The sanjha chulha was the shared village oven, a large tandoor kept hot, where households brought dough and baked their rotis.
It saved fuel, which in a treeless plain was the scarce thing, and it meant the women of a village met daily. A great deal of the information and negotiation of village life happened at it.
It also ran on caste rules about who could use it and when, which is the part usually left out when it is remembered fondly.
Bottled gas and individual stoves ended it in most villages between the 1970s and the 1990s.
Some villages have rebuilt one, usually as a heritage gesture or as a commercial tandoor. The daily gathering it produced has not been rebuilt and nothing replaced it.
The oven was usually kept by one family, often of the potter or the labouring castes, who fired and maintained it and were paid in grain at harvest under the same arrangement that paid the other village servants.
The women of the village met there daily and it was the main place outside the home where news moved and where marriages were discussed. When it went, that function moved to the television and later to the phone.
The rebuilt ones stand at heritage villages, at some gurdwaras, and at dhabas that advertise roti from a sanjha chulha. What they reproduce is the oven and not the arrangement, which was the part that mattered.