THE PEOPLE

HOUSING

The houses of an old village are crowded together, and open on narrow winding lanes. People like to have a sacred tulshi plant growing in their little backyard and a parrot may be hung in a metal cage; the main door of a house must not face the south. Larger houses have within one enclosure a dwelling house, with separate places for cooking and for bathing, a yard, a building for cattle, agricultural implements and perhaps grain. Berar districts have numerous peasant proprietors, though on the one hand there are a few large land-holders and on the other there is a technical limitation which makes the tenure of land not strictly proprietory. Each petty cultivator needs something in the way of a farmyard, but makes the little walled space within and about his dwelling place answer the purpose. All the manure of the establishment used to be collected in a large pit in the midst of it and this may still occur, but the practice is now understood to be illegal. In villages with good water supply houses have their own wells within the same enclosure. The walls are commonly built of earth or a mixture of stones and earth. Brick walls are by no means uncommon and dressed stone is also sometimes used. Wealthy people have attractive wood carving on the fronts of their houses, Telhara in Akot taluka being specially distinguished in this way; Marwaris and Cutchis, perhaps more frequently, use this means of decoration. Strongly built houses are owned by men of the poorest castes as well as by people of wealthier communities, though sometimes, a poor man's house is made of a kind of basket work daubed with earth. Large metal sheets are often made of kerosene oil tins, flattened out and soldered together. These are commonly used to shade the fronts of shops (which are always open) but sometimes for other kinds of roofing or even for the whole of a small building such as the solitary ill-situated hut occupied by the sweeper of the village. Houses occasionally have a flat top of earth, called dhaba, but more frequently they have sloping roofs of tiles, corrugated iron sheets or grass thatch. Red chillies are spread out on these to dry. It is only the poorest, generally living on the outskirts of a village who use thatch because it has great danger of fire. Tiles are more common in the north of the district and tin in the south. Tin is said to have the advantages of being easy to apply and seldom needing repair, it has the defects of being expensive, cold in winter and hot in summer and noisy in the rains, along with a possibility of being blown off and hurting some one; a ceiling is rarely added to reduce the heat.

In towns, strongly built buildings of brick and mortar and now cement and bricks and after the bungalow style are the fashion. Many storied buildings are also coming up particularly in housing co-operative colonies wherever they are being organised. Occasionally, there is a building of this kind in the villages also.

Furnishing is much simplified to the ordinary cultivator because he prefers to squat, crouching and balancing himself on his feet, rather than actually to sit down, even if his seat is a rail or a parapet. So he needs no chairs or tables. The climate again makes it easy to live largely out of doors and perhaps this reduces the demand of comfortable furniture. The standard of comfort has been steadily rising during the last many years and perhaps will continue to rise. However, the household furniture which keeps the ordinary cultivator content at present consists of quite a long list of articles. These comprise a jate or chakki that is a stone handmill for his wife to grind grains, paia and varvanta, the slab and muller with which spices etc. are ground up, an earthen vessel for storing water called mundal, dauri and sarposh i. e., basket and lid for keeping bread, a kathot, for kneading flour, some copper or brass pots for carrying and keeping drinking water tadhava, sleeping mat or carpet; ghongdya, blankets, baj or khat a fourlegged string bed, vakal or quilt made of old clothes and diva a lamp. In families in a higher position there are more articles and those of a better quality. The wealthier classes have European furniture in their drawing rooms. All classes need a variety of agricultural implements and a certain number of boxes for storing articles of value. Grain used to be kept in peos, pits but now in better go downs. It may be taken as a general rule that Hindus prefer brass utensils and Muslims copper ones.

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