Indigenous Architecture in India: Exploring Plural Lifeworlds

by Gauri Bharat

Overview

This volume focuses on socio- spatial practices of indigenous communities in India. It explores the interrelation between the built environments and lifeworlds, i.e. practices, patterns, and structures of everyday life. The chapters deal with different ideas and definitions of indigeneity, while also addressing the complex equations between the production and perception of built forms, indigenous technologies, on the one hand, and social, environmental and political contexts, questions of aesthetics, identity, and self-representation on the other.

From Adivasi art and sacred sites to craft villages and nomadic pastoralists in western India, from indigenous bangle makers in urban north India to terracotta crafts people on the south, each chapter focuses on different communities and the contours of their contemporary lifeworlds. The contributions actively attempt to foreground the logic and perspectives of the communities themselves as the epistemological centre of the architectural and material discourses on indigeneity.

This book will be useful for students, teachers, and researchers of architecture, urban design, urban studies, urban development and planning, anthropology, sociology, and museum studies. It will also be of interest to urban planners and designers, policy planners, local government authorities, and professionals engaged in the discipline.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032792637
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	08/29/2025
Pages:	214
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Gauri Bharat is Senior Associate Professor and Program Chair of Architectural History and Theory at the Faculty of Architecture, CEPT University, Ahmedabad, India. Her research and teaching focuses on lived histories, where she explores how built environments in the past were shaped by and in turn shaped the individual and collective lives of people. The other major focus area is histories of making, where she is working on a book manuscript on the history of reinforced concrete use in the Indian subcontinent. Gauri has published extensively and engages with both academic and non-academic audiences.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Indigenous Architecture in India 1. Studying Bachchom Bayer Ba: The Indigenous Floor Art of Kolhan 2. The Sacred Grove and the Livelihood and Identity of Santals 3. Flooded Villages, Foldable Houses, and Flexible Living 4. Decoding a Craft Habitat. INTERLUDE: Exploring Indigeneity and the City. 5. Placing Indigeneity in the networks of glass-bangle making in Firozabad 6. Ecological Knowledge and Everyday Life of Vagadiya Rabaris 7. Terracotta People: Productive Tensions Between the Indigenous and the Colonial 8. Dialogue between Carpenters and Mud Masons: Cases from Telangana and Goa 9. Material Culture and Change at Chota Oda 10. Community, Spaces and Environment