The punkah in colonial India: Energy history in a minor key
Talk by
Ritam Sengupta
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.
