THE PEOPLE

HOUSES AND HOUSING

 Home life.

According to the 1951 census there were 203,177 occupied houses in the district, which gave an average of 50.36 houses to a square mile, Of these 179,377 (46.79 per sq. mile) were in the rural areas and 233,800 (125.93 per sq. mile) in the urban areas. The 203,177 occupied houses in the district accommodated 233,752 households [A house for census purposes meant " a dwelling with a separate main entrance ". Thus more than one household might be found in the same census house.] (11. 201,742; 0.32,010). This gave an average of 1.51 households for each occupied house for the district, 1.3 for the rural area and 1.3 for the urban area. Houses in the district as a whole nowhere present a picturesque panorama. Modern architecture has made very little impact upon the housing sense of the people. With a few exceptions, where terraces are built, most of the urban dwellings are old-fashioned, having roofs of tiles or corrugated iron sheets. They are built with burnt bricks and have a stone foundation. The walls are plastered with mortar mixed in sand. It is only the abundant use of distempers that gives them a variegated appearance. Rural houses, on the contrary', present a sorry spectacle. Here the hutments are not constructed with a view to meeting individual requirements but are built in a manner that would afford protection against the vagaries of climate. In the dry eastern and northern belt they are flat-roofed and in the rainy north-east and north-west regions they are thatched. Generally they are built with sun-dried bricks and mud, pointed with mud or mortar. In houses fashioned as town dwellings, there are windows, window shutters, door frames and door panels, all made of babul or mango and in houses of the rich of teak wood; otherwise doors are made of thatch and bamboos and a deliberate rectangular opening kept at a height of about five feet from the ground level, provides a ventilator. Bamboo and teak rafters are also largely used.

The houses in the district may be arranged under two divisions,; immovable and movable. The immovable houses may be divided into four classes. Those with tiled roofs and walls of fire-baked bricks or dressed black stone; those with tiled roofs and walls of sun-burnt bricks or mud and stones; those with fiat earth or tiled roofs and generally walls of unburnt bricks; and those with thatched roofs and wattled or grass walls. The movable dwellings belong to wandering tribes who carry them wherever they go. They are of two kinds small tents or pals cither of coarse cotton or wool or condemned tarpaulin, and small huts of bamboo or date matting, Often when the dwellers prolong their stay indefinitely due to continuous employment prospects they make use of the discarded tin-can sheets to give their dwellings an appearance of a residence Usually these nomadic tribes select the outskirts of the city or a village and the plains adjacent to the hills as their favourite abodes The last seventy years or so have witnessed the fast disappearance of these nomads either by their absorption in the local populace or by their migration to other tracts.

Mansions belonging to the old aristocracy as well as the semi-modern structures housing the higher middle class and well-to-do families represent the first model. They are generally two or three storeyed and are built round quadrangles with stone or burnt brick walls, tiled roofs or open terrace. The built-up space is consider-able allowing for broad lobbies, an office room, two or more sleeping rooms, a central store room, a divankhana often used as a dining hall, a kitchen and a god-room. In the houses constructed recently, the bath and privy are usually attached but in the old styled houses, a bath-room is attached in the rear and a privy is located at a distant corner either in front or behind according to convenience of the building. In most of the houses of this type servants' quarters and cattle shed are also provided. These buildings have an imposing appearance. In the front, on the sides and in the rear are planted beautiful flower and fruit trees which spread their haunting fragrance in the morning in the atmosphere near about and cast their willowy shadows in the afternoon to keep the place cool. The flower trees are Gulab, Mogra, Shevanti, Capha, Parijat, lily, Zendu, Gokarna, Bakul, etc. whereas plantain, guava, mango, jambul, situplud, ramphal trees represent the fruit variety. In the rear yard at a central place stands alone the tulasi bush in a masonry pillar pot. The front entrance is a huge wooden door in the case of old styled buildings usually painted in maroon or green oil colour and often having beautiful carvings. The door leads to the divankhana decorated with multicoloured mattresses and furnished with gorgeous furniture like sofa sets, tables with glass tops, handis, etc. The doors and windows which are latticed have curtains displaying a rich colour combination. The walls of these buildings which have a plain plaster surface are usually coloured in distempers or oil paints and in some cases where the old aristocratic families have not become extinct, the walls are painted with drawings representing the episodes from Puranas. The old styled buildings are changed in a manner to suit modern conditions but still they have not lost their former grandeur. They are equipped with electric fittings so that radio, table and ceiling fans, iron, cooker, geyser, etc., have become quite common. And yet one is reminded of the old days of superstition when one sees mango leaves hanging from the door lattices, a horse shoe pinned on the doorstep or an awkward painting of an old goddess in chalk or pinjar exhibited in the front wall of the house to repel ghosts or the curses of sorcerer. The compound has either a stone or brick wall or wire fencing. A devadi also could be found to accommodate the rakhawaldar — perhaps a vestige of the past. These houses falling under the first category are, however, few and far between involving as they do a considerable cost of construction. Their owners, the former Inamdars and Jagirdars as a class are fast becoming extinct and now it is only the big merchants, Zamindars and high salaried persons who could afford dwellings of this type. The houses accommodating the lower middle class, the traders and merchants and well-to-do farmers both in the rural as well as the urban areas represent the second model. They are generally one-storeyed with walls of fire-baked or unbaked bricks and tiled or fiat roofs. They contain three to four rooms. They are built in the centre of an open space admeasuring five to six hundred square yards. The compound is devoid of any gardening. Whatever trees are planted are a few flower trees and vegetable plants. The front is a plain wooden door, with nothing artistic about it and leading to the so-called divankhana which is used at once as an office room, a sitting room and a guest room. The walls are coloured with a distemper or a white-wash. The furniture consists of a few chairs, a table or two, a bench and a mattress. In villages a shopkeeper converts this room into a shop; in towns the professional makes it his office room. The doors and windows are curtained but they do not display any fine taste. Framed pictures of gods and goddesses as well as historical personages are hung on the walls but they possess less than decorative value. The centre room is a rest-room and store-room combined into one. There is no separate god-room or a dining hall. The kitchen serves the purpose of both. One often finds the corner of the kitchen used as a washing sink converted into a bath-room. Privies which are open are situated at a distant corner in the rear of the building- One may find a cow shed, also accommodating the domestic servant. In the place of open terraces, these houses have flat roofed verandahas in the front and rear which might be used for sleeping at night during the hot season and otherwise for drying preparations such as papads, kurdayas, etc. The houses are not kept in a neat condition so that the wall-plastering goes off and some of the houses thus present a deserted look. Repairs are effected only in a casual way, because heavy expenditure is called for. It may not be even in five years once that they are white-washed or painted. The fencing around the compound is only an apology for it with an entrance appropriate to it. Their grotesque appearance is by no means pleasing. The houses accommodating working class families, peasants and cultivators and farm workers represent the third and fourth types. They have only one storey and are built in unburnt bricks. They have flat earth or tiled or thatched roofs and consist only of a couple of rooms. They have compound fences of stone and earth and with heaps of dirt and refuse stacked about and grass and shrubs growing wildly about lend the whole view a strange weirdness. The hutments have no windows, the doors are only improvisations made of reeds (kud) and plastered with red or black earth. The inmates suffer in all seasons, in summer because there is extreme heat, and in the rainy season, because there is no proper protection. Any open space, closed or unclosed, is used as a bath. Distant farms or beds of rivers and streams serve as privies. The whole atmosphere stinks because of profuse use of cowdung and wood-fuel. Gandhiji's des-cription of an average Indian village holds good of the Satara village also. He says, " Instead of having graceful hamlets dotting the land, we have dung-heaps. The approach to many villages is not a refreshing experience. Often one would like to shut one's eyes and stuff one's nose; such is the surrounding dirt and offending smell."

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