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at home, in the chawl PARTITION WALLS IN THE CORRIDOR 2
The renovated terrace toilets 1934
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1980S a history of Domesticity in Ahmedabad
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The two wings of the terrace
How have domestic spaces and everyday life changed over time? Conversely, what can changing domesticity reveal about the larger historical forces that shaped the twentieth century? This exhibition offers some answers through stories of a change in a chawl, and of its residents and the neighbourhood. It traces how modern family life, community relationships, domestic technologies, identity, and urban experience were produced and transformed by the early industrial city. The panels focus on six key themes dealing with various aspects of chawl life and the neighbourhood, and how these transformed over time. The exhibition juxtaposed these narratives against an installation of a chawl room and its contents. We attempted to evoke the spatial constraints and the intimacies of domestic life as a frame through which the historical narratives could be engaged with. In this way, the chawl emerges as a complex site of interactivity, a fluid meshwork of individuals, families, and the community, of the domestic and the urban, and of the past and the present.
Acknowledgements:
Families of Cotton Chawl G. Indirajith Karan Rane Fahad Zuberi CEPT Workshop Team Lilavati Lalbhai Library Staff
Instructors: Dr. Gauri Bharat Dr. Sadan Jha
The water tank adjoining the renovated toilets Students:
Arushi Gopal Aishwarya Morwal Aishwary Padmanabhan Eva Thomas Roshni Kannan Pruthvi Thakur Sprya Sharma
Foldout Design: Aman Amin
The doors and windows are usually open in the chawl and people ÀQG LW FRPIRUWLQJ WR KDYH VRPHRQH ZLWKLQ UHDFK 7KH PRWLYDWLRQ WR KDYH PRUH SHUVRQDO VSDFH OHG WR WKH DSSURSULDWLQJ WKH FRPPRQ spaces. One change which has been uniformly done by the ground à RRU LV DSSURSULDWLRQ RI WKH FRUULGRU WR PDNH SRUFKHV The exhibit was held at the LLL Exhibition Center from February 8th to March 1st, 2019.
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DOMESTICITY ON DISPLAY: THE FIRST CHAWL FAMILIES 3
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Everyday Practices of the Verandah in Cotton Chawl The making ‘own’ The Cotton Chawl is an introverted chawl typology with verandahs actingof as one’s the continuous connecting link between houses, while servingCotton as a pathChawl for passersby. (1930s). The verandah is an intersection of the public life and private life of its inhabitants. The project seeks to explore the way inhabitants approach the verandah in terms of associations with one another and consequently, how norms and codes of conduct are engendered around these associations as a result of it being a semi-private space.
Aishwarya Morwal
Milieu, Modernity, Metamorphosis:
The fabric of a dwelling:
Stories Of Cotton Chawl through its Kitchens
Cotton chawl and its network of built environment and social institutions
2018
kitchen through act Chawl, of regulated – a case of the early kitchens of of cotton chawl, an industrial housing unit that emerged along with The Jain kitchens the of Cotton have seen aspatial trajectoryproduction of additions, subtractions, The transformation replacements and modifications through eight decades of its existence . The exhitbition investigates the objects that were used through time, the infrastructural changes along with their impetus, understands the practices that took place in the kitchen, those that continued or changed and studies the patterns of familial and social implications of individual kitchens of the Chawl. There is a further attempt to theoretically determine if the kitchens were one of the spaces where modernity was influential in copious spatial transformation which either safeguarded pre-existing beliefs or triggered taboos around the practices that revolved around food. Aishwarya Padmanabhan
the mill industry in Ahmedabad, is examined over a span of eighty years through social links that influenced its genesis and the web of institutions that affect daily life at chawl. The symbiotic relationship between a building and its physical and social environment forms the hypothesis of the study which concludes that the presence of a context is primary not just for the birth of a structure but also for its sustenance.
Objects on Display Each family in the chawl makes their own distinctive mark through the objects they accumulated and display in their hines. Using objects as a window to the past and tracing its associations to unravel the lifestyles of the past chawl generations, the panels brings to light the shift in display patterns that is triggered by the larger socio-cultural trends that came about and throws light on the emergence of new family identities.
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Arushi Gopal
Eva Thomas
Cotton Chawl through the Residents Gaze
Architectural paradigm shifts in the Cotton Chawl
The panels aims to recount the experience of the Cotton Chawl through the residents' perspective in the form of anecdotes and stories from their day to day life. The space of the chawl being highly compressed makes life here fairly transparent, enabling to be a place to see and be seen. How does this very structure change the dynamics of the relationships between the people themselves? And what is their relationship to the space? What kind of subjectivities does being in a space like this evoke?
The section showing space usage after the construction of the partition walls
Pruthvi Thakur
Sprya Sharma
The section showing space usage before the construction of the partition walls The Threshold of the
When the Cotton Chawl was established in 1934 to house the mill workers migrating from smaller towns and villages to the city, it was just enough to fulfil their basic necessities. In the last 84 years the way of living in the chawl has changed to a great extent but there were some major transformations which brought the fundamental changes including the social behaviour and the perception of the occupants of the chawl, hence bringing about paradigm shifts.