Sem 02 / Settlement Studies
Economy and Builtform (and Terrain) / Baiyora, Rajasthan

Apurva Talpade 

Economy and Built Form is a module where students of the first year study a settlement where the majority of the inhabitants are involved to different capacities with a form of a primary economy. This is in order to study the link between how the economy of a place is linked to various practices, particularly those surrounding the making of their built spaces, but also about the structuring of the rural built form and its effects on sociality and everyday life. A lot of study gets folded into this - homes are studied in great detail since they often challenge existing presumptions about how we live and the prevalent ordering of domestic spaces; kitchens become especially interesting in such places as the social centre of the household; an annual calendar is often made to note how seasons and associated economic practices are tied intrinsically together; and rituals make an appearance here as emerging from this way of seeing and living. The cultural dimensions of life here are inextricably tied to the study of built form.

This year, the site selected for study was Baiyora, an Adivasi village near Dungarpur in Rajasthan. It is settled by the Bhil community, regarded as the first settlers of the land, that lives and works as an agricultural-pastoral community that both farms the slopes immediately surrounding their houses as well as forages from the forest that weaves between and encircles their settlement. The form of the village is unlike those previously studied by us. While most of the sites we have visited have a distinct idea of the village as a cluster of houses which are ordered based on certain social organisational forms and having designated public gathering spaces and a few institutions, here, the village is completely scattered. Each house exists independently, built on the hillside with its agricultural terrain attached to it. There is scant distinction between one village and the next, with the wider area being largely understood as a common administrative terrain.

The village is almost entirely self sufficient - all food being grown and collected from the land itself, and it is marked by an absence of commerce, there was no shop in the whole village which sold either food grains or even basic domestic commodities.  The study of the site was in fact the study of the terrain itself. This was a hilly topography with wider paths for the passage of cattle, and with access to the homesteads being mostly through footpaths that branch from these. A main metalled vehicular road also passes through it. The institutions encountered were the primary school and a village centre built by the sarpanch.

The mapping of the terrain became the thrust of the study. This is a complicated and unwieldy site for first year students, difficult to hold in plan and section yet best understood through a topographical telling. Students were divided into five groups and each group was tasked with pacing the site, committing built form and tree species and everything they encountered onto the map which covered an area of 100 m by 100 m approximately (this was stretched to include the outhouses of certain house clusters or significant parts of the forest or the neighbouring hillside wherever required). The pacing also gave coarse-grained elevation differences which became part of the annotations of their field notes.

These were then mapped as a gridded drawing which plotted every point for its coordinates on all three axes which produced a tessellated geometry of the hillsides on which the built forms and farms and forests could then be laid.  The mapping brought about an understanding of the relationships between the houses (built by the villagers, from material largely sourced from the forests and hills adjacent), the forms of agriculture practiced,  and the forest and its role in the everyday life of the village.

While the drawings of the clusters were done as detailed plans and sections with an emphasis on material and the objects of living specifically; in order to map the village itself, a new form of drawing was synthesised. Borrowing from traditions of miniature drawing which were generated from a form of narrative, or rather that use the narrative as a means to launch the world and space in the drawing, the larger terrain drawing also produced fictions of space in its making that expand and shrink in order to draw attention to the sites studied.

The larger landscape here gets compressed, one is able to traverse the large tracts of hills very quickly in order to reach from one house cluster to the next. The drawing is able to hold distance and detail, the breadth of landscape as well as the intimate scale of the domestic. One crosses from a house-in-making, its backyard, to farmed fields beyond and immediately senses the distance suggested by the drawing and its hills and smaller houses before it stretches again to the territory of the next significant / studied house cluster.

What this form of drawing is able to do is notionally put together the village for all that has been seen and understood. The village as dispersed houses, the lack of hierarchy that one sees here from the scales and types of the houses, the proximity of the forest to each inhabitation, the geographical extent of each house all together produce the Bhil village. The invention of the drawing is one of the main tasks of the course. The drawing is the site of the inquiry which holds the spatial logic encountered and it is that which changes the nature of the mapped and measured to include the viscerally felt and the closely observed as well.

Drawing as fieldnotes and annotations