridors that are the soul of social life in Mumbai chawls. In all, six brothers and their families have a room each in the house. Two of them are in the village and four of them live in the city. They have invested collectively in this family house, which never seems to stop bustling with people and activities.
Both the Jadhav houses, as different as they may be, are part of a new generation of vernacular architecture, which brings urban aspiration to the village, and in doing so, transforms villages across the country into the most dynamic laboratory for a new aesthetic and typology. These reflect contemporary Indian culture more accurately than any generic skyscraper ever could.
The writers are co-founders of urbz.net, an urban network that’s active in Mumbai, Goa and beyond.
