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FROM GARDEN SUBURB TO

O L D E C I T Y WA R D
A Longitudinal Study of Social Process and Incremental
Architecture in Jaipur, India

R. THOMAS ROSIN

Department of Anthropology, Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park,

California, USA
Abstract
In post-Independence India, new colonies of garden suburbs served an
educated citizenry to integrate science and nature into their daily life.
However, one such colony of bungalows (kothi) and gardens, begun in
Jaipur in the 1950s, after two generations of incremental construction, has
become in the 1990s similar to an old city ward with towering courtyard
houses (haveli) abutting the property lines. This longitudinal study
compares the middle class occupants initial aspirations with real outcomes
as documented in the materiality of built form. The biography of these
buildings reflects not only a quest for a life style of class, but the adapting
of site and building to make secure ones livelihood and heritage for ones
descendants, and to manage relations with ones neighbors. The built
environment is not simply an outcome of regulation, design, and willful
intent. The levels of agency and the variety of actors are multiple and
complex, demanding an analysis of social interaction and an assessment of
aggregate outcomes.
Key Words agency bungalow courtyard house haveli
incremental architecture

INTRODUCTION

Objects have a biography. They are produced; they are exchanged and
put to use; and the outcome of their use and disposition often has
Journal of Material Culture
Copyright 2001 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol. 6(2): 165192 [1359-1835(200107)6:2; 165192;017689]

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long-term and aggregate consequences. Many studies in material culture

have so observed objects in social and symbolic context through time,
although in the study of built form scholars have given precedence to
architecture as newly completed according to design. Stewart Brand
(1994) in his brilliant work, How Buildings Learn; What Happens after
Theyre Built laments this myopic vision (not near-sighted, but timerestricted), pointing out that even in the West where specialization,
design, and codifications rule pre-eminently, buildings continue to
change and readapt after their initial construction.1 Surprisingly, even
scholars of vernacular architecture, who look to locally initiated production without specialists and formal codes, tend to reify one phase of
a building as typical and representative of its total career.2
The loss of the time dimension in the study of building as artifact is
not trivial.3 As Pierre Bourdieu points out, the removal of temporality
from social action encourages constructing social theories without the
reality of agency, choice, praxis, and history (Bourdieu, 1977, 1990). Yet,
even in Bourdieus own classic work on the Kabyle house4, we find an
analysis that totalizes architecture into the initial stage of construction,
a single double-room structure suited to a single couple and their children (1979, 1990: 27183). The Kabyle, based upon Bourdieus ethnographic presentation, seems to favor a dynamic household of many
married sons living under the patriarchy of an elder, whose housing, in
fact, is in a cluster of rooms surrounding a courtyard.5 For such complex
social formations of a joint household or joint family, one requires a
duration of time for observing and presenting the full cycle from initial
construction, expansion, and division of inheritance.6 As Goody has
attended to the developmental cycle for the domestic group, dealing
with the marriages, births, and deaths that reconstitute it (Goody, 1958;
McNetting et al., 1984), so might we attend to the sequential development of the building that shall house such transitions in the composition
of the group occupying it as Schwerdtfeger (1982) has accomplished in
his study of three African cities, as Rosin (1991) has presented for suprafamily and lineage groupings in a village neighborhood in Rajasthan, and
Tolbert (1989) has documented for the life cycle of an individual in the
Sudan. Indeed, variations and stages in social form may be reflected in
the built forms of dwellings and their settlements (See Rosin, 1997:
778).
I propose here to study the biography of a building as part of an
incremental7 architecture suited to the study of vernacular forms
around the world, where there is not a single stage of so-called finalized
construction, but a sequence of incremental additions, partitions, and
deletions.8 My interest is in the socio-dynamic processes that generate
built form. By studying the juncture of decision making in the biography of a building, one may examine the constituents of folk categories,

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conceptions, dispositions, expectations, plans, and desired outcomes

that determine the incremental construction of built form, comparing
our findings on the dynamics of practice to the habitus of dispositions
articulated in Bourdieus theory of practice (Bourdieu, 1984; Swartz,
1997: 95116, 14388). What determines the deep structure of built
form? Is it the concern for class distinctions, life style and tastes or longterm adaptive interests in the security and heritage of ones descendants? Because of its observable materiality, built form documents
accumulative and aggregate outcomes, allowing us to measure actions
and consequences against occupants initial expectations and projections. I am arguing in this paper that initial aspirations of life style and
class proved less significant to the unfolding structure of building and
site than pragmatic and strategic concerns to consolidate family gains
to make secure transmission to ones descendants.
The built form I have chosen for a longitudinal study is that of
middle-class homes built in the new colonies of the major cities of India.
Such colonies, modeled on the civil lines and cantonments that once
housed the British colonial elite (King, 1984; Morris, 1983; Oldenburg,
1984; Sinha, 1999), after Independence embodied Nehrus vision for a
modern India, one in which the educated middle class, would lead the
nation in uniting science and technology into the very construction of
their daily lives. The garden suburbs of bungalows were to replace the
fortress-like courtyard houses (havelis) that dominated in the wards of
the old walled cities. In tracing 30 years of incremental construction in
one such colony, we might be observing the course of modernism and
post-modernisms, and their closure at the end of the 20th century.
METHODOLOGY

The sense of problem and research design for this project emerged over
a 32-year period of recurrent field research in Rajasthan, India, from
1962 to 1994. At the outset of field research, I could not anticipate the
longevity of my personal relations that would permit three decades of
observations, the reconceptualization as field station of a suburban site
that served to provide comfort and refuge, nor an architectural transformation of a neighborhood forward in time to a more traditional past.
It was not until the mid-1980s, that I began documenting the alterations in built form, recovering initial house drawings drafted in the
1950s, obtaining official blueprints for remodeling in 1984, witnessing
discussions, plans, and active remodeling in 1994, and taking photographs with Gail Wread of successive alterations.
In the combined and shifting roles as renter, guest, colleague, and
family member, I, with first wife, later with second wife, occasionally
with daughters, came to live in this home for days or weeks on end,

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between longer periods of village residence 100 miles to the west in the
Marwar region of Rajasthan.
Over three decades I came to occupy and sleep in six different
rooms in this home on two different levels, utilized five different toilets,
bathing under ever-changing plumbing in three different locales. After
the beginning of the first period of field research (196264) when the
rooms we rented were closed to the interior by a moveable cross-bar, I
was henceforth linked directly into the dynamic life of the home, joining
the family daily for dining and tea, and entering and leaving by the
entrances shared by family members. As interactant I was privy to
family discussions, arguments, and revelries; my affairs were as much
topics for discussion and solution as those of the family with whom I
shared a life during our suburban sojourns. I even had midnight, clandestine discussions with a Marwari lad working as servant in this household, sharing in rural dialect and perspective our sense of solidarity as
fellow villagers.
I was often present in the anticipation, planning, and actual redesign
and construction of the home. I observed the final enclosure of the inner
courtyard, the addition of rooms, the shifting of kitchens, and reconstruction of the roof and second floor. I heard of plans, and saw sketches.
Upon my return from a long period in my village home, or return from
USA for another period of research, I would be confronted by new additions or changes in use of old features. The frontage of the home that
once provided lawn and flowerbeds might be occupied by a water
buffalo ensconced to assure quality milk for the daughters of the family.
Doors once closed for tenants might be unbarred and opened to extend
family living space.
In hindsight, those occasions which I shared with the family and
from which observations accrued for this research were of two sorts: (1)
direct observations and discussion about imminent, in process, or just
completed building additions and alterations, and (2) engagements in
family occasions of display and class play, in which one enacted the representations of self and place that pleased one. We shared morning tea
on the roof terrace, warming ourselves in the first rays of winter sun,
our laughter, chatter, and silhouetted images providing distraction to
those passing below on the street. We greeted guests in the parlor, study,
or front verandah. I remember the ambience of afternoon tea served on
the front lawn by the flowerbeds, feeling in a reflexive sense how we
would be viewed over the hedge and through the iron lattice of the front
gate. These were the occasions to create a setting and an ambience to
display accomplishments, connections, and leisure within ones class.
This case example illustrates how it is not so much the quest for
establishing and expressing a class identity, but the political ecology
the management of site and niche through which one may reproduce

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and sustain ones heritage and livelihood through descendants and heirs
that determine the biography of these buildings.
Methodologically, I have proceeded to match built form to the social
formations, interactional processes, and discussions that generate it. I
have observed and recorded the initial constructions on one plot, and
observed its incremental additions and deletions over a 30-year period,
seeking to relate such changes to their origins in the social interactional
context.
The study of material culture, in its incremental construction over
time gives us junctures of decision making. Each incremental addition
is an occasion for inquiry. Who planned and conceived it? On what occasions? Why? How were such plans executed into action, with what
physical results? How did the physical effects thereby set up the settings,
which were taken as givens in future interactions and decisions? In my
observations over a 30-year span, I have been attentive to those anticipations of long-term function that have prompted construction, as well
as to the more immediate responses to the actions of neighbors. Finally,
having reviewed the sequence of incremental changes, I project their trajectory through time to imagine their ultimate outcomes as pattern
within the built environment.
In my study of this family and its neighbors and their dwellings over
several decades, it readily became apparent that changes in built form
anticipated or subsequently succeeded structural changes in the composition of the groups dwelling there. Providing for such crucial events
as marriages, births, and deaths, as well as space for household servants,
foreign guests, and rental units for tenants, directly impacted the built
environment. Hence, my analyses of social process were built upon a
social anthropological understanding of organizational principles in the
formation and reproduction of the household, family, and lineage.
JAIPUR: A NEW COLONY OF BUNGALOWS (KOTHI)
BECOMING AS A CITY WARD OF COURTYARD
HOUSES (HAVELI)

Outside the city of Jaipur in the state of Rajasthan, India, there is a residential suburb called Shivlalpuri, known at the time of its founding in
the late 1950s as one of the new colonies. Such colonies around provincial cities of administration and major towns of commerce were favored
by the middle class of professionals, government servants, and entrepreneurs whose families found success in the decades after the Independence of India.
The colonies herald a new era of postcolonial development. Here the
educated citizens of the Republic of India could join Prime Minister Nehru
in ushering in an age of scientific and technological modernization that

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would directly impact the quality of their daily life, achieved under a
democratic government that would implement public policy through
rational bureaucratic planning. In a colony of planned streets, surveyed
rectilinear plots, with electric, phone, and water connections delivered by
the municipality, the middle class could leave the congestion of the narrow
lanes and multi-tier construction of the traditional walled city. When I
bicycled through such communities in the early 1960s, I felt the immediate contrast between such garden suburbs, with their spacious grounds
surrounding a single-storied bungalow, and the old city wards, with their
enclosed haveli or courtyard multi-storied houses, clustered side-to-side as
towering fortresses. Here in the garden suburb, led by its entrepreneurs,
scientists, professionals, and government servants, pride of place was
combined with the promise of participating in constructing a new India.
Little did I anticipate that the garden suburb might recreate some day, 30
years hence, many of the same characteristics found in the old city ward.
At its inception, the new colony was perceived to stand in sharp contrast to the wards of Jaipur city. While Jaipur is known for its well
planned9 grid of boulevards and for its spacious set-back of second-story
construction (Davar, 1977: 50), the majority of residents live on side
streets and alleys, noteworthy for the overhanging three- and four-story
structures towering above the lanes. These structures called havelis were
traditionally the fortified home of the trading, moneylending, and business community of the surrounding desert, whose construction was
emulated by other successful families. Their exterior walls served to
enclose the domestic living space centered around an inner courtyard
(see also Pramar, 1987, 1989; Prasad, 1997; Sinha, 1994). Balconies
turned inward to view the courtyard, while views of the street were
through latticed windows to protect the women of the house from the
gaze of others. Access to the street was usually through a single main
entrance, often elaborated as a grand gate. Often the buildings reveal a
symmetry and replication of form, with internal units divided into quadrants mirroring one another.
The popular view among the middle class was that the new colonies
of bungalows and gardens would replace the traditional courtyard
houses or havelis of the old city wards. Anthony King traces the bungalow to its origins, as an English readaptation of the Bengali banggolo,
and its reintroduction as a colonial artifact to the emerging of a middle
class around the world (1984).
Accordingly, as K.K. Sehgal, who compiled the Rajasthan District
Gazetteers: Nagaur, states These havelis are being replaced by modern
houses, called kothi or bungalows (1975: 60). In the recently released
Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture (Oliver, 1997) among the rich
entries on India is the section by Sunand Prasad on 2.I.5.h Haveli: urban
(India, N):

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Havelis are no longer built, having ceded their place in the culture to
suburban housetypes derived from the villa i.e. a house whose associated
external space is outside its walls. (1997: 9289)

In a major work (Bhatt and Scriver, 1990) celebrating a broad range of

contemporary Indian-designed architecture, the pride of concluding
pages is saved for the bungalow style house.10
This view that the suburban villa or bungalow shall replace the
courtyard house echoes throughout the literature on vernacular architecture in India. But such authors, I would argue, prove to be looking
only at the early stage of initial construction, rather than to the mature
building that continues to emerge, but only after several generations of
use, incremental building, and long-term occupancy.
C ASE S TUDY

OF A

H OME

AND ITS

N EIGHBORHOOD

The new colony or suburb of Shivlalpuri11 was conceived as a residential

subdivision cut from the lands of the Nihan Jagirdar, a lineage of title
holders of an estate granted by the Jodhpur Maharaja. The Nihan estate
itself was 10 miles from the city of Jaipur, but the lands to become Shivlalpuri were held as barrens suitable for the housing and grazing of
horses, elephants, and camels, whenever the Nihan family attended
functions of the royal court. There remains today a well enclosed guest
house and courtyard, which the last ruling descendant of the Nihan
family has retained for his personal residence.
The land was sold to a developer prior to the extensive land reform
legislation implemented between 1949 and 1955, perhaps to avoid
resumption of the land by the new democratic polity of Rajasthan State.
Since the land was not considered agricultural, its conversion to residential use did not require municipal permission. In 1958 streets, water
and electricity were supplied for some 70 plots, measuring 85 ft by 50 ft
or 4250 ft2. At that time, the lots were valued at Rs.4 per square yard,
selling for Rs.20003000 ($250$375 at the prevailing exchange rate of 8
rupees to the dollar). Thirty years later, the lots were valued at Rs.800
per sq. yd, for a total value over Rs.375,000 (over $23,600 at the prevailing rate of 16 rupees per dollar). In 1999, the exchange has doubled
in favor of the dollar, so that present values would be approximately
$47,200. The inflation in home prices would further increase this
amount.
By 1962 four buyers had quickly built homes to establish residential
claims, to ward off requisition of the lands by a neighboring hospital and
medical college as prime space on which to build faculty housing for
doctors who worked at these institutions. In fact, a significant number
of the lots later to be sold were purchased privately by doctors.

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172

Ground floor and first floor plans 1962: house A

FIGURE 1

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The first dwellings were single storied, set back 1520 ft from the
street with a front verandah, the two gatekeepers of which remain today
relatively unchanged at the entrance way into the colony. Shivlalpuri was
soon to consist of single-storied, family-owned homes, centered on their
respective lots, and set back along the colonys regular grid of streets.
Spacious wrought-iron front gates were set into high frontage walls,
through which one viewed front lawns, flowers, trees, and verandah.
Each dwelling was separated from its neighbors by at least a 10 ft space
at the boundary line, with some neighbors setting aside yard space at the
back boundary. The inhabitants were pleased with the open, airy quality
and new colony atmosphere, and used the Bengali term bangla, or the
Rajasthani word kothi or garden house, to refer to their homes.
My host entertained plans for such a single storied, open, gardenoriented bungalow. The first 20 ft of their 85 ft deep lot was reserved for
a front lawn surrounded by beds for flowers and hedges. A chowk, or
atrium, initially with bare earth, was placed near the center of the house
occupying one half the 40 ft width of the house. Adding to this outdoor
zone were elevated verandahs that controlled access to the front garden
and to the chowk. The front verandah provides access to the masters
study and the formal parlor. The interior verandahs, 10 ft wide, linked
the bedrooms and parlor to the chowk. The verandahs and chowk were
sufficiently spacious to constitute almost a third of the area enclosed
within the houses outer walls. As initially constructed the chowk was
open on its side, but because of construction on the neighboring lot soon
was bricked in with a large gateway covered by a corrugated iron gate,
so that it took the enclosed form of a courtyard (see Figure 1).
Over the next decades a number of sinks and toilets were constructed in a variety of alcoves, a corner of the lot shedded over as an
outdoor cooking and sleeping spot for a servant, and continual innovations introduced for bathing, showering, heating water, with the shifting about of the sites for bathing and cooking. The interior chowk was
screened to keep flies from the dining area on the L-shaped interior
verandah.
These additions were consolidated and expanded with a major
remodeling and construction taking place in 1988, for which blueprints
were drawn up, providing projections on how the house would appear
from the sides (see Figure 2). The construction was carried out largely
as planned, with the addition of another isolated toilet, enclosed by walls
without roofing, on the highest elevation of the new back rooms, laying,
as it were, the unfinished remnants to encourage the next stage of construction.12
Basic construction consisted of cemented brick for walls, lintels of
formed concrete to support window openings or doorways, columns
from quarried marble or sandstone for verandahs. Ceilings are solid slabs

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F I G U R E 2 Blueprint projections, side elevation from the south (top) and rear
view from the east (below)

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of thick sandstone quarried from around Jodhpur. These materials and

techniques of construction have remained traditional, with the exception
of a steel I-beam to double the span of a roof, or the addition of pipes
and electric wire added to the surface of the walls.
The most recent plans for construction include a new exterior staircase on the left or north side of the property to permit direct access to
a new large dance and aerobics studio. This second story studio abuts
the room at the back north-east corner and closes off its interior access,
but leaves free, on its other side to the west, the front of the roof as a
terrace. The south side of the studio is a hallway, meeting the two southeast corner rooms with their separate baths, the front roof terrace,
studio, and the interior staircase climbing from the central courtyard
below.
When I first visited, the home housed the lineally extended family
of my host: his widowed mother, host with wife, with a loyal elderly
retainer who cooked for the family. Back rooms, separated from the interior with external entrances, housed two foreign couples beginning
research in Rajasthan.
The birth of two daughters extended the family to a third generation,
until the widowed mother returned to the original home and family of
her deceased husbands elder brother in another district. From this
elders line a grandson was later to join the hosts family as great
nephew, marry and bring his own wife to join them, and raise his infant
son there during the period when the host family suffered the difficult
birth and tragic loss of an infant third daughter.
The long courtship and marriage of the first daughter to a young
man whose home was up the road, the death of this truly beloved sonin-law just before the birth of his first child, and the return of the first
daughter to her maternal home for the birth and raising of their female
infant marked a period of matrilineal extension of the family. The
second daughter pursued a career in womens health and cosmetology
opening a business and studio in the home, while a number of renters
continued as short-term tenants and a number of foreigners occasionally visited as paying guests, often absorbed into the familys dining and
social activities.
Hence, I have observed this family, its various tenants and guests,
expand and shift from a patrilineally to a matrilineally extended core,
during which time their house has expanded and changed. Once a
bungalow, centered around both a front study, parlor, and verandah
opening to a garden, with an interior verandah opening to a side yard;
it has become a two-storied structure centered around an enclosed, and
progressively contracting interior courtyard. On the back corners, the
structure has grown out toward the property lines.

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T HE P ROCESSES T RANSFORMING

THE

G ARDEN S UBURB

Pivotal among the processes involved in this transformation are the

decisions made at the level of the domestic unit, as dwelling space is
reshaped in response to a variety of demands, including: (1) economic
security, (2) the procurement of domestic services, and (3) family expansion, segmentation, and inheritance.
A. Securing livelihood. A significant proportion of the individuals who
purchased property in Shivlalpuri are in the professions, either as
doctors, lawyers, accountants, or university professors, or in business.
Each has his or her official place of work outside the colony, in the
hospital, medical college, university, government bureaucracy, factory, or
shop. However, there are strong expectations that these individuals also
provide a non-official setting outside of official work hours for private
consultation with clients, students, or coprofessionals, and it is advantageous for them to do so.
For doctors in government practice, there are patients who have
received home referrals so that special care and attention may be
devoted to their cases. For the professors, there are relatives of students
who wish to petition for special dispensations on behalf of a son or
nephew, so as to assure their success in college or on examinations. For
accountants, there are the clients who wish to launder or conceal monies
so that they are not officially declared as a part of their business. For
anyone with a secure position in a bureaucracy, there are those seeking
placement for a younger family member, or aid in overcoming a governmental obstacle. During the hours between 7:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m.,
before departure for ones official place of work at 10:00 a.m., the gates
to the front gardens and verandahs squeak open as petitioners and supplicants take tea, or at least attention, from the master (or mistress) of
each house who is called out from the front study. Private practice interweaves with public service. Among professionals, businessmen, and
government officials, favors may be requested now on behalf of family
members, with the expectation that they may be reciprocated in the
future. (In India, these deferred exchanges of services among elite
provide an ultimate form of security to their families, sustaining a
network of influential and diversified connections that may be called
upon whenever needed.) From supplicants of lesser stature, bribes might
be tendered as gifts, to be accepted or brushed aside and refused.
The dwelling accommodates such transactions. A petitioner may be
received at the gate and dispatched by a servant; he may be invited into
the front garden, or onto the verandah, or into the study, where confidentiality can be assured, moving from more public settings to those
increasingly private.

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B. Convertible rental units. The proximity of the new colony to a medical

college and to a hospital presents its inhabitants with an excellent
opportunity to rent rooms and apartments.
For the focal family of this case study, the initial floor plan of the
home provided for two sets of rooms at the back of the house, each with
bath and latrine and separate side entrances opening up to the back alley
of the lot. These separate entrances permitted prospective tenants to live
independently in the same dwelling without intruding unduly in the life
of the owners. But each apartment unit shared an internal door with the
main house, barred on both sides, which could be unbarred to permit
the unit to be reintegrated into the homeowners domestic space.
In anticipation of developing other such units on the lot, over the
years as opportunities presented themselves, the owners had built
latrines in otherwise unusable places, under staircases, on the roof, or
in dark, windowless corners in the back alley of the lot. Sinks and faucets
proliferated as well. In the most recent years, they built additional rooms
on the roof, accessible only through the house, for use by daughters,
guests, or renters integrated into the family. But these rooms are constructed with two exterior doors, opening out into space, awaiting some
day the staircases that would complete them as separate apartment units.
C. Household services. To procure such services normally entails far
more than providing salary or payment for the task accomplished.
Expected compensations may include shelter, meals, tea, a bundle of biri
to smoke, or betel leaf and areca nut to chew, hand-me-downs in clothing, loans, special gifts on special occasions, as well as an ear sympathetic to the personal cares and family traumas of the servant. To maintain
reliable and trustworthy work from a servant invariably involves establishing a full long-term relationship with that person and their family.
During 25 years, the family of this study provided shelter for persons
who served as cook, grain cleaner, and cow dung patty maker, as bicycle
riksha driver who transported and protected daughters on their way to
private school, as watchman while the father of the household was out
on tour, and as clothes washer. For the washerman, a one-room apartment was provided for the husband, wife, and three children, in
exchange for washing all the familys clothes; for the riksha driver, a
string cot on the roof and a garage to store his three-wheeled cycle at
night; for household servants, a room in the back and use of bathing and
toilet facilities; for the villager caring for the family water buffalo in the
front yard, a mat and a spot to sleep on the verandah, and a place to
store the clothes he keeps for wearing to the cinema. The riksha driver
and the washerman family were free to ply their services to other neighboring households, just as the dishwasher and ironer of clothes, living
in a shelter provided by other families in the block, could come and

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FIGURE 3

Symmetry In Built Form: House B

service this family. Many such service providers would require that
space for their work or for their family needs be offered by some household, if they were to remain to serve the neighborhood. The man who
irons clothing, for example, has constructed a portable two-room shack
on piers next to a patrons house and utilizes space at the side of another
house to keep his table on which he irons each day. Homeowners may
give a single room, or a hut behind their property, or put in a latrine
available only to servants. With these immediate objectives in mind, a
verandah might be walled-in, a corner alley covered with corrugated
metal sheet, or a latrine built under a staircase.
D. Segmentation for future division of inheritance. For an Indian householder, ones conception of dwelling is bound up with family family
extended genealogically and through time. Genealogically the family is
often extended patrilineally in kinship membership to include several
generations the elders, their sons, daughters-in-law and grandchildren.
Temporally the family anticipates and prepares for the inevitable births,
marriages, and deaths of its members.
Anticipating the future segmentation of the family and division of
its property has the most far reaching effects upon the unfolding structure of the dwelling. The residential buildings of Gangawal Park show a
striking symmetry of form. A house is often bilaterally symmetrical, one
side a mirror image of the other (see Figure 3). There may be a further

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FIGURE 4

Kinship Chart of Inhabitants: House B

replication of form, as an upper floor must build upon the supportive

structure of the floor below. It may have a second axis of symmetry,
wherein the back sector is nearly a mirror image (or replication) of the
front, in effect dividing each corner quadrant of the building into similar
modules. Each has its separate entrance, separate facilities for cooking,
bathing, and disposal. Staircases added on at the boundary space may
provide separate access to each set of storied quadrants above.
Such symmetry and replication of floors anticipate the division of
the property among the various sons. For example, consider the kinship
relations among the present inhabitants of the neighboring residence
shown in Figure 4. There are grandparents living in a common building
with their three sons and their separate families, in each of which an
elder among the newest generation of sons has been married. The elder
grandparents live in the south side of the lower floor, with their eldest
son and family living opposite on the north side. Their second son and
family live just above on the north half of the second floor; the third son,
on the north half of the third floor. Since the elderly couple are still alive,
they rent out for their own income the south side of the floor above them,
the front and back of which has been divided into two separate apartments. Upon their death, their sons will probably each inherit a full floor

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180

Floor plans 1988: House A

FIGURE 5

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in final division of their parents property, each renting out the south half
until they require it to house their own expanding family.
E. Extending to the boundaries; filling up the corners. How these various
social processes considered here interrelate to construct the biography
of a house may best be grasped by an account of the events in time and
space impinging upon the back boundary and corners of the lot. In so
relating these events, we introduce the interaction among neighbors.
For the dwelling and family under study, and their adjacent neighbors, all homes had been set back at least 5 ft from the property line in
accordance with the building code (see Figure 1, the floor plan 1962:
House A). The first infraction involved the southerly neighbors using the
south-east corner of their lot to support stairs for their second-story
addition (see Figure 5). Since the outer wall of this L-shaped staircase
was built upon the previously existing 5 ft brick wall shared on the property line, the family under study lodged a protest. But while apologies
were tendered, construction was continued. Where else, the neighbors
queried, could we put up a staircase, now that the second floor addition
is already completed?
The eventual response to this violation of building code was to
violate another party in turn. On the opposite north-eastern corner to
the lot, the family covered over the entire passageway to protect an
outdoor kitchen area. They used that area to cook cereals over an open
fire, so that the fragrance of burning wood and cow dung patties would
flavor the food. Next to this outdoor kitchen, a servant slept on a cot at
night. To this passageway, just around the corner, another room was
created by utilizing the 5 ft high joint property line wall to support corrugated iron roofing. This neighbor, in turn, built a two-story apartment
unit right onto the property-dividing wall.
A decade later the focal family of this study was to build a second
story over the back of their home. They built right up from the property
line on this corner, since the first story structure was already there. They
constructed three sets of rooms each with bath and latrine, one to house
foreign guests, the others for each of their daughters. All were open to
the roof terrace and the inner staircase by the courtyard. But in planning
for the future use of two of these rooms as possible apartments, they
opened into their back wall a door with an outside ledge, overhanging a
one-story drop-off. Someday these doors might open to two sets of staircases that would eventually fill the back alley of the lot, in order to
provide separate entrances for rental units. Such staircases, however,
would further darken the back alleyway (see 1988 Blueprints, projected
view from the back).
Of these three rooms, the highest one at a split level above the others
has a larger bathroom constructed for use by their youngest daughter.

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Space was found for this bathroom by building the room half extended
over the alleyway, some 20 ft above the ground. The outer wall for this
room sits on a single stack of mortared bricks, rising 8 ft from its anchor
on the property line wall with a four inch encroachment right onto the
neighbors servant quarters. (The nurses quarters now remain in permanent shadow below.) From this neighbor whose back garden now falls
into shadow in late afternoon, one may expect, in turn, future construction to block off the imposing view of his neighbors second story
addition now overhanging his property.
S UMMARY

OF

C ASE S TUDY

In this article I have related changes in built form to the management of

the site and buildings to enhance and secure ones livelihood and heritage for an expanding family. In summary:
(i) The building up of a bungalow into a multi-storied dwelling; the
engineering of symmetries into the structure; the quartering of such
buildings, by partitioning the back sector from the front I relate to
the anticipation of family segmentation and division of inheritance.
(ii) Rooms with an extra outside door and ledge, inner double-doors
barred for closure on either side; extra faucets and toilets added in
alcoves and in open spaces I relate to the dual function of providing either
(a) extra quarters to house the future family of a soon-to-be-married
son or daughter, or
(b) an extra apartment separable through the barred door, exterior
entrance, and staircase to rent to a tenant.
(iii) The extension of the building onto the property boundary wall; the
contraction of inner courtyard and verandah I relate to the development of potential rental units, conjugal family units, or the provisioning of space for a cadre of servants who will tend to the needs
of a growing middle-class extended family.
In describing the trend towards abutment of neighboring dwellings
in our case example, I have shown the complexity of social processes
involved in altering but a single major feature of built form. The resultant closing of access to sunlight for some tenants, the rechanneling of
air ventilation, the restriction of views, and the removal of trees and
shrubs on the boundary are actions that violate local expectations of a
garden suburb. The reduction of the spacing between buildings proceeds
in a series of recriminations and counter-actions. Those offended seek
not retribution, but rather claim entitlement now to proceed to fulfill
their own familys interests, often thereby violating the interest of a

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neighbor other than those who initially offended them, in multilaterally

dispersed recriminations and reactions, that tend to alienate all propertyowning neighbors one from the other. Each family sits sovereign within
their own lot focusing their interests on their own micro-society of
extended family, relatives, tenants, servants, and retainers just as the
extended family or lineage of families in a traditional haveli shielded
their complex social world from their neighbors.
As a side effect to the sovereignty and isolation of each propertyowning family, there is no effective community-wide action to solve such
shared problems as clogged street drains and disposal of household
trash. The public sector of the streets and lanes reveals a colony incapable of action in the common public interest.
In form, and perhaps in function, the garden houses of the new
colony of Shivlalpura are increasingly approaching the nature of the traditional multi-storied haveli. What emerges from my presentation is an
argument that the garden suburbs and the wards of the old city contain
not different types of buildings, but rather reveal different stages in the
developmental sequence of a traditional form of architecture.
P ROJECTING

INTO THE

F UTURE

What does remain of the initial bungalow and garden conception of

Shivlalpura, as viewed today from the streets, are the ornate wroughtiron gates, the patches of lawn and verandah, visible just beyond the 5 ft
high front walls. Here preserved for the modern career or profession of
the master or mistress of the home is the garden frontage as the intersection between public and private worlds, between official and nonofficial roles, between public service and private aggrandizement.
Yet, the garden frontage, while similar in many functions, remains
distinctly different from the massive thresholds and gates of the haveli.
A haveli abuts the street, with walls at least a story high confounding the
passer-by. Such differences challenge our assertion that there is a
developmental sequence from the kothi to the modern haveli. Such differences, however, provide an opportunity to test the adequacy of an idea
inferred from observations of the previous 25 years. One may test the
correctness of that inference by hypothesizing the changes that might
occur in the next decades.
I take my clue from the study by Wacziarg and Nath of havelis in the
Shekhawati region just north of Jaipur. They observe that,
. . . the typical haveli in Shekhawati consists of two courtyards an outer
and an inner . . . The outer courtyard serves as an extended threshold, since
the main gate is seldom shut . . . The inner one is the domain of women.
(Wacziarg and Nath, 1982: 22)

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Floor plan of the Sagarmal Gulab Rai Ladia haveli. (Drawings from Wacziarg and Nath, 1982: 22)

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184
FIGURE 6

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F I G U R E 7 Axonometric view of the Sagarmal Gulab Rai Ladia haveli in

Mandawa. (Drawings from Wacziarg and Nath, 1982: 23)

The dwellings of Shivlalpuri differ from such haveli not only in their
gardened front yards but also in the absence of a second, outer courtyard (see Figures 6 and 7, item 7).
Projecting into the future, one may image the following scenario: As
the streets become more congested with traffic, with rain sewers clogged
with trash; as young men become more rebellious, and punk and heavy
metal lyrics replace the love songs of Hindi cinema; as the streets
become less secure, with peoples of other neighborhoods passing
through; then, indeed, one may expect families to construct a barrier
from the street more effective than the thin wall of brick and shrubbery
there today. Imagine the advantage of a line of frontage shops, each
opening only onto the street, and each shallow enough in depth to leave
yet a part of the garden and the lawn behind them. The homes, thereby,
gain valuable commercial property and a protection from the street. Or
imagine building-up and thickening the frontage wall. In this manner the
front garden, lawn, and verandah become fully enclosed and are transformed into the second outer courtyard as found described for the traditional haveli of Shekhawati. So might one hypothesize the next
sequence in incremental construction to test the ideas expressed here
against future observations.
The values that would have directed this course of action would not
be dissimilar to those of the past: family protection, securing young

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women from the public sector (which is today increasingly unruly), and
maintaining the front of the home as a threshold effecting the transition
between public and private worlds.
From this intensive long-term study of one domestic unit and its
environs, one may extract a message perhaps relevant to India as a
whole: irrespective of community-wide planning, attractive design, and
fine rhetoric articulating principles of public interest and shared aspirations for the community-at-large, the primacy of the family, and its
sovereignty in relationship to its neighbors, remains. The garden suburb
is becoming reshaped into an old city ward, for the processes of family
decision-making, evaluation, constructive action, and social interaction
that generate such an architecture remain largely unchanged.
CONCLUSION

We see in the initial configuration of this home and surroundings the

modernizing ideal of Nehru that a class of professionals, government servants, and entrepreneurs would lead their nation to integrate technology
and nature into their daily life, while protected and served by state institutions that would provide quality service and leadership in health,
education, and economic development. Yet, such centralized policy,
bureaucratic administration, and participatory municipal government, in
fact, prove less significant in the planning and actual development of this
middle-class suburb.
Electric power, telephone, and municipal water lines, indeed, are in
place, yet inadequate flow of water has encouraged many to add pumps
and tube wells to their front yards to assure a full supply during peak
hours or during the summer months. Yet not municipal sewer lines, but
excavated septic tanks are under the garden frontage developments
that suggest future contamination of the groundwater such households
would individually tap.
Nevertheless, the ideal of uniting technology and nature in the home
setting are preserved in garden and verandah frontage, the grand gate
opening wide to bring a car into the driveway and garage, and the subsequent technological innovations in bath, shower, and kitchen. Early
morning and late afternoon sunlight are preserved on the roof terrace;
air circulation, by the inner courtyard. Yet while roof terrace, garden,
and courtyard are prized, each is now contracting in allotted space. The
interior chowk, already enclosed as an inner courtyard with verandahs,
shrunk, as it became further enclosed by a shower room and a kitchen
with elevated counters and cupboards emulating the West.
Yet, I would argue, such modernization associated with the life style
ideals of a middle class are less significant structurally, than the major
innovations closing up the corner, the adding of units to support

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additional couples or tenants, and the doubling of upstairs rooms with a

special outside staircase in 1995 to accommodate future division and
livelihood for a daughter building her own professional business. There
is a tension between the home as expression of class, through styles of
consumption and leisure, and the home as site for productive activity
providing for the security and longevity of the family, its heritage and
descendants.
Indeed, in India consumption was not separated from production;
home was not divorced from work; but the tradition of combining home
and work on a single site continued, although the professionals of the
new colonies had offices set up for them in public hospitals, universities,
and government buildings. The political ecology of ones career made
the home an extension of ones productive, earning potential. And ultimately the home provides an estate to mark and construct the site as the
place of memory, accumulation, and commemoration of ancestors and
descendants.
As a study of built form, the focus of this article has been not on the
movable objects, furnishings, ornamentation, and surface style, the latter
of which are often selected for research in studies of life style and class
(for example, see Bourdieu, 1984: 50318, for his selection of data in Distinction.) Indeed, while matters of class are trendy based on movable and
replaceable artifacts, matters of long-term adaptation create a legacy not
easily changed. The incremental construction witnessed in this case
study, selects and builds upon prior features, intensifying the dependency
of future stages upon an increasingly embedded and layered supportive
foundation. A core structure emerges that no longer can be further
changed without threatening the subsequent features built upon it.
In its full materiality, in its actual manifestation as object within
shared experience, built form communicates about those whose lives
and actions directly or indirectly have shaped it. This study before you
measures real outcomes in built form against their occupants initial
expectations and projections. For the built environment is not simply an
outcome of willful intent. The levels of agency and the variety of actors
in the social fields that generate the material environment, with both its
artifice and residues, are multiple and complex.
Hence, we may argue with the postmodernists that their attention
to a peoples own self representations in speech and in writing is inadequate in a review of practice if one does not include means to represent and assess the generated and accumulated outcomes of their
thoughts, speech, and actions. We may witness how plans, projections,
and designs from earlier periods of conception do not alone account for
the built environment. In particular, although the dwellers of the new
colony Shivlalpuri in Jaipur saw themselves creating a new garden
suburb, two generations of construction and living on the sites have

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created a neighborhood not dissimilar to the courtyard houses (haveliya)

of the oldest wards of the walled city. Their means of daily living, their
long-term economic, social, and political interests, and their interactions
with neighbors, all of which have prompted construction, has produced
an end distinct from many of their earlier expectations as new citizens
of the state of India.
I find that the class ideology, life style and tastes that prompted
middle-class emulation of the colonial style bungalow proved in the
course of things less important to the unfolding, constitutive structure
of the build environment than the deep-seated dispositions and anticipations about family, descendants, and transmission of heritage that
prompted incremental renovation and reconstruction. Such resurgence
of traditional forms of knowledge and practice are enacted by agents
whose proclivities and dispositions, as Bourdieu would have it in his
articulation of habitus, include not only matters of taste but deeply
embedded expectations and anticipations over long-term interests (see
Swartz, 1997: 10914; Brubaker, 1993). Agency and implementation
prove local, interactive, with consequences aggregated rather than centrally planned and administered.
Yet agency is not simply a matter of socialized tastes, but as one
would expect in a middle-class suburb, rational, strategic and interactive
among neighboring units. In pursuing a theory of practice, we should
acknowledge that consciousness, rationality, and pragmatic reflection
might play an important role (Calhoun, 1993: 7782), even in the unintended re-establishment of traditional forms of architecture.
Acknowledgements
Francis Wacziarg and Aman Nath have generously permitted the reproduction
of two excellent drawings of the Gulab Rai Ladia haveli in Mandawa from their
classic presentation of Rajasthan; The Painted Walls of Shekhavati, published by
Vikas Publishing House Pvt Ltd, 1982. The family whose home was recorded in
this study provided floor plans and blueprints from two different periods of construction, which the pen of Gail Wread gracefully rendered as figures. This
article was first conceived for presentation at the Third Conference on Built Form
and Culture Research, 912 November 1989, Arizona State University. The completed article was presented for the Panel Social Landscapes in South Asia at
the 28th Annual Conference on South Asia, 1417 October 1999, University of
Wisconsin, Madison, USA. Amita Sinha provided useful comments, while Kathy
Charmaz, provided valuable advice in editing.
Notes
1. Yet, note that the very title of his work assumes that there is a temporal
point at which a building is considered built. Further note that Brand also
often chooses to write as though the building is causal agent, rather than
those humans who readapt it.

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2. Structuralism, as introduced by H. Glassie (1975) to vernacular architecture,

presents the timeless permutations of components, rather than a linear or
dendritic trajectory through time of biographic and historic moments of
strategic importance in which plans, decisions, and actions construct upon
the accumulations and residues of past actions.
3. Despite the broad definition of material culture introduced in the editorial
of the first issue of the Journal of Material Culture, this paper is an investigation of the relationship between people and things not irrespective of
(Miller and Tilley, 1996: 5), but rather most respectful of time and space.
4. In an earlier volume of this journal Vom Bruck (1997) also addresses this
classic work by Bourdieu.
5. Bourdieu writes House building, which always takes place when a son is
married and which symbolizes the birth of a new family . . . (1990: 317).
Such a sentence suggests notions of a nuclear household, not consistent with
other references to the preferred jointness of the lineage and its patrimony,
to the relations among brothers (1990: 192), to the authority of the patriarch
(1990: 192), the jointness of housework among women (1990: 194), and to
the unity of a great house akham amograne (1990: 192).
Furthermore, Bourdieu writes about When the two cousins belong to the
same strongly united house living under the authority of one elder and
holding all its property in common (1990: 166). Clearly, such a house, with
a single authority, several conjugal pairs, and property held in common, fits
the definition of a joint household.
In addition, we find out that there are important variations in the form of
the extended family, as in the practice of adopting sons, as in resident
husbands of daughters: . . . there is no family that does not include at least
one awrith, but an awrith disguised under the official image of the associate
or the adopted son (1990: 179).
The complexity of the ethnographic situation might be revealed by
Bourdieus reference to secondary houses: secondary houses are set at right
angles around the courtyard, they are often simply lodging rooms, without
kitchen or cowshed, and the courtyard is often closed off, on the side
opposite the front of the main house, by the back of the neighboring
house . . . Yet Bourdieu does not clarify whether such clusters of main and
secondary houses are not part of a resident cluster housing the joint family.
Hence, we have ample evidence that the Kabyle house selected for analysis
as type, covers but one phase of the developmental cycle of the domestic
group, simplifying the house complex through time to its nuclear family
stage alone.
6. In Bourdieus seminal chapter The Work of Time (1990: 98111), we find
discussion of the reproduction of institutions, but no reference to the phases,
duration, or sequence in processes through which an institution may renew
itself. To speak of the reproduction of social formation requires some
conception of the time durations involved, so the investigator may either
study case examples longitudinally through time, or adequately select and
place case examples to observe and represent a range of phases, strategies,
and outcomes during a period of observation. Of particular note is absence
of reference to the developmental cycle of the domestic group, either at the
theoretical level, or in his classic analysis of the Kabyle house.
7. Paul Oliver introduces this term, not in his text, but in a caption to a photograph (1987: 291).
8. Based upon a sampling of cross-cultural differences in built form, Susan
Kent (1990) has suggested how built form relates to the complexities of social

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9.
10.

11.

12.

organization. Such a neo-evolutionary construction, however, does not tend

to the direct observation and biography of building and site, as is the focus
of our study.
For the influence of the sacred text Vaastu Shastras upon the design of Jaipur
City, see Sinha, 1998: 39.
The authors Bhatt and Scriver conclude their work on government buildings,
museums, housing projects, and tourist bangalows, with a sahibs cottage
centered on its lot, with full garden spaces on three sides: the dining room
. . . is the nucleus of both the house and garden, and is directly linked to
both through recessed verandas on both the east and west exposures . . .
Window apertures [are] arranged . . . [to] fram[e] magic glimpses of garden
greenery (1990: 2201). The authors refer to the neo-colonial reveries that
still pervade the lifestyle and ideals of middle-class India (1990: 216).
I have changed the name, caste, and colony location of the family and neighborhood to protect as best I can their anonymity. While the details of family
developmental cycle would enhance my description of the interrelationships
among kinship and built form, I find that the matters of marriage, birth, and
death involve not only joys, but the sorrows of profound loss that should
not be treated lightly here.
Where incremental architecture is the recognized norm, one often sees
reinforced steel cables, jagged mansory at the corners, and extensions of the
foundation all exposed to permit linking on for the next anticipated
addition.

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Wacziarg, Francis and Nath, Aman (1982) Rajasthan: The Painted Walls of Shekhavati. Delhi: Vikas Publishing.
R . T H O M A S R O S I N is a Professor of Anthropology at the Sonoma State
University, Rohnert Park, California, USA who has conducted research in
western India over a 35 year period. His earlier work documented the rural

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implementation of land reform in a feudal province transformed by the democratic institutions of the newly independent India. Subsequently, he studied the
conjunctive use of rain run-off and groundwater in the indigenous system of irrigation in the Aravallis Hills bordering the Thar desert, with publications in
Human Ecology, Cultural Survival, and various collections on Rajasthan. His
present interests are cross-cultural differences in folk conception about how
human products, residues, and wastes are recycled back into nature. A paper on
traffic and trash is forthcoming in Contribution to Indian Sociology 34(3), SeptDec
2000. Address: Professor of Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, Sonoma
State University, Rohnert Park, CA 94928. [email: tom.rosin@sonoma.edu]

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