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.