Gyanendra Pandey is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History at Emory University and author of
Homes Our Fathers Built
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Published:December 2024
Chapter 2 discusses the architectural and physical surroundings in which men, women, and children of diverse classes and communities lived, made their homes, and managed domestic life in colonial and postcolonial India. Since physical structures often tell us little, if divorced from a knowledge of the way in which they were imagined and lived in, it uses autobiographical accounts to fill out the portrait of the houses men built through the later nineteenth century and the first two-thirds of the twentieth. The chapter sketches several recurrent features of the physical layout of elite homes, indicating something of the hierarchies and orders they symbolized. It then turns to living conditions among lower-class working people. The chapter centers the constraints and opportunities these changing arrangements provided for the unfolding of domestic life and relationships.
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