With its thick walls, high ceilings, large rooms, and wide verandahs, the colonial bungalow was constructed to meet the challenges of hot climates. Designed to keep cool air in, hot air out, and provide plenty of airy shade, the bungalow was so successful that it became the standard colonial residence across the world, from British India to French Polynesia. Access by local people to bungalows, certainly their interiors, was typically restricted, and this fact, along with their design, which was distinct from local architecture, made them a symbol of both imperial power and racial discrimination. Frequently appearing in colonial-themed literature and film, the essential bungalow design remains a popular form of residence in post-colonial times across the world.
Origins
The origin of the name bungalow, according to The Oxford Library of Words and Phrases, is from the Gujarati word bangalo and the Hindi word banglā, meaning "belonging to Bengal," indicating the first such buildings appeared in northeast India.
Colonial bungalows, designed to combat the challenges of a tropical or subtropical climate, were first built in out-of-the-way trading stations and then appeared in larger communities. They provided a means by which colonists could, in a place where local people generally lived in a simpler style of accommodation, reproduce in some way the style of living they were familiar with back home. The architectural differences the bungalow presented also reminded locals of who had the wealth and power in the colony. Not all colonists were rich, even compared to local people, particularly soldiers and junior administrators. It was common for two or three unmarried men to share a bungalow until they could afford a residence of their own. Such shared bungalows were often called 'chummeries.'
Design Features
The entire bungalow was often built slightly above the ground. The roof was generally steeply sloped to provide greater height to the rooms within and to more easily allow rainwater to drain off. Materials for walls and roofing depended on availability, with, for example, rattan, wood, plaited leaves, mud, brick, plaster, and corrugated iron all being used in various places. Better bungalows had thick walls that ensured the interior rooms were well insulated against excessive exterior heat, and so a cooler and more constant temperature was maintained within the home. Whitewashed walls helped reflect the heat. Large, open-plan rooms, particularly for lounge and eating areas, coupled with the high ceilings, allowed for good circulation of air. This was an important consideration not only in the hotter seasons but also to prevent the buildup of high humidity levels in the wet seasons, which are so typical of tropical climates.
In order not to be cooped up indoors all of the time, the colonial bungalow was given a wide and deep verandah. The verandah often went around all four sides of the building in earlier or isolated bungalows, but when bungalow estates were created in colonial towns, to save space, the verandah was often limited to just one side. This structure of an overhanging roof held up by regular columns meant the sun did not directly hit the walls of the building. Indeed, the contrast between the sunlit exterior and gloomy interior of a colonial bungalow was often striking. The verandah also provided a shaded area that could be enjoyed in the cooler mornings and evenings. A railing to the verandah kept out curious wildlife, especially stray dogs or night predators like leopards.
Windows and French doors with latticed shutters could keep direct sunlight out even when the sun was at a low angle or if the verandah did not cover all sides of the bungalow. Large windows allowed in more air and preferably provided views of a landscape made all the more impressive because it was entirely foreign to the colonists.
Bungalows were usually set in a clearing and, in suitable climates, often surrounded by a lawn area. The bungalow might also be built on top of a rise or small hill, as this location better captured any breezes and reduced the intensity of unwanted visitors like mosquitoes. Artificial breezes could be created within the bungalow by ceiling fans or punkahs, fans made of a large piece of material suspended from the ceiling and put in motion by pulling a rope. Some bungalows had primitive air conditioning where a series of fans within a box-like structure blew air through a space made damp by the hanging of wet strips of cloth.
A good description of a fine colonial bungalow comes from one Violet Jacobs, who lived in Mhow in central India around 1895:
Imagine yourself on the porch and coming up some steps. You go up across the verandah and through the front door that opens into the drawing room; it has a fan-light and is very tall. All the outside doors and windows have wire shutters like meat safes to keep out insects. They are a great luxury here. The drawing room is about the height of Dun Kirk [the church at home in Dun, Angus] and a sort of chancel arch runs laterally across the middle; it has six doors running down each side of it and opening into other rooms and the effect is rather pretty, as all have fan-lights over them. There are seven windows and nineteen ventilators so there should be plenty of air. We've got stone floors instead of the mud ones most bungalows have and all the whitewash is tinted pale green. There's a crimson drugget [floor covering], the wicker chairs are all painted white and the general effect isn't bad at all.
(Holmes, 141-2)
The colonial bungalow design was so successful that it became possible to order prefabricated versions, which were shipped from, for example, Glasgow in Scotland to Australia, where they could be assembled on site. Another success was that the essential concept of the bungalow structure was adopted for other purposes besides private residences. All sorts of communal buildings, such as schools, clubhouses, trading depots, and hospitals, employed the bungalow design.
A Political Purpose
Distinct from indigenous architecture, the bungalow served an imperial purpose beyond mere architecture, as here explained by the historian P. J. Marshall:
The bungalow's attraction was in large part the way it advanced a political purpose – that of social distancing. Its setting, in a spacious compound, with a curving entry drive and access controlled by walls, gates, and watchmen, announced the superiority of the British Raj and helped contain the pervasive British fears of disease and contamination from too close a contact with 'natives.'
(236)
This separation of colonists and local people in less isolated communities even stretched to commerce. Tradespeople were carefully screened and, if given permission to enter the grounds of a bungalow, were usually allowed no further access than the verandah. As Marshall notes: "Only social equals were allowed into the interior" (ibid). Bungalows, then, were a secret inner world and a physical example of racial discrimination, one certainly not unnoticed by local people. Over time, this segregation did change as White colonials moved on, such as when a regiment was reposted, and so bungalows became available for better-off locals like merchants and shopkeepers, members of the growing indigenous middle class.
The private imperial space of the bungalow was very often dominated not by men but by women. In colonial outposts, women had a slightly freer role in society, although this came with expectations to use their resourcefulness in organising the household's daily requirements, bringing up any children, and managing and disciplining servants. There was also an expectation that women should nurture the social life of the colonial community. The bungalow, then, became a place to host dinner and tea parties, which were more informal than those events held in clubs.
In Colonial Literature
Bungalows appear frequently in literature concerned with the colonial period. Isolated, unique, and often dilapidated due to the ravages of the climate, colonial bungalows often reflect the physical isolation and moral shortcomings of the main characters in the stories. Many books by Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) are set in far-flung places where disreputable and down-at-heel colonials inhabit the exotic landscape. In his 1898 collection of short stories, suggestively titled Tales of Unrest, the entry An Outpost of Progress describes a remote ivory trading station in (what later became) Belgian Congo, where the two protagonists quarrel, one shooting the other and the survivor hanging himself. The reader is warned early on of the broken morals of these characters by Conrad's description of their bungalow:
…there was only one large building in the cleared ground of the station. It was built neatly of reeds, with a verandah on all four sides. There were three rooms in it. The one in the middle as the living-room, and had two rough tables and a few stools in it. The other two were the bedrooms for the white men. Each had a bedstead and a mosquito net for all furniture. The plank floor was littered with the belongings of the white men; open half-empty boxes, town wearing apparel, old boots; all the things dirty, and all the things broken, that accumulate mysteriously round untidy men.
(83)
George Orwell (1903-1950), who was born in British India, spent several years in the colonial police force in Myanmar. Orwell's 1934 novel Burmese Days describes one character's bungalow as follows:
The doctor's house was a long bungalow of earth-oiled wood, standing on piles, with a large unkempt garden which adjoined that of the Club…The verandah was wide and dark, with low eaves from which baskets of fern hung, making it seem like a cave behind a waterfall of sunlight. It was furnished with long, cane-bottomed chairs made in the jail and at one end was a bookcase containing a rather unappetising little library…
(34-5)
Orwell describes the interior of another Burmese bungalow, that of his main character, Flory:
The bedroom was a large square room with white plaster walls, open doorways and no ceiling, but only rafters in which sparrows nested. There was no furniture except the big four-poster bed, with its furled mosquito net like a canopy, and a wicker table and chair and small mirror; also some rough bookshelves containing several hundred books, all mildewed by many rainy seasons and riddled by silver fish…Beyond the veranda eaves the light rained down like glistening white oil.
(49)
That the location of a colonial bungalow was meant, where possible, to extract the maximum advantages from the local environment is well described by Karen Blixen (1885-1962), who owned a coffee farm in Kenya and who famously wrote of her experience in her 1937 book Out of Africa.
My dining room looked west and had three long windows that opened out to the paved terrace, the lawn, and the forest. The land here sloped down to the river that formed the boundary between me and the Masai. You could not see the river itself from the house, but you could follow its winding course by the design of the dark-green big acacias which grew along it…The wind blew from the east: the doors of my dining room, to lee, were always open, and for this reason, the west side of the house was always popular with the Natives.
(43)
Naturally, as colonial villages and towns increased in size, so estates of bungalows were built, each connected to a main road. Paul Scott (1920-1978), in his 1968 novel The Day of the Scorpion (part of the celebrated Raj Quartet), describes the hill station of Pankot, where British residents retreated from the intense summer heat of the Indian plains.
Most of them [bungalows] were hidden by pines, marked by roadside posts at drive-entrances. And yet there was no feeling of enclosure. The road, at every turn, gave views…English flowers could be grown (sometimes spectacularly) in the gardens.
(72)
The author Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1927-2013), in her 1975 prize-winning book Heat and Dust, tells of a young British woman (Olivia) who marries an official (Douglas) in India in the 1920s. Their story is told in parallel to that of a contemporary, unnamed woman who possesses letters written by Olivia and who retraces her life 50 years before. In her book, Prawer Jhabvala describes how colonial buildings have survived but been reused in the post-colonial period, and so she contrasts the socially restricted home life of a British woman in colonial India with the bustling mixed social interaction of post-independence.
Douglas and Olivia's bungalow now houses the Water Board, the municipal Health Department, and a sub-post office…[the bungalow has] like everything else been divided and sub-divided into many parts to fulfil many functions. Only the Medical Superintendent's house has been kept intact and is supposed to be a traveller's rest-house…Yesterday I came across an odd trio outside the traveller's bungalow. The watchman having refused to open the doors, they had to spread themselves and their belongings out on the verandah…Actually, it turned out to be more pleasant on the verandah. It was musty and dark inside the bungalow; the place smelled dead…It was a gloomy, brooding house and could never have been anything else.
(8-24)
Legacy
Nowadays, of course, bungalows can be seen just about everywhere, and they can range from a humble retirement home to a vast single-story complex. The arrival of the bungalow in the colonising countries was, however, made in stages. As the design was by definition exotic, bungalows were first built in locations associated with leisure, such as seaside and holiday resorts. From here, the bungalow spread to towns and cities as an alternative to more traditional housing. Such quintessential design features as large windows, multiple doorways, expansive open-plan rooms, shuttered windows, and railed verandahs are not at all required for cooler places like Britain, France, or the Netherlands, but this has not prevented the bungalow from becoming a staple feature of urban landscapes worldwide, whatever the local climate.
