De-constructing the Sense of Inside and the Outside in a Chawl

The chawl is a housing typology from western India, known especially for its overwhelming population density and strong sense of community living, comprised of several small, tightly spaced units connected by a common veranda. Built predominantly in the early 1900s, chawls were commonly adopted in cities like Mumbai and Ahmedabad, which rapidly absorbed working-class populations migrating from villages to work in the booming textile industries. The Cotton Chawl, built in 1935 in Ahmedabad, is one such three-storied chawl, housing 87 units. Comprising only one room and a small kitchenette, generally used by 4-5 family members, the household units in the chawl often spill out onto the 3-foot-wide veranda. Activities such as sitting, conversing, performing everyday domestic tasks, celebrating religious ceremonies, and even sleeping take place on the veranda, which becomes a complex site at the intersection of personal and collective life. The close-knit architecture of the chawl gives people the sense of an extended home, outside the individual house unit, where language, behaviors, movement, and interactions are all shaped by people’s perceptions of privacy, gender norms, and shared understandings of social and cultural codes. Understanding the spatio-temporal rhythms of these activities, I use oral history and ethnography to understand how terms like inside and outside, private and public, and the home and the world have deeply specific and relational meanings. I illustrate how physical demarcations of inside and outside are highly inadequate to understand how space is truly used. My central argument is that, in community settlements like the chawl, spatial demarcations of architecture don’t necessarily correspond with the metaphorical, embodied, and ideological conceptions of place. Here, common spaces like the balcony are not merely containers of activities, but they are produced from the very activities and relationalities of time and people's acts, constantly imbuing newer meaning within them.