Solar Systems for the Rural Body

Abstract

This article considers how solar energy discourse in the 1970s othered rural bodies in India. In the 1970s, proponents of solar energy seized the opportunity provided by the oil crisis to argue for their technology as a clean, cheap, abundant, and universal alternate. The community characterized solar energy as a technical problem, yet in house design, they relied on subjective parameters like thermal comfort. Investigating the designs of solar cooling and heating systems for houses in semi-arid rural Punjab in the 1970s, this article argues that first world parameters like “comfort” and “house” were taken as universal standards when in fact they were historically constituted ideas. This elision of history had the effect of othering the rural bodies for which they were designed.

Keywords:

• critical theory
• infrastructure
• environmental systems
• 1900–1999
• Asia

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Acknowledgments

I would like thank Olga Touloumi and Jay Cephas for helping shape an early draft, Tanya Southcott for her incisive comments, the two anonymous reviewers who helped sharpen and broaden my arguments, and Daniel Leithinger, my most intrepid interlocuter.

Notes

Notes

1 Parmpal Singh and M. A. Jazayeri Naseri, “Experimental Investigation on Solar House Heating in Northern India,” in Sun: Mankind’s Future Source of Energy: Proceedings of the International Solar Energy Congress, New Delhi, India, January 1978, ed. Francis de Winter and Michael Cox (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1978), 1686, https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-1-4832-8407-1.50325-1; K. D. Mannan, Parmpal Singh, and G. S. Dhillon, “Natural Thermal Environmental Control of Houses in Northern India,” in de Winter and Cox, Sun, 1681.

2 Farrington Daniels, “Utilization of Solar Energy,” in Wind and Solar Energy; Proceedings of the New Delhi Symposium, Arid Zones Research, vol. VII (Paris: UNESCO, 1956), 132.

3 Daniel A. Barber, A House in the Sun: Modern Architecture and Solar Energy in the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 89–90.

4 V. V. Krishna, “Organization of Industrial Research: The Early History of CSIR, 1934–47,” in Science and Modern India: An Institutional History, c. 1784–1947, ed. Uma Das Gupta (Delhi: Pearson India, 2010), unpaginated digital copy.

5 Krishna, n.p.

6 K. W. Böer, “International Solar Energy Society, and American Solar Energy Society,” in The Fifty-Year History of the International Solar Energy Society and Its National Sections (Boulder, CO: American Solar Energy Society, 2005), 10.

7 Francis de Winter and Michael Cox, foreword in Sun, xxix.

8 On the geopolitics of oil in the 1950s and 1960s, see Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2011), 151–53.

9 Mitchell, 175–76.

10 Mitchell, 5.

11 B. Boiko, “UNESCO Solar Energy Programme,” in de Winter and Cox, Sun, 9.

12 De Winter and Cox, foreword in Sun, xxix.

13 Charles Correa, “A Place in the Sun,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 131, no. 5322 (1983): 328–40.

14 Correa, 331.

15 For two narratives on this, see Keller Easterling, Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways, and Houses in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); and Barber, House in the Sun.

16 Keshava Deva Malaviya, “Inaugural Address,” in Wind and Solar Energy, 19.

17 Malaviya, 19.

18 Farrington Daniels, “Utilization of Solar Energy,” in Wind and Solar Energy, 131.

19 Daniels, 134.

20 Daniels, 129.

21 Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 4.

22 L. A. Ramdas and S. Yegnanarayanan, “Solar Energy in India,” in Wind and Solar Energy, 188.

23 Malaviya, “Inaugural Address,” 19.

24 Barber, House in the Sun, 104–5.

25 Barber, 2–3.

26 “Solar House Heating, Part II: The MIT Solar House,” 3, quoted in Barber, House in the Sun, 104–5.

27 Barber, House in the Sun, 115–20.

28 For a parallel instance of this peculiar relationship between global institutions and rural peripheries, see Olga Touloumi’s research on Jacquline Tyrwhitt’s work with village housing in India: Olga Touloumi, “Development Media and the Model Village: Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and the United Nations in India,” in Architecture in Development, forthcoming.

29 Amulya K. N. Reddy and José Goldemberg, “Energy for the Developing World,” Scientific American 263, no. 3 (1990): 110–19.

30 University Education Commission and S. Radhakrishnan, The Report of the University Education Commission, December 1948–August 1949 (Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1951), 498.

31 Indian Council of Agricultural Research Report, ca. 1960, Series 1.5, Box 95, Folder 623, Rockefeller Foundation records, Field Offices, New Delhi, 6.7 Rockefeller Archive Center, New York.

32 Draft of the State Rural University Act Ludhiana, 1959, Series 5.2, Box 99, Folder 659, Rockefeller Foundation records, Field Offices, New Delhi, 6.7 Rockefeller Archive Center, New York.

33 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 115.

34 Mannan, Singh, and Dhillon, “Natural Thermal Environmental Control,” 1681.

35 Singh and Naseri, “Experimental Investigation,” 1687-8.

36 The AT movement drew inspiration from Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful, which argued for shifting the scale for thinking about developmental interventions. See Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as If People Mattered (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). This movement cannot be addressed fully in this paper, but it is noteworthy that the popularity of the phrase “appropriate technologies” entered into construction research at this time, influencing the work of government institutions like the Central Building Research Institute and spawning its own institutes like the Appropriate Technologies Development Association. On critiques of development, see Wolfgang Sachs, The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power (London: Zed Books, 2010).

37 Adrian Smith, “Environmental Movements and Innovation: From Alternative Technology to Hollow Technology,” Human Ecology Review 12, no. 2 (Winter 2005): 106–19.

38 M. M. Hoda, “Solar Cookers,” in de Winter and Cox, Sun, 2068.

39 Ayala Levin and Neta Feniger, “Introduction: The Modern Village,” Journal of Architecture 23, no. 3 (2018): 361–66.

40 Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (India), CSIR in the Service of Rural Society (New Delhi: Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, 1978), 1.

41 Francine R. Frankel, India’s Political Economy, 1947–2004: The Gradual Revolution, 2nd ed. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 500–10.

42 Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (India), CSIR in the Service of Rural Society, iii.

43 Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (India), iii.

44 Singh and Naseri, “Experimental Investigation.” 1686.

45 M. Humphreys, “Thermal Comfort Temperatures and the Habits of Hobbits: Comfort Temperatures and Climates,” in Standards for Thermal Comfort: Indoor Air Temperature Standards for the 21st Century, ed. M. Humphreys, S. Roaf, and O. Sykes (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995), 6.

46 John E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

47 Arnold referenced Joseph Frayer, who wrote on the association between climate and fevers in 1882. David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 30.

48 Arnold, 33.

49 Jiat-Hwee Chang, A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience, 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 2016), 22.

50 David Arnold, The Problem of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 141–43.

51 Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 41–42. See also Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 127–50.

52 Jiat-Hwee Chang and Anthony D. King, “Towards a Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Historical Fragments of Power-Knowledge, Built Environment and Climate in the British Colonial Territories,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 32, no. 3 (November 2011): 283–300, https://doi.org/10.1080/10331867.2017.1295502.

53 Farhan Karim shows how the comfort offered by modern amenities visited India via exhibitions, arguing that comfort became a mode of creating demand for consumer items, even as it revealed itself as out of place. See Farhan Sirajul Karim, “Modernity Transfers: The MoMA and Postcolonial India,” in Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development and Identity, ed. Duanfang Lu, 1st ed. (New York: Routledge, 2010), 198–200.

54 Eva Horn, “Air Conditioning: Taming the Climate as a Dream of Civilization,” Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, ed. James Graham (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2016), 233–42.

55 Jiat-Hwee Chang and Tim Winter, “Thermal Modernity and Architecture,” Journal of Architecture 20, no. 1 (January 2015): 92–121, https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2015.1010095.

56 Cherian George, Singapore: The Air-Conditioned Nation: Essays on the Politics of Comfort and Control, 1990–2000 (Singapore: Landmark Books, 2000), 17.

57 Elizabeth Shove, Gordon Walker, and Sam Brown, “Transnational Transitions: The Diffusion and Integration of Mechanical Cooling,” Urban Studies 51, no. 7 (May 2014): 1506–19, https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098013500084.

58 A. Ramachandran and J. Gururaja, “India’s National Solar Energy Research and Development Programme,” in de Winter and Cox, Sun, 44.

59 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 131–32.

60 Nandita Badami, “The Solar Form” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Irvine, 2020).

Additional information

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Ateya Khorakiwala

Ateya Khorakiwala is an architectural historian and assistant professor at Columbia University’s GSAPP, researching the infrastructural environments and ecological landscapes of the developmental Indian state. She is working on a book on the history of plinths and warehouses in developmental India. Khorakiwala received her Ph.D. from the Harvard GSD and was a fellow with the Princeton Mellon Initiative in Architecture Urbanism and the Humanities. She was trained as an architect in Mumbai at KRVIA and studied the history and theory of architecture at MIT.