Dispensable Necessities: Historicising the slow death of the Punkah Wallah in colonial India

The mechanical device widely known in British India as the punkah, was not unique to the
period of colonial rule in the region. Mughal-era establishments certainly had some use of this
ceiling-mounted contrivance that had to be pulled by means of an attached wire or rope by a
human operator seated closer to the ground. The traveler Peter Mundy noted the presence of “the
great artificial fanne of linen which hanges downe from aloft” at Shah Jahan’s court in Agra
where he was visiting in 1632. The Hobson-Jobson glossary described an even longer lineage to
the punkah, stretching back to the Arab world of the 8 th century. It thus discounted the
apocryphal account becoming popular towards the end of the 19th century, that the origin of the
punkah lay in an East-India Company clerk’s ingenious plan of hanging a table-top from the
ceiling and getting his native attendant to ‘wave’ it above his head by tugging at the other end of
the string with which it was hung. Yet, it is still quite difficult to deny that colonial settlers in late
18th and early 19th century India as well as in other parts of the British Empire seemed to have
reinvented the use of the device on the most exaggerated scale, against their most mighty foes –
the scorching sun and the heavy humidity.

There was of course comfort in the punkah, the kind that Justice Hyde did not have as he
disappeared from court several times to change his shirt, soaking wet with perspiration, during
Nanda Kumar’s infamous trial in 1775. And to travelers arriving in the early 19 th century, the
punkah and its pullers seemed to connote that odd element of status, which many of their
European possessors seemingly discovered only while located in India. And yet there was
royalty and status also in the hand-held fan, which the French voyager de Grandpre noticed was
being used individually for every attendee at the dinner table of his hosts. But by 1789 when he
was recording these notes, these fans had already acquired their younger and mechanical cousin,
who eventually usurped their name in glossaries to follow with a pride of false precedence. By
1848, one such glossary was describing the hand-held fan to be “more of an ornament”, while
‘swing punkah’ had apparently become an ‘indispensable’ fixture in ‘all principal apartments’ of
European homes.

though Bengali households will of course remember its indispensability till as late as the 1990s,
the heydays of load-sheddings in Calcutta. And thus after all, it seems to have far outlasted the
punkah, in situations both ordinary and extraordinary.
Is this because the work of fanning with the hand-held fan straddles the line between affect and
the labour of social reproduction – that odd layer of ‘material life’ which Fernand Braudel
thought was something of an outlier, to capitalist emergence?

But if we can ask this question at all, is it not because there did happen over the 19th and 20th
centuries something like an INDUSTRIALISATION of ventilation and air-cooling, now
suddenly resurfacing as mea culpa in our anthropocenic consciousness, reminding that it was not
just the factories and the cars that were doing the planet in?

The punkah, however did not live to stoke this fire, it merely started it. And this is my primary
submission -- that the punkah and the punkah-wallah were the elementary components of
nothing less than a colonial industrialisation of ventilation and air-cooling. The punkah was the
technosocial principle, that fanning could be simultaneously of more than one body and in more
than one space. Within a few years of de Grandpre’s exposition, the punkah was not only fanning
over dining tables, but in every room of European households, and also over large congregations
in churches, offices, court-rooms and barracks. It had thus more than overwhelmed the intimacy
of hand-held fanning.

In fact its new demand was that its human operator had to sit outside of the room in which the
punkah swung. Perhaps this separation was premised on the need for European and high-class/ or
caste privacy from “half naked wretches” pulling punkahs, ‘wretches’ who did not attain the
liveried and sightly status of higher servants. But it also seems to denote the recognition of a
discerning level of humanity that could cast back a gaze or listen in on secrets, a humanity
perhaps not attributed to slaves in ante bellum America, who continued to pull the punkah from
inside the rooms of their master’s mansions.

The ‘industrialisation’ in question was of course more than a techno-social implication of an

elementary mechanics that it could not wait to replace. It owed in fact to other developments like
those in colonial sanitary and weather science since the 1800s, which made the punkah more
than a question of quaint comfort. These scientific forebodings overlapped significantly with
what David Arnold has called the ‘deathscapes’ of colonial India.

“Whoever cannot provide himself with these artificial cooling appliances”, commented a
climatological treatise from as late as the early 20 th century, “...languish and gasp for air…Little
by little the European loses appetite and sleep; all power and energy forsake him.”

This almost biopolitical casting came to demand in turn something like our 24x7 services, to
secure the European community day and night since the early decades of the 19th century. In turn,
this demand came to order a category of servants dedicated, entirely to punkah pulling, who were
then to be paid for specific time slots - employing 4 to 6 coolies per day in slots of 4 hours or 6
hours each.
That the punkah tided over other alternatives of dealing with the heat to become a standard
feature, was also ensured by an econo-demographic dynamic -- the seasonal and relatively cheap
availability of large groups of labourers, migrating often, in ‘tens of thousands’ for 8-9 months
of the ‘hot season’,. The paradigmatic case here is of Calcutta. By November every year, there
seemed to have been camps set up outside Howrah station of 10-15,000 punkah-pulling men
commandeered by thikadars, making a mass exodus back to Orissa and Chota Nagpur.

If I am describing this interplay of multiple dynamics -- biopolitical, technosocial, economic-

demographic – as an industrial formation, this is finally because much like modern forms of
production, a pushing at its limits and a motive of transcending its conditions of existence were
intrinsic to the systematics of this ‘industry’.

In colonial India, the primary limit to the existence of this ‘industry’ was that the punkah-wallah
was cheap but never cheap enough. Perhaps never actually too costly, a 24x7 generalised system
of operating punkahs, was a gradually expanding arrangement, that at the least, had begun to
appear expensive on many a household budget.

The ‘oikonomi(a)-c’ concern with the punkah system however had its most effective projection
at the level of the colonial state, quite understandably, since it was easily the largest employer of
punkah labour. Ever since the introduction of budgeting in India, Civil and Military Finance
Commissions gasped and growled at the punkah establishment’s expenses. Notable here is the
Civil Finance Commission of 1860 which was welcomed by The Friend of India as a campaign
against the “two armies of locusts” – those of chaprasis and punkah-wallahs. The Commission
on the other hand was caricatured by Girish Chandra Ghosh, the editor of The Hindoo Patriot as
the Punkah Coolie Commission.

Ghosh, was not opposed to proposals of reducing the chuprasee establishment but found it
ridiculous that the Commission sought to deny punkahs to Indian clerks, on grounds that they did
not have the use of one at home. Why would they need the punkah at home, he wondered, where
they were “in such a comfortable undress…unfettered by those torments of European life - the
shirt and the neck-tie, the pantaloons and the dress coat”? He went on to present a ‘philosophy of
figures’ to the Civil Auditor. Let me quote at length:

Ghosh’s anti-government insinuation was actually one in a series of late 19 th and 20th century
claims to the punkah-wallah that increasingly took a political turn. The governor of Madras
picked up a public feud between 1875 and 1881 with the Government of India, regarding the
restrictions placed on Bombay and Madras to independently sanction the pays of punkah coolies.
Surprised at the government’s limitation of punkah facilities, a newspaper article wondered
whether this was a move to accelerate promotion since “death by asphyxia will infallibly carry
off all the stouter seniors”.

Emerging nationalist concerns duplicated this logic as frequently the native press complained
about the ‘debasing’ way in which the Indian administration thought of reducing punkah-pulling
endowments native employees. The nationalist leader Lala Lajpat Rai complained of being
denied a punkah-coolie in course of his exile as a form of discrimination by the government. In
1926, Motilal Nehru’s subjection to cleaning his commode with his own hands and being denied
a punkah wallah became a heated topic in the Legislative Council of the United Provinces.

To the government, the punkah establishment presented an uncontrollable but more importantly
uncountable expense. The military finance commissions found that it was impossible to estimate
the numbers of actual punkah-pullers employed, and yet estimates were upwardly revised every
year.

A resolution to this seems to have been to contractually employ coolies through native thikadars
and eventually local regimental officers over relatively fixed charges that could be then spent by
the contractee in any way possible. The 1887 Finance Commission opined that “(E)ven if no
financial saving were possible, the contract system would result in a great diminution of the work
of audit.”

And yet it was not beyond notice that native contractors in collusion with European officers
often took advantage of a lax accounting protocol to extract substantial surplus, by providing less
number of coolies than required, thus overworking them severely.

If economising then was not really accomplishing any demonstrable thrift, there seemed to have
been two very effective but somewhat opposing side-effects to it. The first of these was a
paradoxical re-valuation of punkah service in colonial public life – The more he was sought to be
dispensed with, the more necessary did the punkah-puller appear – a counter-intuitive regime of
use-value he then did seem to have contributed.

The other effect was a fascination since the 1840s and before, of bringing about mechanized
substitutes. This fascination widened the disparity between what actually was and what really
could be of the punkah-system and thus pushed towards its eventual supersession. But the
relatively long interplay of this double-sided movement of conceiving the seemingly dispensable
and yet utterly necessary punkah-wallah continued to mould and modify the very potential of
possible supersessions. Herein lay his revenge for all the boots thrown at his dozing self and all
the denouncement of his indolence.

By 1895, The Scientific American was musing desultorily about the “over 120 patents for punkah
pullers” filed and yet none having “come into general use in India”. “If you were to discuss the
subject of punkah-pulling”, commented Indian Engineering in 1898, “you would find that every
second man you spoke to had either invented a machine or was going to invent one or knew a
friend who had invented one.”

In the 19th century, if you were not the ‘every second man’ designing some preposterous model
of self-acting punkahs -- requiring the winding of a clock-spring for an hour, or pulling up 26
tons of weights to a height of 80 feet -- you were probably an engineer with the British army.
Experimental measures in military barracks, those great laboratories of punkah-science, had to
have some demonstrable accomplishment, at least to begin with. And the measure of this success
was how much work could be done by how fewer punkah-wallahs?

Engineer Grant thus made a treadle based machine that could make one man pull for twelve
punkah-coolies and was used ‘successfully’ in the Benares barracks and was to be experimented
at Agra, Meerut and Punjab. Captain Mortimer set up an arrangement that halved the number of
coolies at Dinapore. And the Romanes punkha-pulling machine apparently had 3 coolies doing
the work of 35.

But none of these ‘innovations’ travelled much further in space and time.

That making fewer coolies tug at complicated mechanical arrangements operating 10, 20 or 30
punkahs was practically inefficient and expecting too much from the pullers was already being
admitted by military committees in the late 1870s.

One such opinion went that 6 punkahs was about the “average weight” that coolies working in
three shifts over one whole day could be “fairly expected to pull”. It was appended in this
evaluation that if the pulling remained slow, “it largely depends on the number of coolies
employed”,

In the thirty odd years since the famous 1876 Fuller minute, there were 25 recorded deaths of
punkah wallahs at the hands and legs and bayonets of British soldiers. Looking back, it now
seems less than ironic that the sites of such violence seem to overlap with the very same stations
where ‘labor-saving’ mechanisation claimed its ‘success’.

It would probably not be that much of a stretch of imagination to find in the last decades of the
19th century, an overworked coolie population stretching themselves thin over running cumbrous
punkah machines in the barracks of Dinapore, Benares and Punjab, machines which with all their
sophistication were still not really serving their purpose. What followed was brutal and perhaps
requires a different order of explanation. But the conditions of the making, of for example,
punkah-coolie Menghee’s fatigued sleep and eventual death under the blows of Private Rigby in
1893 Benares, seem to follow from the same machine that was supposed to make his work
easier.

Surveying 19th century examples of various mechanical substitutes that were to make the
punkah-coolie dispensable, it might seem self-explanatory here, that the industrialisation of
ventilation and air cooling in colonial India could either be regenerated by an expanded
employment of the same coolies;

or that it had to evolve into a different order of industrialisation, that of energy itself, as
electricity was going to offer.
But on the eve of the coming of electrical systems to British India in the late 1890s, there was
one explanation which was claiming international prominence amongst more obvious ones.

The previously quoted 1895 Scientific American article, while wondering why 120 odd patents
had still not managed to derive the magical formula of self-acting punkahs, concluded that “The
jerk seems to be the rock upon which most inventors get wrecked and to obtain this, some most
extraordinary devices are resorted to.”

What was this ‘jerk’ or the ‘flick’ that seemed to have obsessed inventors of automated punkahs
both before and after the coming of electricity?

In all likelihood, the ‘jerk’ or the ‘flick’ theory started to emerge around the late 1860s when it
was becoming clear that mechanical substitutes were not immediately replacing human labour,
even as such substitutes were raining down the patent offices. The object of this authorless
proposition seems to have been to pose the critical distinction - that a good self-acting device
would need to replicate the punkah coolie’s possible operation of alternatively pulling and letting
go. Thus Lt. Turnbull’s patent of 1868 was advertised with the suggestion that his device
“imitates with admirable nicety of effect the movement of the wrist when the punkah is worked
by an attendant.”

However, what this ‘admirable nicety’ was meant to accomplish, becomes somewhat counter-
intuitive, as we come across other ‘jerky’ alternatives. For instance, the Fleury’s punkah from
1885 claimed a ‘superiority’ of jerking compared to human in that it can jerk in both directions”.
The ‘jerk’ seems to open up a door to more confusion when it is considered that the popular
press in early 1850s were querying a Mr. Harber’s machines about whether they were actually
“free from the ‘jerk’?

Engineering authorities since the 1890s come across as much more sceptical as to whether “the
flick of a punkah is anything else than the sign of bad pulling.” Experiments in barracks, had
earlier found out that it was punkahs hung with a longer rope that afforded a ‘jerk’ and those
hung with a smaller rope swung without any spasmodic movement. In any case, amongst the
soldiers in respective barracks, preference for the ‘jerk’ or the clean swing depended quite
simply on what they were more used to. But such expert opinions did not really manage to put a
dent in the reputation of the ‘jerk’. It thus continued in the early decades of the twentieth century
to dictate how the punkah system conceived of its evolution even in the electrical age.

By one estimate, India commanded by 1917, half of the world’s million dollar market for electric
fans. Electric fans shot down air vertically that was hardly comparable to the ‘jerky’
apperception of the punkah -- there was no jerk, flick, swing involved in an electrical fan. These
fans were rather tracing out a different industrial paradigm -- it was less a comforting service and
more a form of energy that was being sold. This was particularly the case in India since fans
were the most decisive commodity for electrical capital to establish itself.
The daytime ‘load’ in the west was fast being sold to industrial enterprises whereas in colonies
like India, this was no certainty. Fans thus came to the rescue and electricity supply companies
gave special rates for fan users, promoting the use of electric fans on their own accord.

That the not so cheap, neither energy-efficient, electrical fan managed to compete with,
eventually supplant the punkah-system reveals exactly how artificially this systemic existence
was consolidated. But this supplanting had to, very expectedly, go through some competition,
especially with electrically operated punkahs and their principled marketing of the ‘jerk’.

The most prominent amongst these electrical punkahs could have been the Bandy punkah that
was marketed aggressively across the world through full-page advertisements, governmental
channels and industrial exhibitions. Its promotional material read:

“The native ‘punkah-wallah’ imparted a peculiar flick to the swinging curtain which
considerably increased its efficacy, and was in fact one of the saving graces of the human
element in punkah operation.” And it was of course the Bandy that came to the saving of this
‘saving grace’...

While electric fans followed after the slow spread of electricity across India, mechanised and
electrical punkahs never managed to completely overcome their original inspiration because, as a
1935 account argued, their “unvarying action” always seemed a corruption of the manually
operated apparatus. This is perhaps only expected, since after all they were chasing something of
an unreal ideal - that of the jerk, the flick, the kick...of the ideal imitation of a seemingly human
attribute by the machine, an attribute that was itself something of a chimera.