Murbad, Dahanu,
Maharashtra

Murbad is a small village of the Warli community in the Jawhar Taluka of northern Konkan. While the dominant economy of the village is rice cultivation, one can find a series of hunting-gathering and animistic practices in the everyday life of the people. To understand the relationship between the economic activity, the builtform and life; a series of studies were conducted including that of the landscape and morphology, the agricultural economy, everyday rituals and practices, household characteristics, house-form and building construction, etc. Over the duration of the study, there was a realisation of all of these being connected to each other and it was then necessary to put together their story in that form - as a large morph. This is the manner in which the settlement happened. Hence, the group developed a series of long scrolls of the village - a continuous space of insides and outsides; of backyards, front yards and streets; of forests and farms; of water channels and highways; and of plants, animals and human beings. While these scrolls were able to hold this continuum, it was also able to provide close glimpses of how things worked - how houses were made, how farming was done, how the rituals were performed, and how the gods and devils and human beings occupied the different parts of the landscape.