Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 84, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 April 1914 — COMES TO US FROM INDIA [ARTICLE]

COMES TO US FROM INDIA

Word “Bungalow,” Now In Such General Use, Originally Meant a Thatched Hut.

The word bungalow is an Anglo-In-dian version of the Hindi bkngla, which primarily means Bengali, or of Bengal, and is only applied to a thatched hut, says Country Life in America. It may be worth while to explain how this trivial and merely local name came to be fixed on the Englishman’s house in India. Early residents there engaged in military, administrative or trading duties lived a nomadic life for the greater part of the year in tents. Apd since there was nothing in the indigenous buildings of Bengal suited to their requirements their first dwelling houses, designed by themselves and built of materials at site, were naturally planned on the model of the Indian service tents to which they were accustomed —that is, a large and lofty room surrounded by double walls of canvas inclosing space between them, with partitions of two or more corners for bath or store rooms. It is probable, indeed, that in the beginning the tent itself was occasionally covered with the sun proof thatch or bangla. The nanfte and the thatch were all that were taken, and now the origin of the name is forgotten even by most Indians, who accept the resonant, trisyllabic bungalow as the Englishman’s own name for his own peculiar house.