Mategaon,
Aurangabad, Maharashtra

The village of Mategaon is a small settlement in the Parbani district of Maharashtra, close to the Ellora caves. It falls in the district of Aurangabad, the entirety of which occupies a relatively flat rocky region of the Western Ghats known as the Deccan Plateau. Extremely dry and hot for most of the year, the region nevertheless is agriculturally very productive; the area around Mategaon producing cotton, millets, sugarcane, corn and wheat, and with most of the population being directly employed in farming.
The students of the first year produced a breadth of drawings for a larger picture to emerge on the correlations between the built forms and the economic modes on which the village is reliant. These drawings included maps to chart the whole of the settlement; a survey and drawing of three houses within the village, each located within different communities; drawings of the everyday markers that draw out a sense of the objects and organizations that describe and stake out the particularities of living in Mategaon; a mapping of the locations of important institutions in the form of descriptive and quantitative research constituting long notes, sketches and diagrams, and photographs from observations and oral histories; and a calendar that folds in the cycles of production of the various crops that the village is engaged in growing by drawing their specific routines with a focus on the specialized practices of each.