From Marathi/Hindi 'gaon' (village), a gaothan is a pre-existing village settlement absorbed into a growing Indian city.
From Marathi/Hindi 'gaon' (village), a gaothan is a pre-existing village settlement absorbed into a growing Indian city. These pockets retain older building styles and land tenure rules that predate municipal planning, often creating a dense, informal character surrounded by modern development. Common in Mumbai urban-planning discourse.
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Regional slang from around the English-speaking world — British, Australian, Irish, Caribbean, Nigerian, Filipino, AAVE, and the hyphenated-English dialects that make the internet sound local.
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(India, historical) A storehouse for grain or salt, typically having a circular wall of mud with a conical roof.
(India) A mountain pass.
(rare) A corner-plot of land in India.
In Indian usage, gaucher refers to communal grazing land — typically land set aside by a village or municipality for cattle. It appears mainly in land-tenure and rural administration contexts, particularly in Gujarat and other states with strong pastoral traditions. Disputes over gaucher land are a recurring theme in Indian land rights cases.
The redevelopment plan had to work around the gaothan, whose residents held ancestral land rights outside the city's zoning laws.
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(India) An urban village.
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