Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/132

122 village it probably belongs to the money-lender. There are few climates in the world where, except in rainy season, the peasant less needs shelter than in India. He generally lives, works, and sleeps in the open air, and the house is little more than a storehouse for his cattle, grain, implements, and scanty furniture, or for his women folk when he reaches the stage of respectability which allows him to seclude them. To describe a few houses of this typical class.

In Bengal you enter with your face to the east a small door opening on the village street, and thence into an open yard, on the west side of which is the "big hut," with walls of mud, and the roof thickly thatched with rice straw. The middle beam of this thatch is of palm wood, and the floor is raised at least four or five feet from the ground. The hut is divided into two compartments, the one a sleeping-room, the other a store-room. The verandah forms the family sitting-room, while in the sleeping-room are kept the family brass vessels and other valuables. On the south side of the yard is a smaller, ruder hut, used to isolate the wife at her confinement, while at other times the farm implements are kept in it. Other similar rooms are occupied by the owner's brothers or other relations who live with him. Besides these there is a cowhouse with large earthen manners holding the animals' food, and near it is a granary, in which the grain is protected by ropes of twisted straw, with a straw-rick which supplies fodder.

In Bombay the house of the village headman has walls made of clay mixed with chopped grass and kneaded by the feet of buffaloes. The flat roof rests on beams, the whole covered with clay which is beaten hard and smoothed, a shelter against the pitiless sun, with a slope to carry off the rain water. The poorer tenant occupies a shed partially enclosed with clay walls or wattled boughs, the roof of grass or millet-stalks.