ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the British Spiritualist Madeline Slade’s making of a Gandhian housing architecture of finitude in the village of Segaon in the Wardha district in the mid nineteen thirties. At a distinct remove from the making of a gradually improvable architecture conforming to “minimum standards,” the making of a Gandhian housing architecture of finitude in Segaon foregrounded Gandhi’s self-sacrificial adherence to the task of staying within limits and observing constraints. The chapter demonstrates the ways in which Gandhi’s self-sacrificial acts of staying within limits and observing constraints may have been inherent to his emergent, anthropocentric comprehension of “place-boundedness.” The chapter explores Gandhi’s discourse of place-boundedness and his near-simultaneous emphasis on self-sacrificial finitude in Segaon in 1936, from the vantages of varnashramadharma, a religious discourse related to caste. In what ways did Gandhi’s emergent conception of varnashramadharma-oriented place-boundedness converge with his ideal of village-improvement work in Segaon? How might one read the Gandhian architecture of Segaon from the vantages of accounts related to his descriptions of Akash (the sky) and open spaces and his failing health at the time? The chapter attempts a few answers to these questions. Moreover, drawing on a physical description of a few of Slade’s architectural creations in and around Segaon, the chapter also speculates about the political reasons undergirding her exclusion from that village.
