1 1 8 The House in India f?'om the Point of View
form of the stupa, the solid cupola intended for the safe custody of relics, or to mark a spot sacred in Buddhist legend, originated in the curved bamboo roof built over a circular hut-shrine.^ The origin of the barrel roof of the Buddhist chaitya appears in the Toda hut, " shaped like a half barrel, with the barrel-like roof projecting for a con- siderable distance beyond the first partition containing the door " ; while that used for funereal purposes is rectangular, with a rude thatch supported by a ridge-pole, and end and side posts. ^ A survival of the same kind has been traced in the curvilinear form of the roof in some Bengal buildings of the present day.^ In the same way, the tents of black wool, woven by Bedawi women, are generally supported by three parallel rows of poles length- ways and crossways — the highest line being the centre — and the covering is pegged down. The result is that the outlines of the roof form two or more hanging curves, and these, as Sir R. Burton remarks, are a characteristic of the Tartar and Chinese architecture ; they are preserved in the Turkish, and sometimes in the European kiosque, and they have extended to the Brazil, where the upturned eaves, often painted in vermilion below, at once attract the traveller's notice.*
Circular huts are not uncommon in India. In Mallani, in Rajputana, the people live in bee-hive shaped huts, each family having a separate enclosure fenced by hedges of thorns, and in the time of the Emperor Akbar the inhabi- tants of Ajmer used to live in similar huts.-'^ In Car Nicobar the huts have the main portion of the building covered by
- op. cit. 17.
2W. H. Rivers, The Todas, 28, 583 f., 339, with photographs ; E. Thurston, Castes and Tribes of South India, vii. 129, with photograph.
^J. Fergusson, Histoty 0/ Indian and Eastern Architecture (1899), 474,
545 e^ ■s«'/-
■* The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, ed. 1893, v. 307. '^Rajputana Gazetteer, ii. 274 ; Ain-i-Akbari, ed. H. S. Jarrett, ii. 267.
