THE PEOPLE

HOUSES

The types of houses built in the district vary with the locality and the stage of development and culture of the community to which the inhabitant belongs. The Kunbi generally lives in a small house with mud and gravel walls and a thatched roof held up by wooden posts let in at the corners and the gables. The rafters are generally bamboos, and the thatch of bundles of rice straw and coarse grass. In the south, the rafters may be of cocoanut palm and the roofing of cocoanut leaves plaited or loose. The inside is generally divided into two rooms, a larger where the family cooks and lives in the day time, and smaller the sleeping and store room. At the gable end is usually a lean-to shed in which cattle and field tools are kept, and grass and wood stored. A Maratha house is generally better and much neater than a Kunbi's, with sun-dried brick walls, a tiled roof, a front verandah and in the fair season an outer booth with a flat roof of plaited palm leaves, the floor every-day carefully smoothed and cowdunged. Most Brahmans, Bhandaris and Musalmans, live in well-built houses raised on stone plinths. The walls are masonry or burnt brick work and roofs are tiled. The wood work in the roof is generally substantial and well built and the door and window frames neatly put together. Wooden shutters are generally used, though glazed windows are sometimes seen in Ratnagiri, Malvan, Vengurla and other towns. The village Mahar usually lives in a small shapeless roughly-built thatched mud hut. But pensioners and other high class Mahars generally, like the Marathas, build a better style house.

Except in large towns, houses are very seldom built as a speculation. Well-to-do traders, retired Government servants and pleaders build for their own use substantial and comfortable dwellings but seldom let them to tenants. All large trading towns and villages have a good number of substantial stone tile-roofed buildings housing nearly five per cent, of the population. The better sort of house, square built, with an open central or front courtyard, has, round the courtyard, an eight feet deep verandah-like dais or platform raised about three feet from the ground; its walls covered with cement or chunam plaster, oil painted, and its cornices hung with frames of bright coloured lithoprint pictures of gods, saints and mythological subjects. From this verandah, the common family resort, doors lead into back rooms, mostly dark and windowless or out into a cattle yard with offices in the rear. Shopkeepers live in dark rooms behind their stalls, with a backyard for cattle, and offices in the rear, entered through a back door. The hovels of the poor, a few feet square with one doorway, generally the sole opening for light or smoke, are divided by bamboo or palas leaf partitions into three or four small rooms into which a family of eight or ten are often crowded. The houses of the richer classes, one, two or three stories high, have walls of laterite or black stone, bricks, either with cement or chunam plaster or pointing and tiled roofs. According to the means and size of the owner's family, they contain from eight to fifteen rooms. In front there is a porch ota, and settle, and a verandah behind. Inside are central room majghar, god-room, store-room, kitchen, bed-rooms, and several other rooms according to the necessity of the family. These houses have some open space in the rear containing a well, a privy and a cattle-house or an out-house.

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