The punkah in colonial India: Energy history in a minor key
Talk by
Ritam Sengupta
A Punca Bearer, Charles d’Oyly, undated.
Cross-Disciplinary-Strategies
Department, in collaboration with the Transcultural Studies Department.
This talk will explore the history
of a device – the punkah – in colonial India; predecessor of the now very familiar ceiling fan. It will present the system
of running punkahs as a history of energy transition in South Asia.
Ritam Sengupta
is a historian and a Postdoctoral Fellow at ZMO, Berlin working on an ERC-funded project on the histories of temporality in
South Asia. As part of this project, he is currently conducting research on the notions and experiences of time as implicated
in the agrarian and ecological settings of colonial North India.
