Morphology of Rural Settlement

• Morphology of a rural settlement is its internal structure and layout: the site, the plan of lanes and streets, the arrangement and form of houses, and the fields and open spaces around the built-up area.
• It is shaped by the physical environment (relief, water, climate, building materials) and by society (caste, kinship, land ownership, livelihood). A village plan is therefore a record of both nature and social history.
• In India the study covers three things: the physical plan of the village, its social morphology (caste-wise arrangement of space) and its house types, which change from region to region with climate and materials.

Rural Settlements: Concept and Character

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Concept

• The concept moved from a static, descriptive view to a dynamic, process-based one.
  • Kirk H. Stone (1965) saw rural settlement as clusters of buildings tied to primary production and stressed their distribution on the land.
  • Terry G. Jordan (1966) argued that a settlement is not a mere aggregate of houses but a living system produced by continuous interaction between people and their environment.
• Today a rural settlement is understood as a territorial unit where people live and work mainly in primary activities, whose form is set by the interplay of natural, economic, social and cultural forces.
• Rural settlements are not isolated units. Each village is a node in a rural–urban continuum, tied to markets, roads and towns.

Physical Basis

• Relief, soil, climate and water decide the site of a village and also its form, density and spacing:
  • The fertile Indo-Gangetic plain supports large, compact villages. The North American Prairies have dispersed farmsteads, reflecting large holdings and mechanised farming.
  • In the Himalaya, settlements are small and confined to valley floors, terraces and spring lines.
  • In dry lands, oases, tanks and river banks become the focus of habitation.
• Geographers therefore study a rural settlement through its site, situation, area, shape, function and population.

Characteristics

• Rural and urban: the line is usually drawn on population size, density and occupational structure, and the criteria vary from country to country. In India the Census defines urban areas, and every remaining settlement counts as rural.
• Demographic: small population and low density, reflecting dependence on land and limited diversification.
  • Whether people live scattered or compact depends on environmental and socio-economic conditions.
• Economic: dominance of primary activities: agriculture, animal husbandry, fishing, forestry, mining and the collection of forest produce.
  • This direct dependence on nature makes villages highly sensitive to environmental change: monsoon failure, soil loss and depletion of commons.
• Social: relative homogeneity, strong kinship and community bonds, joint or extended families, and in India a caste structure that orders both occupations and space.
  • Social mobility was limited, but education, migration and non-farm work are loosening it.
  • Close personal ties act as a centripetal force, and the village keeps a distinct culture. People are less isolated from one another than in towns.
• Dynamic: villages near cities become peri-urban or “rurban” spaces with mixed occupations, and the line between rural and urban settlement blurs.
  • Roads, markets and programmes such as the Shyama Prasad Mukherji Rurban Mission (2016), smart village schemes and wider rural development and infrastructure works are speeding this transition.

Morphology of Rural Settlement

Meaning

• Morphology is the layout, internal structure and spatial organisation of a settlement. It explains how buildings, lanes, fields and open spaces are arranged and why.
• It covers the internal or constructional plan of a village:
  • the layout of streets and lanes;
  • the arrangement and pattern of houses;
  • the size and shape of the village and its fields;
  • the location of the nucleus: the water body, the religious site or the house of the headman.
• Morphology is both visible (the plan) and functional (the processes and social relations behind the plan).
• It asks what is there, where and why, and it identifies, classifies and regionalises the internal and external parts of the village: the built-up area and the open land around it.
  • Carl O. Sauer rested it on three postulates: an organic or quasi-organic unity, the functional equivalence of forms, and the agglomeration and placement of structural elements.

Site and Situation

• Site is the ground on which the village stands. Situation is its position relative to the land, water and routes around it.
• In India the first settlers chose sites for water, safety from floods, defence and access to good land:
  • Wet-point sites: near tanks, wells, springs and rivers where water is scarce. Villages of Rajasthan, Bundelkhand and the Deccan cluster round tanks and wells.
  • Dry-point sites: on natural levees, river terraces and raised mounds above flood level. These are common in the Ganga, Kosi and Brahmaputra plains and on the deltas.
  • Defensive sites: on hill tops, ridges and spurs, or behind walls and moats. Examples are Naga and Mizo ridge-top villages and old fortified villages (garhi) of the Upper Ganga plain.
  • Route sites: at ford points, river crossings and road junctions. Such villages often grow into market villages (mandi) and small towns.
  • Resource sites: close to forest, fishing grounds, mines or pastures, as with fishing hamlets of the coast and forest villages of central India.
• Site sets the limits of growth. A village on a narrow levee becomes elongated. One at a crossroads becomes star-shaped or cruciform. One around a tank becomes circular.

Physical and Social Morphology

Physical Morphology

• Physical morphology is read through a set of relationships:
  • Road to lane: how the village lanes join the outside road. Newer houses and shops crowd towards the road.
  • Lane to lane: the geometry of the lane network.
    • In most Indian villages lanes are narrow, crooked and end abruptly in dead ends. This shows the unplanned, organic growth of the village.
    • In planned villages, such as the cruciform villages of the UK and grid villages elsewhere in Europe, lanes cross at right angles (90°).
  • Lane to house: in planned villages the lanes fix the line of houses. In India it is often the reverse: houses come first and lanes are the gaps left between them.
  • House to house: the spacing of houses.
    • In compact villages houses are wall to wall or unevenly spaced, of uneven height and with little geometric order.
    • Houses cluster by caste and kin group.
  • Field to village: the shape of the fields influences the outline of the village. Rectangular fields of the plains favour rectangular or chessboard villages.
• Houses range from pucca to kutcha. In older cores, rooms are dark and ventilated only near the roof.

Ground Plan and Built-up Area

• Ground plan: the arrangement of houses, lanes, market spaces and public places. It changes slowly and decides access and functional efficiency.
  • It may be grid-like in planned or canal colony villages and irregular in old villages.
• Built-up area (abadi): the compact block of houses, usually on higher, flood-free ground.
  • The nucleus was occupied by the first settlers, usually the landowning group, around a temple, well, pond, chaupal or the headman’s house.
  • The village then grows outward from this nucleus. Hamlets grow up at a distance, often of later settlers, labourers or lower castes.
  • Activity and density are highest at the nucleus and fall with distance from it.
• The built-up area is linked to the fields by cart tracks (chak roads) and footpaths.

Doxiadis’ Four Parts of a Settlement

• Constantinos A. Doxiadis, founder of Ekistics, argued that every settlement, from a village to a metropolis, is made of four kinds of functional parts. Applied to a rural settlement:
  • Homogeneous part: the large, uniform surface that sustains the village: agricultural fields, orchards and grazing land. In a city the homogeneous parts are the residential areas.
  • Central part: the built-up area or abadi, with houses, the chaupal, shops and the core of village life.
  • Circulatory part: roads, lanes, cart tracks and footpaths that link houses to each other and to the fields.
  • Special part: sites with special functions: the temple or mosque, school, panchayat ghar, cremation or burial ground, threshing floor and village tank.
• Doxiadis also held that a settlement should grow by adding stable units while its centre grows along one axis.
• His scheme is often cited as the earliest classification of rural morphology, and Indian village studies commonly restate it as concentric zones of the built-up area, from the old nucleus outward:
  • Homogeneous sector or village core: the central, most densely built and congested part, around a religious site, water body, community land or the zamindar’s or headman’s house, ringed by his own caste. Its tightness reflects a patriarchal society and old security concerns.
  • Transitional or artisans’ zone: next to the core, home of village servicemen (goldsmith, blacksmith, carpenter, milkman, weaver), where middle castes mix with poorer upper-caste households. It links core and periphery and reflects occupational interdependence.
  • Circulatory part or peripheral expansion zone: the outer margin along roads and transport links, with new houses and recent settlers pushed out by congestion in the core, and so mixed in land use and social make-up.
  • Special part: beyond the built-up area, where landless labourers, usually of lower castes, live close to the farmlands, for field work and through social segregation.
  • Primary lanes cut across these rings and secondary lanes branch from them, and the village expands ring by ring over time.
  • This reading differs from Doxiadis’ own scheme, in which the homogeneous part is the fields and the central part is the built-up area.

Social Morphology in Brief

• In Indian villages caste hierarchy is written into the plan.
  • Upper and landowning castes (Brahmins, Rajputs, Bhumihars, Jats or other dominant castes) hold the central, higher and better-drained site. Their houses are large, with courtyards.
  • Service and artisan castes (blacksmiths, carpenters, potters, weavers, herders, with Ahirs, Jats and Lodhs where they are not the landowners) live in the middle ring, linked to the core through the jajmani system.
  • Dalit and landless households live at the periphery or in separate hamlets, often in small kutcha houses shared with cattle.
• Division of work, untouchability (now much weaker) and social prohibitions on the work of women and lower castes gave villages a social morphology distinct from that of towns. They shape the arrangement of buildings, the pattern of streets and fields, and the functions of the settlement.
• Caste-based hamlets are closely linked with the centre under the jajmani system and act as one unit.
• Kashi Nath Singh (1975) explained this with two norms: a religio-ritual norm that maximises distance between castes, and an economic-secular norm that keeps them close because of mutual dependence. The social morphology of rural settlements treats this in detail.
  • Religious-ritual model: the village divides into a twin settlement of caste Hindus and outcastes, which favoured the hamleted form.
    • In compact villages outcastes lived on the outer edge, to the south, south-east or east, a direction thought less open to the wind, in the belief that even air was polluted by contact with a Shudra.
    • How the custom arose is debated. One view sees these groups as remnants of pre-Aryan tribes, despised by Aryan and later Rajput settlers.
  • Secular dominance model: all castes and religions came together as functional units under the old jajmani system, since landowners needed the labour of the landless.

The Ekistic Elements

• Doxiadis’ Ekistics, the science of human settlements, treats a settlement as a dynamic system studied jointly by geography, sociology, architecture, planning and economics. Its five elements apply directly to the village:
  • Nature: landforms, soil, climate, water and vegetation. They decide the site, the farming system and the compact or dispersed form.
    • Alluvial soils of the Ganga plain support dense, compact villages. The Thar supports small, scattered dhanis.
  • Man (Anthropos): the population, its skills and technology. People modify nature to suit settlement.
    • Terraced fields and stepped houses on Himalayan slopes are an example.
  • Society: caste, class, family, panchayat, customs. It decides the internal zoning, segregation or cohesion of the village.
  • Shells: houses, buildings and infrastructure. They reflect income, culture and technology.
    • Mud houses in remote villages contrast with RCC houses in peri-urban villages.
  • Networks: roads, railways, communication and trade links. They decide interaction and growth.
    • Villages near highways and junctions, such as those around Pt. Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Junction (Mughalsarai), have grown and diversified fast.
• The elements work together. A new road (network) brings trade, which changes occupations (society), which brings new houses (shells), which alter the village form.
• Doxiadis also placed the village in a hierarchy of ekistic units, from the single room and house through village, town and city to metropolis, megalopolis and a future world city, the ecumenopolis. The wider theory belongs to the theories of the evolution of human settlements.

Morphology of Hill Villages

• Site: villages sit on river terraces, gentle spurs, saddles and alluvial fans, above flood level and below cold ridge tops.
  • Sun-facing slopes (adret: the south-facing slopes of the Himalaya) are preferred. Shaded slopes are left to forest.
  • Spring lines and small streams fix many sites.
• Form: villages are small, linear or stepped, following the contours. Houses stand in tiers along terraces, and paths zigzag between them.
  • Where level land is scarce, the village breaks into hamlets spread over the slope.
  • In parts of the North-East, older villages stand on ridge tops, chosen for defence and drainage, as among the Nagas.
• Use of space: the best flat land is kept for fields. Houses are built on poorer, steeper ground. Ground floors shelter cattle, and upper floors are for living and storage.
• Seasonal settlements: transhumant herders such as the Gaddis of Himachal Pradesh and the Bhotias of Uttarakhand keep winter homes in the valleys and summer huts in alpine pastures.
• Change: roads draw houses and shops into linear strings along the highway, while out-migration has left many hill villages of Uttarakhand partly or wholly deserted.

Regional Morphology of Indian Villages

• Each region has its own village form. The types of rural settlement and their patterns follow these controls.

Rural House Types in India

House and Census House

• A house is a shelter against the weather that meets basic bodily needs. In structure it is a roof carried on walls, with a door.
• The Census defines a census house as a building or part of a building with a separate main entrance from the road, a common courtyard or a staircase, used or recognised as a separate unit.
• Rural houses are mostly built of local materials: stone, mud, unburnt brick, bamboo, wood, reeds, leaves and grass. Poor households depend on them most, and richer ones can afford burnt brick and cement.
• The Census classes houses by the materials of wall and roof, using the criteria of the National Buildings Organisation:
  • Pucca: wall and roof both of pucca materials.
  • Kutcha: wall and roof both of kutcha materials.
  • Semi-pucca: one of the two pucca and the other kutcha.

Factors Influencing House Types

• Climate:
  • Rainfall decides the roof slope. Heavy rain needs steep, sloping roofs (Keralam, Konkan, Bengal, the North-East). Dry areas use flat roofs, which also serve for drying grain and sleeping (Rajasthan, Punjab, Ladakh, the Deccan).
  • Heat calls for thick walls, small windows and courtyards. Cold and snow call for compact houses, south-facing rooms and steep or heavy roofs.
• Building materials, which follow geology and vegetation:
  • Mud and burnt brick in the alluvial plains;
  • stone in hard-rock areas (sandstone in Rajasthan, basalt in the Deccan, granite in the south);
  • laterite blocks on the western coast;
  • timber and slate in the Himalaya;
  • bamboo, cane and thatch in the North-East, Bengal and tribal areas.
• Hazards:
  • Floods call for raised plinths and stilts (Assam, Bihar, Bengal).
  • Earthquakes favour light frames and timber-laced walls (Assam-type houses, kath-kuni, bhunga).
  • Cyclones call for low, rounded roofs (Odisha and Andhra coast).
• Economy: cattle sheds, granaries, threshing yards and storage lofts are part of a farm house. Size and finish reflect landholding and income.
• Society and culture:
  • caste and status (large courtyard houses of landowners, one-room huts of the landless);
  • joint families (houses built around courtyards);
  • seclusion of women (inward-looking courtyards in the north);
  • religious orientation and local craft traditions (wall paintings of the Warli and Gond).
• Technology and policy: cement, steel, machine-made tiles and housing schemes now override many local controls.

Regional House Types

Changing Rural Folk Houses

• The rural house is changing fast from kutcha to pucca:
  • Census 2011 showed the change midway. For rural households, the main roof material was:
    • grass, thatch, bamboo, wood or mud: 20%;
    • handmade tiles: 18%;
    • concrete: 18%;
    • metal or asbestos sheets: 16%.
  • Burnt brick (40%) had overtaken mud and unburnt brick (30%) as the main wall material.
  • Under the Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana–Gramin (PMAY-G, 2016), 3.12 crore houses had been completed by August 2026, against a target of 4.95 crore by March 2029.
    • Each house has a minimum area of 25 sq m, including a hygienic cooking space.
    • It is linked with a toilet (Swachh Bharat Mission–Grameen), tap water (Jal Jeevan Mission), LPG (Ujjwala) and electricity.
• Drivers of change: rising incomes and remittances, cheaper cement and steel, government housing, scarcity of thatch and timber, and the prestige of the urban-style house.
• Changes in form:
  • RCC flat roofs replace sloping thatch and tiles.
  • Livestock is moved out of the dwelling.
  • Toilets, bathrooms and separate kitchens are added.
  • Houses are built along roads rather than inside the old core.
  • Joint-family courtyard houses split into nuclear-family units.
• Costs of the change:
  • Standard concrete boxes are hotter in summer and colder in winter than mud, laterite or timber houses.
  • Local craft skills are lost.
  • In the Himalaya, poorly built RCC houses on steep slopes are more vulnerable to earthquakes and landslides than kath-kuni houses.
• Responses:
  • PMAY-G lets beneficiaries choose region-specific designs, gathered in its PAHAL compendium of rural housing typologies.
  • It also trains rural masons in local, disaster-resistant techniques.

Changing Morphology of Villages

• Roads (PMGSY, launched in 2000) pull new houses, shops and services to the roadside. Compact villages grow ribbons along the road, and old cores decay.
• Land reforms, partition of family land and new housing colonies spread the built-up area outward. Some compact villages become semi-compact.
• State housing for Dalit and landless households (Indira Awaas Yojana from 1985, then PMAY-G) has created new colonies at the edge. These colonies often repeat the old segregation in a new form.
• Commons shrink. Ponds, grazing grounds and threshing floors are encroached for houses, though MGNREGA works and the Amrit Sarovar campaign (2022) have revived many village tanks.
• Out-migration works the other way. In the hills of Uttarakhand and in parts of Bihar and Odisha, villages lose people, and houses stand locked or fall into ruin.
• Near cities, villages become part of the rural–urban fringe, with rental housing, warehouses and mixed land use.
• The result is a dual morphology in many villages: an old, dense, caste-ordered core and a newer, looser, road-oriented belt of pucca houses.