ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the Gandhian CSV’s construction, in the late nineteen nineties, of a series of low-cost houses in the village of Wagdara in the Wardha district. Through conversations with the Kolams, an Adivasi community, the chapter draws out their increasing interest in promoting their language and the travails of their environment in a wider region comprising five villages in Wardha. The chapter examines the reasons undergirding the Kolams acceptance of the Gandhian CSV’s “Wardha House” in the village. Conversing with the Kolams about their conception of region, language and environment helps draw to the fore the unique ways in which the organizational layout of individual CSV houses in Wagdara have been rendered into less consequential Kolami matters. The chapter demonstrates how a Kolami present of language-based identity assertion in Wagdara became coeval with a Gandhian present of low-cost housing architecture.
