Bungalow

Etymology

Bungalow derives from the Hindi, Mahrati, or Gujurati bangla, meaning “of or belonging to Bengal.” The term was used by Indians and Europeans in India during the seventeenth century. It was anglicized during the eighteenth century, with the standard English spelling first recorded in 1784. The term was documented in England in 1788, but it was still identified as linguistically Indian. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was fully incorporated into the English language. “Bungalow” is found in at least 10 European languages. It was first recorded in Australia in 1876 and in North America in 1880. Scholars argue that the bungalow was popularized in West Africa in the 1890s. Thus, the etymology of bungalow suggests a timeline and geography of cultural diffusion. Yet, most scholars agree that the term built form and associations have not always been coterminous. Proposing a single origin and course of development for the bungalow might therefore be unproductive.

The Bungalow in India

According to Anthony King, a tropical dwelling type for European use emerged in British India by the late eighteenth century. It incorporated features from four sources: a local Bengali house form, the non-Bengali Indian appellation “bungalow,” the adaptation of said form and nomenclature by European settlers, and the further development of the veranda under Portuguese influence. A desire to separate British and Indian bodies and modes of living lay at the core of the bungalow's development. The resulting form, a large central room surrounded by smaller rooms and a veranda, translated colonial ideology into the fabric of home life. Deep verandas protected an inner sanctum from excessive heat and allowed for greater control of interactions with “natives.” Its efficacy was enhanced by placing the building at the center of a large garden segregated from Indian settlements. Thus the Anglo-Indian bungalow-compound was associated with protosubur-ban settings like military cantonments, “civil lines,” and hill stations. Two overlapping architectural expressions of the bungalow were in place in the nineteenth century: a sprawling single-story structure under a pitched roof that referred directly to Bengali prototypes and a one- to two-story flat-roofed villa influenced by neoclassical architecture in England. For a few lucky Indians, inhabiting a bungalow was a sign of assimilation into the colonial order. By the twentieth century, [Page 92]the colonial bungalow was reintegrated into Indian culture, where it described any detached single-family dwelling.

William J. Glover and Swati Chattopadhyay have complicated this view of the bungalow-compound. Glover shows that the bungalow was an idealized site for the enactment of upper-middle-class British values, whose attainability was compromised by the building's unfamiliar materiality. As Chattopadhyay has shown for Calcutta (Kolkata), the boundaries between the “White town” of Europeans and the “Black town” of Indians were blurry, with various classes of Europeans living in Indian-built bungalows in close proximity to locals. Indeed, the bungalow was so unstable discursively that a countermetro-politan femininity flourished under its auspices. In a sense then, the bungalow served as a prop for British colonial authority.

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