Date of Award

Spring 5-23-2022

Document Type

Thesis

Department

Architecture

First Advisor

Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen

Second Advisor

Helen Siu

Abstract

Kerala, the southwestern state of Independent India, had gained its distinct architectural heritage by the time the British East India Company began colonizing India in the 17th century. Upper caste Nambuthiris and Nayars organized their agrarian homesteads — four-winged courtyard houses with gender as their axis of internal regulation. Although the house layout remained the same, the gendered inhabitation varied based on caste. On their arrival, British colonists began reordering and reshaping this native cosmos into a perceived anglicized 'normative'[1]. The existing political and social terrains were fractured, revised, and reworked to create an anglicized model of society. The joint family system of the agrarian society was fragmented through top-down urban policies, thus impacting the lived spaces of the natives. It changed how families lived their daily lives and had a long-lasting impact on Kerala's traditional culture's social and physical landscape. It ultimately altered the choreography of Kerala's domesticity.

In this thesis, I take a closer look at the agrarian houses and trace the alterations to the spatial organization and domestic practices of these homes through colonial intervention. My period of study covers the mid-19th to mid- 20th century as this period represented the beginning of a shift in Kerala society: from a traditional agrarian society built on a joint kinship structure to a market model that encouraged nuclear family arrangements. Through an interdisciplinary methodology, my approach is to analyze space through the lens of anthropology. I compared existing house layouts with archived blueprints to study temporal alterations and gendered divisions. I parsed archival records such as marriage acts, judiciary records of family disputes, property rights, and land committee reports to find evidence of how the abolishment of feudalism and women's empowerment led to changes in the domestic sphere. I employed oral histories as a road map to locate pertinent records and reconstruct past spatial practices.

By combining architectural history and theory with the anthropology of dwelling, this study attempts to open the conversation on broader practices relating to State making and domestic spatial production in developing countries. Today as Kerala further adopts neoliberal policies, the housing patterns have altered to accommodate new modes of living. By focusing on the case of agrarian homesteads in Kerala, this study explores spatial production under the weight of a matrix of socio-cultural, political, and economic forces that continue to evolve in the global south.

[1] The British endeavored to transform the native urban fabric into an English model. They encouraged the growth of commercial ties, administrative reforms, and nuclear family models that reflected English society and its structures.

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