10 King, The Bungalow, 46.
11 Madhavi Desai and Miki Desai, The Bungalow in Twentieth-Century India, (New York: Routledge, 2012), 40.
12 Desai, The Bungalow in TwentiethCentury India, 40.
13 William J. Glover “A Feeling of Absence from Old England: The Colonial Bungalow,” Home Culture 1 (2004): 64.
14 Glover, “A Feeling of Absence,” 70.
15 Glover, “A Feeling of Absence,” 72.
preserve their identity, and to legitimize their authority as rulers through clear visual and spatial distinctions. The residency of British colonists was generally temporary, and this transience precluded the acquisition and ownership of luxury material possessions, typically powerful signifiers of class and status.10 In the mid-nineteenth century, the Public Works Department (PWD) was created in order to institutionalize and standardize the construction of buildings within the empire, and this was a major reason for the prevalence of the bungalow form in British-occupied India.11 As Madhavi Desai explains, in their efforts to standardize what they termed ‘tropical architecture,’ the PWD established a set of standard features for a domestic space, including an enclosed compound, thick mud walls, a partially covered verandah, and a thatched roof.12 This corresponded to a trend of building houses not in urban centers, but on spacious private lots, which provided a grassy barrier between the main house and the chaotic city beyond the compound walls. The use of a portico, a preview to the American garage and values rooted in private ownership and public/private distinction, created another visual and physical threshold. Despite efforts to isolate themselves in their enclaves, the British could never seal themselves off from the presence of Indians, since the locals were both active and passive participants in the creation of the bungalows. While some dwellings were built by the PWD, it was more common for the British dwellings to be built and rented out by British developers.13 This presented a paradox; on one hand the British were institutionally in power, on the other they were also temporary inhabitants and renters (rather than owners), a reminder of the tenuousness of their power. It was Indian laborers who built the structures; even though European technologies were employed, such as iron grilles and glazed windows, the “tangible qualities of a bungalows physical fabric remained rooted in the Indian, not English, architectural traditions.”14 As Colesworthy Grant wrote in a guide to British life in India, “the exterior of the bungalow will, I doubt not, be sufficient to impress you with a feeling of absence from England.”15 The continuous engagement between these physical, cultural, and social elements at multiple scales constitutes the bungalow as an ecological system. In each structure, the various technologies present created a relationship not only between the British occupant and their memories of home, but also connected the individual laborers to the global transfer of building materials. This is just one of many interrelated parts that can be teased out of each entity. During the nineteenth-century, the home was upheld by the British as a container and cultivator of moral taste and character. As William Glover explains, they saw the home as a refuge from the competitive outside world, and as an incubator for children and servants, generally locals, to be trained in British cultural mores and manners: “maintaining proper domestic arrangements in the colony was seen as a bulwark against the feared dissolution of character that might come about through prolonged exposure to the tropics.”16 Home became a site of possible improvement of the “native population” and subsequently a tool for legitimizing colonial rule on an interpersonal level. In colonial
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