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Colonial house sketch12/18/2023 ![]() ![]() It was symmetrical in form and largely so in spatial organisation. The early bungalow was typically austere, built from brick or stone, with simple volumes and a stark whitewashed finish. In urban areas, large pieces of land adjacent to the inner city were reserved by the British for their cantonment and civil lines.Īt the beginning of the 20th century, the bungalow, set in a spacious lot, was the norm as the residential house type for British military officers associated with the Indian Army, colonial administrators and business people, as well as a small group of wealthy Indian elites. They also included the dak bungalows (government guest houses usually in remote localities) and other dwelling structures spread all over the districts of British India. The rural ones were inhabited by British residents of India such as managers of various plantations or factories in the 18th century onwards. ![]() ![]() However, in the post-colonial time, the bungalow became absorbed into the collective psyche and built environments of the Indian society as its own, as this article attempts to narrate.īroadly speaking, there were two bungalow categories: the urban and the rural. The bungalow thus reflected very different ways of life, gender roles, and the hierarchy of family members, visitors and servants. It was a counter concept to the more or less socially geared, community-oriented, collective lifestyle that was manifest in the urban (craftsman-designed) and rural dwellings of a vast number of dense and organically grown settlements of medieval India. In its evolved version, the archetypal bungalow in the 19th century consisted of a low, one-storey, spacious building, having a symmetrical internal layout, with a veranda all around, situated in a large, landscaped compound. Its roots lie in the early attempts by British military engineers in Bengal during the 18th century to transform a model of a traditional domestic structure into a standardised and permanent dwelling for the East India Company when they were still traders in the subcontinent. The new concept of the bungalow arrived as an alien house form in this setting. Its impact included attitudes towards housing design and settlement patterns of which the emergence of the bungalow type was important. British colonial rule affected India’s social and institutional structure. As the population increases and urbanisation accelerates, this widely popular and aesthetically rich cultural icon is fast disappearingĪt the beginning of the 20th century, a wide variety of indigenous house types existed in India, varying in layout and articulation in response to socio-culture and geo-climatic locales. ![]()
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