Keeping the master cool,every day,all day: Punkah-pulling in colonial India

Introduction

A peculiar device became a standard feature of European homes, offices and barracks in colonial India. Also used elsewhere in the British Empire and in slave-serviced homes of antebellum America, the device took the same name as the commonly used hand-held fan. The ‘punkah’ was a wooden framework, sometimes with cloth extensions, hung from the ceiling with an attachment of rope/wire which was pulled at the other end by a human operator. The to-and-fro swinging of the device had the objectives of ventilation and cooling. Its use was a seasonal affair spanning six to nine months depending on the experience of the ‘hot weather’ across different locations in the subcontinent. The device began to face serious competition from electrical equipment towards the end of the nineteenth century, although mechanical substitutes had been invented much earlier. Eventually replaced by the rotating electrical fan, the punkah and its pullers disappeared, albeit gradually, over the twentieth century.

This article studies how the work of punkah-pulling was conducted in European establishments of British India beginning with the popularisation of the device in the late-eighteenth century. ¹ It concludes around the early twentieth century when European inhabitants in cities like Calcutta as well as state functionaries like Viceroy Curzon initiated a more decisive pursuit of technical substitutes. By studying the conduct of punkah-pulling, this article tries to understand how European masters gradually multiplied their claims over their domestic servants’ labouring time and how such claims were mediated by the regulatory interventions of the colonial state. Existing and developing social and legal norms through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries already endowed the master with fairly extensive control over their domestic servant’s work time. But it is important to comprehend how this control actualised in material practice. The problem of punkah-pulling provides an apposite index to trace this, simply because it was a significant addition to the workload of domestic servants in European establishments. Since the late-eighteenth century, as the punkah came to be used more and more, day and night, the task was often cast as a limiting condition of exactly how much and what kind of work could be demanded of certain kinds of native servants. Expectedly, considerable instances of violence but also recalcitrance, refusal and in some cases rebellion marked its distribution in both private and public sites. This in turn invited the direct and indirect mediation of the colonial state. It is this archive of oppositional instances and state mediation that this article assembles in order to analyse the materialisation of the European master’s quotidian claims over the native servant’s time.

Mid-nineteenth-century health-related concerns led to the personal service of punkah-pulling becoming necessary for up to all twenty-four hours of the day in urban European households and army barracks, where its costs came to be borne by the colonial state. Consequently, there emerged a separate group of servants—‘punkah wallahs’/‘punkah coolies’—entirely dedicated to this task. Large groups of primarily male servants filled up these seasonally available positions in regions of British India. The emergence of this separate occupation was also concurrent with a de-domestication of punkah-pullers. De-domestication had an obviously physical dimension as the pullers were moved from the interiors of buildings onto their outsides. But more significantly, it involved new forms of employing temporary punkah wallahs/coolies separately from the existing coteries of house servants or army menials and on definite time-bound shifts covering portions of the night and day. De-domestication did not mean that punkah wallahs/coolies attained the status of institutionally recognised public servants, even though they were hired in large numbers by the colonial state. Rather, this article explores de-domestication as a description of how punkah wallahs/coolies occupied simultaneously the margins of private work, where they ceased to belong to the social and affective order of the home, as well as the margins of public occupation, where the domestic expectation of constant work continued to be violently imposed on them.

Three implications emerge from this exploration. Firstly, even with the conception of a separate occupational category of the de-domesticated punkah wallah/coolie, the task of punkah-pulling continued to be assigned to other servants like bearers in both households and barracks. The master’s ownership of the entirety of the domestic servant’s labouring time was thus exerted in terms of getting ‘insiders’ to conduct the task as part of their expected duties, as a cheaper alternative to consigning the task entirely to ‘outsiders’. Yet this article also shows how more domesticated servants associated with European establishments often objected to taking up this work. This objection was however articulated not so much against temporal control, but more on grounds of customary and caste status. Thus a second implication of the de-domestication of punkah-pulling was that over the later decades of the nineteenth century, the task made a steady descent down the social hierarchy of service labour. Finally, newer forms of time-bound recruitment of de-domesticated punkah wallahs/coolies through altered kinds of social intermediation also led to conditions of greater exploitation. This was particularly the case with the night shift of punkah-pulling when the fixed hours intensified the urge to violently extract ceaseless work from the temporarily available servants. For barracks, the recurring violence caused an increasing concern with recuperating the legitimacy of empire through curtailing racial cruelty. But for urban European households, it could be argued that personal violence was indicative of a pushback by the concerned servants against their masters. These masters, not unlike their de-domesticated punkah coolies, were no longer cushioned by the intimacy of domesticity or the moral control of intermediary attendants. Both the violence as well as the individual and eventually collectivised opposition by native menials, also hint at the limits of European masters’ claims over their punkah-puller’s time. Such limits then could perhaps only be overcome through mechanised substitutes.

Existing scholarship on the history of domestic service in colonial settings has offered the insight that the interaction between European masters and native servants was a significant medium of the emergence of colonial identity in its dominant/racialised, gendered and affective forms. ² The constitutive role of racial violence in such contexts of domestic service has also received attention as both interrupting as well as being facilitated by the legality of the colonial order. ³ While the violence involved in the conduct of punkah-pulling acquired serious infamy in the late nineteenth century, ⁴ this article takes legally enabled racial violence as one among other (interacting) modalities involved in the conduct of this never-ending task in colonial establishments. It then makes the case that the mediation of the colonial state and its legal agencies extended well beyond the allowance of the European master’s quotidian or exceptional violence. It pursues the possibility that even the resolution of apparently minor ‘domestic’ issues such as who to get the punkah-pulled by, could potentially draw upon other kinds of legal/regulatory affordances (see below) to supplement the configuration of privatised power and violence in the European household. In attending to the historical recurrence of such issues, this article poses domestic work as both the medium but also the object of socialisation between the European master and the native servant in a way in which it has perhaps remained relatively underspecified in existing scholarship. What was at stake in this objective realisation of master-servant terms was not only the production of a ruling identity, but also a very material quota of work that was assumed to be essential to the social reproduction of the coloniser.

In focussing upon the role of regulation and law, the article takes its cue from several histories of Indian labour which discuss colonial-legal enactments as creating definite asymmetries in favour of the employer. ⁵ Along with the criminalisation of the breach of contract by employees and the privatisation of the enforcement of labour agreements, another characteristic feature of such asymmetry has been argued to have been the denial of more rule-driven work regimes with defined work-descriptions. ⁶ Since the late-eighteenth century, the legal framework concerning domestic service in Britain had begun recognising the master’s unqualified ownership of the servant’s time during the period of contract. ⁷ The modern regime of contract posited its formal differences, though also arguably its subtle equivalence with older regimes of work that allowed masters absolute possession of their slave’s/hireling’s personhood. ⁸ In comparison, how the master’s ownership of the servant’s time was legally claimed in European households of British India is a question that could be pursued in its colonial specificity. Particularly, this article explores how assertions of such ownership, possibly accompanying the greater regularisation of contractual regimes, came to contend with existing social norms and segmentations of housework in the region. ⁹ One way of tracing this could be to analyse how indigenous forms of slavery transitioned to different modern regimes of work. ¹⁰ This article instead takes up the case of punkah-pulling as performed primarily by waged servants and studies how colonial conceptions and administration of service expectations and agreements ¹¹ dealt with questions of ‘custom’ or caste-based division of work. Such issues came up not only in the private household but also in public barracks and thus this article additionally tries to comprehend how the respective work situations in these two contexts compared.

The rest of the article is structured into five sections. The following section describes an initial phase of reluctance by Oriya bearers in early-colonial Calcutta to execute the newly assigned task of punkah-pulling due to certain communally ordained sanctions. It shows that overcoming this phase of refusal eventually involved targeted intervention by the Company state against the collective socio-political existence of Oriya labourers in Calcutta. The third section describes how a separate occupation dedicated to punkah-pulling came up in the mid-nineteenth century as continuous punkah use became an essential attribute of European life. It also shows how in spite of this, punkah-pulling continued to be designated to other servants in European households, through a discussion of certain judicial cases. The fourth section discusses how contractor-managed recruitment in the army pushed punkah-pulling coolies to the limits of exhaustion and rendered them increasingly vulnerable to the violence of European soldiers. It also develops upon the possibility broached in the preceding section that the task of punkah-pulling had made a steady climb down the hierarchy of service labour, with this work being categorically refused by certain working groups. The fifth section analyses how colonial judicial deliberation rendered equivalent the ordinary and the fatal forms of violence suffered by punkah-pullers, and how the expanding claims of European masters on their punkah wallahs’ time were reaching their relative limits by the end of the nineteenth century. The final section offers summatory remarks.

Punkah-pulling in the Early-colonial Household

In the early years of its popularisation in late-eighteenth-century Calcutta, the punkah complemented the waving of hand-held fans during meals. ¹² But by the 1840s, it was being described as an ‘indispensable’ fixture in ‘all principal apartments’ of European homes, the hand-held fan being ‘more for ornament’. ¹³ The use of the hand-held punkah was not entirely superseded, but it fanned only ‘as much as your bearer can featly wave with both his hands’. ¹⁴ The swing punkah had a more mechanical pendulum-like form with part of the swinging being conducted by force of gravity. It could be used for tending to more than one body and larger spaces such as offices, churches and theatres. The difference in scale at which the respective punkahs could operate did not however imply any labour-saving. By the early nineteenth century, along with moving beyond the dining room to other apartments of European households, the punkah was also crossing over another threshold, that of the day into the night, as it came to be used during sleep. Thus whatever the mechanical advantage, the possibility of saving labour was offset by the novel tendency of being ‘fanned’ more indiscriminately, instead of for specific occasions (like during meal time).

This fairly labour-intensive enterprise of punkah-pulling was delegated to the ‘lower’ ranks of servants employed in wealthier European households, most often the palanquin-bearers. ¹⁵ As historians of domestic servants have noted, employment in European households of early-colonial India followed certain hierarchical patterns, often taking after local nobility. ¹⁶ The hierarchy was more pronounced at the top, occupied by the literate class like the accountants, and the bottom, occupied by the likes of sweepers, whose work was hereditary and distinctly caste-marked. Between these two extremes, positions such as ‘khidmutgars’ and ‘hookahbardars’ did not necessarily follow from a fixed caste function. Still, a more definite ranking by wage and status pertaining to work distribution remained even within this middling range. ¹⁷ It is somewhere on the ‘lower’ ranks of this middle range on which was located the palanquin-bearers. Usually recruited and commanded by a ‘sirdar-bearer’ who acted as the head of household’s personal attendant, these bearers were employed in numbers of five or more and were supposed to also make themselves useful for other sundry tasks, such as cleaning the furniture, that were not performed by figures like ‘khidmutgars’.

The occupational category of palanquin-bearer extended beyond the household—hired palkis carried by thika bearers being the main public transport. In the second half of the eighteenth century, one group dominated the occupation in Calcutta. These were the ‘Balasore bearers’—Gwala caste men from Orissa, who had overtaken by far the lower caste Dulia or Bagdi bearers. ¹⁸ They were described as a migrant group of ‘seven thousand of the stoutest fellows’ from Bhadrak. ¹⁹ Along with other Oriyas in Calcutta, they were knit together as a ‘Commonwealth’—a powerful collective with its own council and chiefs, some Brahmins and others ‘old sirdars’. ²⁰ While the group seems to have en masse taken up an occupation performed by castes ‘lower’ to them, they were still not inclined to be slotted into tasks perceived to be inappropriate of their social/occupational roles. Thus Oriya domestic bearers, Solvyns observed, could not disobey rules set by their chiefs and ‘refuse to render services which do not appear to be at all out of their line’, like lighting a tallow candle or handing a glass of water; yet they continued to be preferred in domestic service for being ‘much cleaner about their persons than other Carriers’. ²¹

The reluctance of Oriya bearers about performing certain kinds of tasks in European homes extended for some time to punkah-pulling. In the early nineteenth century, an observation recurs about these bearers but also other Muslim servants, refusing to pull the punkah over a table on which meat of particular kinds is served. ²² Curiously, servants expressing similar reservations about fanning with a hand-punkah seem non-existent in writings about early-colonial Calcutta. The refusal may be deciphered as a strategy to avoid the new laborious assignment. But the refusal also seems consistent to an extent with communal sanctions ensuing from organisational control. The chiefs or ‘Paramanicks’ of Oriya bearers had been reported to be making certain ‘Ooriya Mehal Collections’ on as many as nine counts from natives of Orissa in Calcutta, for occasions ranging from finding work or a place to stay, or as fines when someone would marry outside caste or even when someone ‘quitting his own caste, eats in another’. ²³ It is likely that the order of the Paramanicks and the council were carried into individual households through the moral mediation of the sirdar-bearer ‘that no individual, however attached to his master … dared to disobey’. ²⁴

While Oriya bearers thus remained choosy about assigned tasks, their masters also perceived considerable difference between their conceptions of appropriate duties following from the perceived rank of such ‘lower’ servants and what these servants eventually agreed to do. It then seems probable that even as European masters internalised the logic of distributing housework into ‘customary’/caste brackets, a push towards a more unspecified ownership of the labouring time of certain categories of servants was becoming part of their expectations. Such expectations as enveloped in notions of contract were prevalent in Britain by 1765, when law allowed masters complete ownership over their servants’ time for the contract period without a specific work description. ²⁵ Peter Robb argues that while early-colonial law was ‘generalising’ its own categories alongside ‘indigenous titles’, compromises based more on trust than contract were practised between European masters and their servants. ²⁶ The recurring refusals of Oriya bearers to perform duties like punkah-pulling and frequent accusations about their ‘insolence’ indicate that such trusting compromises had their boundaries. These boundaries were of course also drawn in relation to the master’s suspicion of the ‘commonwealth’ of Oriya bearers whose intervention into domestic work was becoming a definite point of contention by the early nineteenth century. Alongside maintaining regular ‘collections’ and pronouncing communal rules, the ‘commonwealth’ also offered protections against personal violence. When ‘any offence be given to one or more of these bearers’, as one observer described, the ‘superiors … interdicted all Ooreeahs from engaging in the offender’s service’. ²⁷ Additionally, the ‘commonwealth’ financially supported its members for getting legal advice and filing complaints about more serious injury. ²⁸

By the 1830s–1840s, punkah-pulling appears to have been more definitively appended to the bearer’s list of chores alongside palanquin-carrying or furniture-cleaning. One contemporary explanation of the Oriya bearer’s increasing pliability was the competition he faced from Kahars, recent entrants in Calcutta’s labour market from Bihar, a caste associated with domestic service and palanquin-carrying. ²⁹ But it is telling that after 1857, making the Oriya servant fan over a table serving meat was being described as the ‘firm’ way in which the Bengal Sepoy should have been conducted, ‘as necessity has obliged us to be with our domestics’. ³⁰ Did ‘firmness’ here indicate something more that went into the overcoming of the Oriya bearer’s reluctance other than changes in Calcutta’s labour market? Was it then a consistent exercise of personal command by European masters that enforced the pliability of the said servants?

Taking stock of certain interventions by the colonial state that were directed at the working conditions of Oriya labourers in Calcutta since the late-eighteenth century, we might adopt a third axis of explaining how the Oriya domestic’s persistent reluctance was tided over. While labour market changes and the individual command of European masters might have put significant pressure on the concerned workers, the everyday extraction of their acquiescence still needed a supplementary push of punitive and regulatory actions executed more directly by the Company state. Following scholarship that describes an early interest taken by the Company state in framing significant legal interventions affecting the organisation of urban work, ³¹ one alternative here would be to view the case of Oriya bearers through the prism of the regulations introduced specifically for domestic servants in early-colonial Calcutta. Since 1759, these regulations sought to fix penal limits on servants’ capacity to leave work and demand more wages and register them compulsorily. ³² However, as Nitin Sinha argues, these regulations were not necessarily very effective at the level of the household. ³³ Sinha’s broader point is that these interventions were rather anxious attempts at regulating urban workers whose mobility and bargaining power across intersecting labour markets, including that of domestic service, could complicate the Company state’s sourcing of labour for its own core concerns of construction, military and transport. ³⁴ As a converse to Sinha’s argument, it would be useful to trace the fading of the Oriya bearer’s ‘insolence’ not so much in the state’s direct policy concerning domestic servants, but rather by following the consistent regulatory encounters between the Company state and thika palanquin-bearers of Calcutta, with whom the recalcitrant Oriya domestics shared a common social existence. ³⁵ The regulation of domestic work and the regulation of transport labour could have had overlapping scope, as both needed ‘freeing’ from the collective mediation of the Oriya council and Paramanicks.

The concluding decades of the eighteenth century saw the Company state’s dealings with this collective become a protracted conflict. By the 1770s, meetings convened by Oriya chiefs were being forbidden. ³⁶ In 1790, the financial sustenance of the collective was challenged by suspending all monetary collections made by Paramanicks. ³⁷ Simultaneously, wages of thika bearers were fixed. ³⁸ But by 1803 these wages had to be fixed again amidst growing frustration at a thousand bearers becoming unavailable around the pilgrimage season. ³⁹ In the ensuing tussles between the state and the Oriya collective, the highest orders of colonial rule came to deliver well-publicised, exemplary acts of discipline. In 1813, when faced with the refusal to pull the punkah, Governor-General Hastings threatened to discharge all his Oriya bearers. The bearers ‘discussed the matter for two or three days’ before agreeing. ⁴⁰ The conflict still continued. In 1819 thika bearers stopped work in protest against fixing of hiring rates by the number of miles covered. ⁴¹ In May 1827 a rigid measure of compulsory registration, wearing badges and payment by clock-time was enforced. This resulted in a general strike by Oriya bearers. ⁴² But by 4 June 1827, the opposition was ‘considerably diminished’, the men having given in to the government’s proposals. ⁴³ It is worth noting here that at the time of the strike, a European in Calcutta introduced a palki converted into a cheap animal-drawn carriage called the ‘Brownberry’, explicitly posing it as a substitute for palanquins. ⁴⁴

In the second decade of the nineteenth century, the colonial state brought in another set of draconian laws targeting domestic servants with unilateral penal sanctions. The most significant of these was Regulation VII of 1819 that carried a one-month imprisonment clause for servants displaying ‘neglect to perform work’ or wilfully quitting without fifteen days’ notice. ⁴⁵ These regulations further reinforced the individual command of masters. But it would still be difficult to understand the noticeable dissolution of supposed restrictions involved in pulling the punkah over European meals, without accounting for the state-led offensive against the collective order of Oriya workers that we just described. Similar to what Ravi Ahuja discusses for Madras in the same period, the colonial state’s policy towards these workers in Calcutta was one of ‘direct intervention in elementary aspects of social organisation’. ⁴⁶ With the ‘commonwealth’ of bearers, it was thus not enough that they would be made to navigate new regulatory grounds—it was also essential that the very principles of intermediation through Paramanicks that constituted their pyramidal collective existence would be contested. What followed was a taming of the thika bearers, surely aided further by the concurrent diversification of the transport labour market in Calcutta. And a definite corollary to this was also the replacement of some of the real or strategic semantics of the work culture in European households by a (relatively) more decisive command of the master and the acquiescence of some more multi-tasked servants.

In his 1841 ‘Handbook’, Parbury claimed that the employment of domestic servants had entered a new era as many instances were known in which natives had conceded to become ‘servants of all work’. ⁴⁷ He was describing a tendency at best. The lowest rungs of the service hierarchy continued to be populated by the lowest castes and the highest rungs continued to be out of the bounds for any other but the literate castes. Yet the negotiability afforded to the middling yet ‘lower’ attendants like bearers by way of the mediation of their communal collective in the employment relation, was now somewhat lost. The most obvious implication of this was their obedient participation in gradually increasing hours of punkah-pulling. It is also likely that they agreed to perform other aspects of housework such as lighting candles, serving food and water, which they earlier refused citing communally issued restrictions. ⁴⁸ Intermediation too need not have ceased entirely, but it no longer carried the weight of collective norms and was restricted to the individual role of sirdar-bearers within particular households. In any case, with the disempowering of extant collective forms of arbitration, the scope was created by the active intervention of the colonial state to socially install the master as the ultimate authority of what could constitute adequate work-descriptions of his servants. This social authority was, as we shall see, an important factor in future judicial deliberations over work contracts that did not have the benefit of penal clauses incriminating servants—those in Regulation VII being read down by the time of the First (1837) and Second (1847) Report on the Indian Penal Code, ⁴⁹ and the regulation itself repealed in 1862.

Even as ‘servants of all work’ could then be handed the unforgiving task of punkah-pulling, a second, more divergent tendency could also be seen from the new conditions under which this work was being conducted. With the punkah in every apartment and the nocturnal extension of punkah-pulling, the puller was suddenly in certain places at certain times beyond his stipulated entry, for cleaning, etc. This did not necessarily sit well with masters’ sensibilities. ⁵⁰ He was consequently removed to a space outside immediate visibility—to the verandah or outside the building, by passing the cord through a hole in the wall. ⁵¹ Since the early decades of the nineteenth century, the punkah was moved by ‘unseen hands’ that did not have to stop for the sake of privacy, thus further strengthening the tendency of having it pulled for longer hours. Being thus extramurally confined to relative invisibility as well as somewhat sequestered from the domain of servant’s sociability, ⁵² the puller of the punkah became liminal to the world of household work. Perhaps, the grounds were thus laid for his role becoming increasingly de-domesticated. But de-domestication was not simply an architectural shift. In tandem with the increasing tendency of having the punkah pulled continuously and across private and public establishments alike, de-domestication amounted to a separate occupation, that of ‘punkah wallahs’ or ‘punkah coolies’, hired temporarily every hot season and separate from the existing retinue of household retainers or barrack menials. And yet de-domestication was also not a total phenomenon, as masters continued to press their enlarged claims over their domestic servants’ time by enjoining them to pull their punkahs whenever need emerged.

The De-domestication of Punkah-pulling

Over the first few decades of the nineteenth century, medical arguments had begun advocating the punkah as essential protection against the newly classified ‘tropical’ climate of India. ⁵³ Contrary opinions still existed that the punkah merely circulated hot air and the European was better off in the open. ⁵⁴ And even as the Indian climate was construed as severe enough to require artificial remedy, technical alternatives such as various thermantidotes and ventilators competed for favour alongside the punkah. If the use of punkahs in comparison started appearing as more necessary to European life in India, this could have had something to do with the dissolution of servants’ quibbles about pulling them in European households. Manual punkah-pulling was also proving a more economic option compared to other alternatives as well as to automated forms of the device that had already come into existence. In sovereign Awadh, to take one example, palace punkahs were driven entirely by steam since 1819. ⁵⁵ But as explained a later editorial, in India, ‘there is no power that could be purchased for punkah work at so moderate a price as that of the human muscle’. ⁵⁶

Till the 1840s, European households did not employ servants to pull punkahs non-stop. Servants called ‘punkah wallah’ appear across European homes in this decade, yet much like bearers, they carried palanquins and performed ‘a housemaid’s work’. ⁵⁷ Householders still warned against making a ‘habit’ out of the limited ‘luxury’ of the punkah. ⁵⁸ The regularisation of a separate occupation solely dedicated to punkah-pulling then actually owed more to developments outside the household. The punkah’s medical necessity was urgently pressed on in the case of European soldiers, as their dire health situation became increasingly visible. ⁵⁹ Consequently, the colonial state committed to undertake the expenses of punkah-pulling for European troops in 1848, and for all twenty-four hours of the day in many cantonments. ⁶⁰ By then, the state had also begun paying for punkah-pulling in its offices and as part of residential provisions made to its higher officials. The ‘punkah coolies’, as servants solely hired for the purposes of punkah-pulling, first emerged as a separate occupation sometime around the mid-nineteenth century to meet the demand for continuous cooling primarily in public offices and barracks.

Discomfort with an increasing scale of expenses was soon felt. The Civil Finance Commission initiated in 1860 was welcomed with the hope that it would diminish the ‘(T)he two armies of Locusts’, those of the punkah-pullers and the chuprasees. ⁶¹ In reaction, the appeal of the punkah emerged pointedly in a wider public consisting also of native claimants. The editor of Hindoo Patriot Girish Ghosh found it ridiculous that the Commission sought to deny native clerks state-sponsored access to punkah-pullers as they did not use the device at home. At home, he claimed, the native did not really need it since he was after all ‘unfettered by … the shirt and the neck-tie, the pantaloons and the dress coat’. ⁶² It is useful to specify here that the punkah was certainly used in more elite native households. Yet, while this article does not offer a fuller analysis of the issue of punkah use by native elites, it does seem likely that this use was significantly more moderate compared to European wants. Part of this can be intuited from the continuing allusions to overhead fanning devices as luxurious indulgences made by Bengali commentators well after their popularisation in colonial Calcutta and till even the early decades of the twentieth century. ⁶³ Bankimchandra Chattapadhyay in an 1872 essay thus mocked the borrowed tastes of Anglophile Bengali elites in possessing among other things, ‘punkahs (fans)—seldom meant to be pulled’. ⁶⁴ The more urgent native demand for punkah services, like Ghosh’s, were a concern of an emerging professional middle-class and continued to be directed at public establishments of the colonial state. ⁶⁵

The claim to the state’s punkah allowances also gathered emotional volume in more expected quarters, across lines of social stratification among Europeans in British India that historians have identified as separating higher orders of civil servants, army-officers, planters and businessmen from a miscellaneous group encompassing soldiers, employees and intermediaries in government and private services. ⁶⁶ While middle-class native claims were to the use of the punkah in public spaces for working hours, Europeans were interested in allowances that covered the whole day and their places of habitation. ⁶⁷ For much of the second half of the nineteenth century, the colonial government ran a sustained campaign to reduce punkah-pulling expenditures in barracks and for lower-order officials. Going by the acrimonious reactions to this campaign, ⁶⁸ continuous punkah use as a health necessity seemed to also have had added import as an aspirational ideal for Europeans. ⁶⁹

Clearly then, the habit/aspiration of being continually fanned had hardly stayed confined to public sites. Consequently, a separate category of servants dedicated to fulfilling this habit appears in accounts about urban European households not long after the state-enabled regularisation of day-and-night punkah-pulling in barracks and offices. A detailed description comes from journalist Thomas Knox:

There is a certain class of servants, known as pankha-wallahs (punka-fellows), who work these fans and are hired for that purpose … they boarding themselves. They stand outside and work the punka by means of a cord passing through a hole in the wall.… You have a punka over your bed, another over your bath-tub, another at your dressing-bureau, another over your dining-table, and another above your desk. Your body-servant calls out to your punkha-wallah, and has him shift from one cord to another as you go from one room to another. You have the punka in motion all day and all night somewhere, and for this purpose you must have two men to relieve each other. ⁷⁰

While this description perhaps applied to the very well-off, it nonetheless serves the purpose of parsing certain tendencies shaping a newly de-domesticated system of work that facilitated continuous punkah use in European homes over the second half of the nineteenth century. The system had at its core servants called ‘punkah wallahs’ who were solely dedicated to the (potentially) constant running of punkahs. They were to be hired in multiples in order to relieve each other and this even went up to three/four punkah wallahs per day, serving in shifts of eight/six hours. ⁷¹ They worked outside the direct perceptual domain of the master and also housed separately from the household.

Who were these punkah wallahs? In European establishments of Calcutta, the Gwalas of Orissa and Kahars of Bihar continued for some time to be the main migrant groups that took up punkah-pulling as a separate occupation. ⁷² As we have seen, the former group was previously associated with both palanquin-carrying and domestic service that had begun including punkah-pulling since the early decades of the nineteenth century. The 1876 Census of Calcutta had most of the nineteen-thousand-odd Oriyas in the city still working in the same professions of ‘house-bearers and punkah-pullers, and as palki-bearers’. ⁷³ Palanquins however were gradually being replaced in the city with a variety of horse-drawn carriages and horse-keepers and coachmen had begun substituting palanquin-bearers in households. ⁷⁴ In the 1881 Census, the number of registered ‘palki-bearers’ was only 4085 compared to the 11,500 in 1850. ⁷⁵ And by 1901, there were just about 1342 of these bearers in the town and its recently amalgamated suburbs. ⁷⁶ It would then not be too off the mark to presume that many from the profession of palki-bearers made a not-too-radical shift by taking up the relatively new vocation of punkah wallahs, as palanquin-transport gradually became limited in the city. ⁷⁷

The market for de-domesticated punkah labour extended beyond established migrant groups. Oriyas in Calcutta were themselves becoming more differentiated with the addition of castes like Bauris. ⁷⁸ But a clearer indication of the diversification of this labour market could be the generic appellation ‘coolie’ becoming appended to the nomenclature of punkah labour, more often in barracks, but also not infrequently in households. The term ‘coolie’ broadly indicates the migratory lower strata of the non-landed agricultural labour population, in considerable supply in colonial India to be mobilised for public works, mines, plantations and also some forms of personal service. ⁷⁹ The nomenclature ‘punkah coolie’ also makes sense when we learn that employment of such servants intersected with trajectories of plantation labour (coming from areas like Chota Nagpur) who were more typically referred to as coolies and some of whom at least preferred punkah work over plantation labour. ⁸⁰ ‘Punkah coolies’ were also hired in Calcutta from ‘up-country’ castes further down the social order such as Dusadhs and Rajwars ⁸¹ and Muslims from eastern/lower Bengal. Over the last few decades of the nineteenth century, many such streams of migrant labour—old bearers and new ‘coolies’—steadily assembled every ‘hot weather’ period in Calcutta, to earn the seasonal component of their subsistence incomes by pulling punkahs. One 1890 estimate of their number in Calcutta was 28,000. ⁸² Another 1902 description was of a 10,000–15,000 strong migrant population of ‘punkah coolies’ from Chota Nagpur and Orissa leaving from Howrah station in November, at the end of ‘hot season’, a ‘remarkable (annual) exodus’. ⁸³ The large numbers mentioned could possibly be counting migrant labourers employed in a variety of occupations (including jute industry) not confined to punkah-pulling. ⁸⁴ But there can still be little doubt that for an urban centre like Calcutta, the supply of punkah labour was large and of a gradually diversifying profile.

There might be parallels between de-domesticated punkah labour and the servant group of ‘mehtars’/scavengers in Calcutta. As Tanika Sarkar points out, while Calcutta households always kept a strict distance from their mehtars based on untouchability, the mehtars did have some bargaining power in terms of the caste exclusivity of their profession. ⁸⁵ After the 1860s, many new groups of North Indian migrant labourers joined the ranks of existing ‘Dhangars’ and other lower castes in the market for manual scavenging labour in Calcutta. ⁸⁶ Around 1863, scavengers were also given compulsory public status as they came to be registered under the Calcutta Corporation. These developments, Sarkar contends, initially led to a loss of the scavengers’ bargaining power, even as they still faced the most direct brunt of caste discrimination within contexts of private employment. ⁸⁷ But in later decades, induction into public service also brought respectability and a capacity for political resistance. ⁸⁸

Like scavengers, one consequence of a large and variegated supply of punkah labour could have been a downward pressure on the bargaining power of existing groups performing this work in Calcutta, due to which the wages for punkah-pulling remained almost stagnant in the city. An official survey showed that the monthly wages of punkah-pullers in Calcutta rose from ₹5 to ₹6 between 1890 and 1912. ⁸⁹ Prior to this, in 1841 the monthly wage was ₹5–6, in 1877 ₹5 and an 1893 household guide mentioned that two ‘punkah coolies’ could be hired in Calcutta for ₹9. ⁹⁰ The 1841 account described the ‘punkah bearer’ as assistant to the ‘Sirdar-Bearer or the House and Furniture Domestic’ (who himself received ₹6 to ₹8), which suggests that punkah-pulling was not the only duty of this servant. Taking this domesticated ‘punkah bearer’ as base, it could seem that the later, possibly de-domesticated ‘punkah coolie’s’ wage in 1893 might have actually fallen a bit. Or, the 1893 household guide’s estimate of the wage of a ‘punkah coolie’ might have corresponded to a cheaper category of labourers, than those who came within the ambit of the government survey covering the years 1890–912. In any case, the wage figure does not seem to have risen much over the second half of the nineteenth century, a period when the separate occupation of the punkah wallah/coolie came up in Calcutta. ⁹¹

To continue with the comparison between punkah labour and scavengers, the public hiring of punkah coolies in barracks hardly gave them socio-political recognition as public servants like the Corporation-employed scavengers, partly due to such coolies remaining seasonal and temporary hires. Instead, as we shall see in the next section, a new system of contractor-based employment led to more aggravated conditions of exploitation for such casualised labourers. On the other hand, the de-domestication of punkah work with respect to urban private households actually further distanced the already (architecturally) marginalised punkah labour from the social and moral constitution of such households. While the scavenger occupied a particular kind of margin of the home in terms of untouchability practices, the household punkah wallah/coolie’s marginality was made of certain changes in the forms of intermediation that structured their private employment. Such alterations amounted to violence outright dominating other means of disciplining punkah labour.

The ‘higher’ sirdar-bearer/‘body servant’ kind of figure appears to have continued to mediate the employment of de-domesticated punkah labour but with some critical differences. As mentioned in the previous section, till earlier in the nineteenth century, the supervisory sirdar-bearer was also a moral agent of indigenous labouring collectives, executing their communal norms and protective functions within Calcutta households. By the middle of the century, with the state-enabled erosion of the relative importance of such collectives in the domestic employment relation, the sirdar-bearer was restricted to the hiring and disciplining of his subordinate bearers. ⁹² However with the diverse and possibly also wage-differentiated range of options now available for recruiting punkah labour, it is very likely that these de-domesticated subordinates were frequently hired from disparate communities over which the sirdar-bearer exercised no necessary moral authority. Sometimes the recruitment involved a corrupt brokerage imposed by the ‘higher’ intermediary of ‘one rupee out of every five’ paid to the ‘punkah coolies’. ⁹³ Otherwise, the lack of moral authority translated into the sirdar-bearer having to discipline punkah coolies through violence and punitive action, especially those employed for the night shift, who were more likely to be de-domesticated menials hired separately from house servants and the communal kin of the intermediary. ⁹⁴ Still more common was the master himself inflicting regular violence on the same punkah coolies, as he could no longer depend on the reproduction of obedience through the existing social or moral means of control that potentially applied to permanent retainers. ⁹⁵

De-domestication also had implications for the ways in which existing household servants drew their ‘customary’ limits in relation to punkah work, now associated with outsider menials. Cases were filed by such native servants for recovery of wages from European masters, in which the designation of punkah-pulling seems to have been a sore point of contention. Such masters were possibly those who, irrespective of stagnant wages, did not find punkah-pulling expenses cheap enough, as the need for continuous punkah use peaked in the second half of the nineteenth century. ⁹⁶ For them, one obvious possibility existed—to have ‘servants of all work’ fill in without extra expense. However, this was not necessarily an easy substitution. And yet it was effected time and again as the legal processing of contract enabled the European master to legitimately appropriate more of his domestic servant’s work time, irrespective of other ‘customary’ considerations.

The concerned cases were among several other wage-recovery suits in Small Causes Courts likely occasioned by an 1865 judgement in Calcutta that a servant could not be denied due wages if he was dismissed or if he quit without notice before the contract period ended. ⁹⁷ The frequency of resorting to legal appeal did not however correspond to the frequency of favourable judgment. Yet, resort to legal redress by native servants on principles of contractual reciprocity necessitates a reconsideration of the view that the colonial judiciary’s allowance of personalised violent control trumped contract as ‘a mechanism of enforcement’ in housework. ⁹⁸ These cases on the other hand demonstrate somewhat ironically that contractual principles were often compelled into judicial deliberation irrespective of the allowance of informal ‘privatised’ control; if only so that judicial action could continuously make contract the medium of realising the European master’s claims over the native servant’s labouring time.

For instance, in April 1873, a coachman ‘Permall’ in Madras sued his employer Captain Graham for recovering wages after being dismissed for refusing to pull the punkah. Graham argued that while hiring the plaintiff ‘he distinctly made him understand’ that punkah-pulling was part of his duties. Permall’s witness, a horse-keeper, testified that the former had never pulled the punkah while in Graham’s employ. Since the witness could not say anything about the initial agreement, the judge dismissed the suit by relying more on the defendant’s statement that this was ‘wilful disobedience’. ⁹⁹ Notably similar is the suit brought by Captain Carmichael’s bearer against him in October 1871 in Calcutta to recover wages on being sacked for refusing to pull the punkah. Identifying himself as ‘sirdar-bearer’, the plaintiff argued that except having done it a few times before, he did not consider punkah-pulling his job for which one separate ‘punkah coolie’ was already engaged. Supported by two European witnesses, the defendant argued that ‘it was the duty of a bearer to pull the punkah’. Judge G. C. Sconce eventually dismissed the suit by deciding that the servant failed to perform his duties. ¹⁰⁰

It is important to understand that ‘Master and Servant Law’ in India did consider the duties of a servant to be those, as a guide to the law put it, ‘which are customarily held to apply to his particular form of service’. ¹⁰¹ Judge Sconce himself wrote that ‘A bearer could not be lawfully called on to do the work of a Mehter, Khidmutgar or Cook’, though if he agreed to do such work, ‘he could not, in the absence of an agreement to that effect, claim additional wages for doing it’. ¹⁰² But judicial practice resorted to the supposition of possible verbal or ‘implied contracts’ when it came to ascertaining the actual expectation of service, mostly relying on the testimony of European masters. The notion of contract came to bridge the seeming dissonance between legal principle and equally legal practice as the work agreement was often comprehended as including more than what ‘custom’ specified. State interventions by the early nineteenth century had effectively established the master as the most significant social arbiter over the work descriptions of particular servants by attacking the mediation of indigenous labouring collectives and by introducing penal measures for servants. ¹⁰³ The repeal by the 1860s of such penal measures could have been the context in which civil suits problematising the expectations of domestic work were becoming more possible. But even in the absence of penal provisions, contractuality did not function to guarantee that work obligations and ‘customs’ mattered reciprocally for masters and servants ¹⁰⁴ ; contract remained rather a means of re-formalising the master’s considerably broadened claim to the servant’s time. Consequently, the day-and-night movement of the punkah could be maintained as a relatively affordable proposition for European households where the number of domestics had shrunk considerably, where for instance, the same servant bore functions of both ‘sirdar-bearer’ and ‘bearer’.

Interestingly, wealthier native households of the time hardly seemed to have had a separate servant called ‘punkah wallah’, if we go by the examples given by the historian Swapna Mitra Banerjee. ¹⁰⁵ This could have been due to the sparing use of the punkah in such households. In lieu of other kinds of evidence, a somewhat speculative suggestion could also be made here that in elite native servant-keeping practices, the moral control of employing family retainers was more effective, whereby existing servants could be made to pull the punkah without any additional compulsion. ¹⁰⁶ Bengali officers at their workplace, for example, made the same regular servant work as a punkah-puller, as a groom and as a personal attendant without much controversy. ¹⁰⁷ On the other hand, as the cases discussed show, European households could have had to go through a formalisation of similar expectations by resorting to the force of law, in a household atmosphere where insider ‘bearers’ had firmed up an acute sense of ‘customary’ (caste?) distinction against a different category of temporary and perceptibly ‘lower’-in-status ‘coolies’, who came in from outside to pull punkahs. Ethnographic observations from these times point to the possibility that those employed in punkah-pulling were attributed a lower status, unfit for intermarriage even within the same communal formation. ¹⁰⁸ More pronounced refusal of punkah-pulling on caste considerations was encountered in the barracks that confirms the steady descent of punkah-pulling down the hierarchy of service labour. The next section discusses the organisation of punkah-pulling in the colonial army in terms of such similarities but also the contrasts with household settings.

Punkah-pulling in the Colonial Army

After 1857, the army had become an expensive affair for the colonial state with the ratio of European soldiers being increased to one for every two native sepoys. ¹⁰⁹ By the early 1860s, punkah-pulling expenses (granted only to European soldiers) had started appearing as ‘generally enormous’. ¹¹⁰ Labour-saving by mechanical means was one regular proposal to reduce expenses. Complete automation remained a desideratum till the use of electricity, even though some automated arrangements proved effective previously. But certain other mechanical arrangements did come to be pursued more ‘successfully’, which involved a single puller operating several punkahs together. Military committees had by the 1870s submitted that making coolies tug at mechanical arrangements operating ten, twenty or thirty punkahs was expecting too much and a train of six punkahs was about the ‘average weight’ that they could be ‘fairly expected to pull’. ¹¹¹ Yet by the 1880s, coolies were still pulling up to ten punkahs together. ¹¹² Whatever might have been the thrift in these arrangements, they hardly quelled the state’s continuing financial anxiety. ¹¹³ These anxieties were also increasingly being correlated with instances of corruption in the hiring of punkah coolies coming to public notice. To take one example, in 1868 in Allahabad, Hurre Ram, a contractor was found to be getting punkahs pulled for a particular regiment by less than half the number of coolies that he was paid for. When threatened with being reported, he apparently responded that the contract he made ‘was to do the work of the regiment efficiently, and not to supply any particular number of coolies’. ¹¹⁴

The intermediary figure of the contractor could be a crucial point of comparison between regimes of punkah work in urban European households and army barracks. In urban homes of the second half of the nineteenth century, intermediaries like sirdar-bearers were one among other means of conducting such work, along with the routine violence of masters and a legal system of employment contracts practically weighted in favour of the employer. This role of civil law in the conduct of punkah-pulling in army barracks is less visible, though the military had its own punitive regulations specific to regimental followers and servants. ¹¹⁵ To the much larger seasonal enterprise of punkah-pulling in the colonial army, employing thousands of coolies across geographically dispersed cantonments, the contractor seemed to have afforded a more essential semblance of management and by implication, economy. ¹¹⁶

In his analytical survey of labour intermediaries connected to major commercialised/industrialised economic activities in colonial India, Tirthankar Roy suggests that three roles could converge in such figures—a recruiter, a supervisory foreman and a village headman sort of communal representative. ¹¹⁷ The latter two roles are relatively difficult to detect in the functions of the punkah labour contractors of the army. With ample license to conduct unqualified personal violence, ‘supervision’, if any, was mostly the preserve of European occupants of the barracks who did not hesitate to discipline punkah coolies immediately in the harshest manner, without the contractor or military regulations intervening. And with a much larger pool of labour to source, the contractor perhaps had even less in common in terms of caste or communal identification with the punkah labour he hired, than sirdar-bearers in urban households. In this sense, he also had little similarity with village headmen of the early nineteenth century who, Roy explains, were ‘inseparable’ from their village communities for whom they functioned as a non-market medium of interacting with the plantation or indentured labour market. ¹¹⁸ Rather, the punkah coolie contractor had more resemblance with intermediary recruiters of tea-garden workers in a later period, who had scant moral loyalty to any community and were more categorically oriented towards hiring large numbers of varying ‘qualities’ of labourers at least cost. ¹¹⁹ The contractor was after all the best instrument of economy for the colonial state whereby his recruiting skills formed his primary appeal. In 1888 in Punjab, when the government was finding it difficult to find punkah coolies at five rupees wages, contractors seemed to have engaged whole villages for four rupees a head, often pulling in younger boys to do the work. ¹²⁰ In other contexts, it had become only too usual for them to employ the cheaper labour of ‘cripples, the halt, the maimed, and the blind, the old and infirm, and children’. ¹²¹

Administrative concern directed towards curtailing the corruption of the contractor thus never eroded his role completely but rather enfolded it within decreasing protocols of accountability. This is clearly evinced by the proceedings of the ‘Eden Commission’ of 1879–1880 constituted to re-organise the colonial army. ¹²² The commission heard several testimonies to the effect that ‘the manual labour is by the system of contract reduced to the utmost strength of the punkah coolies’ ¹²³ since ‘vested interests’ ensured that a lesser number or less able classes of coolies were hired; for them, the government paid full wage while the contractor paid ‘a mere nothing’, thus ‘pocketing the difference’. ¹²⁴ When making its recommendations, the Commission sought to ‘reform’ the contract system by allotting an annually fixed allowance to regimental commanding officers for punkah-pulling, the expenditure of which was not to be subject to the audit of the Pay Department. ¹²⁵ The measure seems to have ensured that the corruption inherent in the ‘economy’ of punkah-pulling could continue sans the glaring visibility it had attained.

As another mode of economising, alongside seasonally hired punkah coolies, the military had been getting regimental punkahs pulled by a ‘moveable column’ establishment, maintained throughout the year for miscellaneous duties. ¹²⁶ This establishment included women who were also tasked with punkah-pulling. ¹²⁷ The ‘Eden Commission’ also made contributions towards such supplementary measures of economising on punkah-pulling expenses. While recommending the creation of a more permanent ‘dooly bearer’ establishment as an ‘ambulance corps’, to be ‘regularly enlisted, disciplined, and clothed’, it further suggested that these bearers could be made to pull punkahs when not engaged in their primary purpose. ¹²⁸ In an article that opens up the history of the colonial military to a consideration of the non-combatant labour crucial to its upkeep, Radhika Singha counts such ‘stretcher-bearers’ among a set of ‘higher’ native followers differentiated from a ‘lower’ motley group of ‘menial’ followers such as sweepers, water-carriers and syces, by their gradually consolidating institutional recognition as public employees. ¹²⁹ On the other hand, the ‘lower’ group was distinguished by their casual employment and their ‘meniality’ as they included servants performing ‘polluting’ tasks, but also by their being subject to ‘an indefinite requirement of being ‘on call’ which resembled the dependency of domestic service’. ¹³⁰ Singha builds upon the context of the First World War. In the second half of the nineteenth century though, the ‘indefinite requirement’ to be on call could possibly be extendible across divisions of both ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ followers, pivoted as it might have been, on the question of the apportioning of incessant punkah-pulling work. Thus like the case of urban European households, in the barracks too, the requirement of bearers to pull punkahs comes across as the sustenance of a domesticated norm of claiming the maximum of existing servants’ time, over and above an otherwise de-domesticated system of employing punkah coolies dedicated to the task.

Yet again like in household contexts, the refusal to pull the punkah also eventually became a distinguishing factor between the ‘higher’ and the ‘lower’ servant in the colonial army. Over the last two decades of the nineteenth century, it was becoming apparent that dooly bearers in barracks were largely avoiding the task of punkah-pulling as something beneath their caste/status. In 1905, soon after the setting up of a more formalised body of the Army Bearer Corps, ¹³¹ military authorities officially recognised this. It was conceded that though ‘in the eyes of a Hindu the work of punkah-pulling is in no way inferior to that of a dooly bearer’, recruitment would be difficult if ‘Army Bearer Corps men who belong to higher castes’ were going to be made to pull punkahs alongside ‘scavengers, tanners, and other degraded riff-raff … usually employed in punkah-pulling for troops’. ¹³² This exemption came at a time when men of the Kahar caste, commonly associated with dooly/stretcher bearing (yet also no strangers to punkah-pulling), were seemingly qualifying their caste status on count of the higher castes accepting water from them and them being admissible into the interior of higher-caste homes. ¹³³ In effect then, as domesticated labouring groups moved on to claim recognition as public servants, their distinction was carved out against de-domesticated punkah coolies who remained both excluded from the ambit of institutional recognition as well as cast(e) out of the social and affective terrain of the domestic.

Such refusals to pull the punkah of course also came at a time of the maximum incidence of punkah coolies suffering from fatal acts of violence by European soldiers, which would have undoubtedly made the profession quite unpopular. If these coolies were actually slacking or sleeping more at their job for which they were apparently being targeted, this could be understood to be the fairly direct implication of the military establishment searching out categories of lowly paid labour, capable of the barest exertion and subjecting them to pull heavy sets of multiple punkahs in frequent shifts. More than any cost-cutting, the production of terribly overworked punkah coolies was then perhaps the most striking contribution of the colonial state’s measures of bringing ‘economy’ in punkah-pulling. The racist violence that followed was then very much abetted by such measures.

Violence, Colonial Law and the Limits to Regimes of Punkah-pulling

In the later decades of the nineteenth century, fatal violence by ‘unruly’ Europeans unsettled the legitimacy of the colonial state, as the proto-nationalist criticism of this violence became voluminous. The inaugural event in this was the 1876 ‘Fuller Minute’ by Governor-General Lytton criticising the acquittal of lawyer Robert Fuller, who kicked his groom Katwaroo to death when the latter came late to work. ¹³⁴ The Fuller Minute and later, Curzon’s censure of European soldiers’ violent conduct, ¹³⁵ became the most public manifestations of the tension created by ‘white violence’. Colonial-legal practice however continued to effectively aid the reproduction of such everyday violence by legitimising race privileges. ¹³⁶ The puller of the punkah was squarely and rather precariously located at the intersection of the adversarial currents of interventions concerning the fatalities committed by Europeans. In the three decades following the Fuller Minute, twenty-one cases were reported from army barracks where punkah coolies died from violence inflicted by European soldiers. ¹³⁷ Similar fatalities were also reported from civil contexts. The repetitive judicial exercise of decriminalising such violence might make the predicament of punkah-pullers the most representative case of the enabling of racial violence by colonial legality. But before making this classification, it is instructive to first understand how the colonial judiciary and its adversaries actually dealt with cases of fatal violence against them.

A precedent-setting example in such matters was the case against Mr Fox, the Assistant Station-master of Tundla, accused of delivering a fatal blow leading to the death of his ‘punkah coolie’ Tulsia on 30 August 1879. The matter came on the heels of the ‘Fuller Case’ and Chief Justice Stuart at Allahabad High Court chose to take cognisance. ¹³⁸ The similarities between the two cases extended to a diagnosis of the spleen of both victims being ‘enlarged’ and both returning convictions of ‘voluntarily causing hurt’ under Section 323 of the IPC. While the police already excluded the charge of murder, Stuart himself specifically ruled out the charge in the police report under Sec. 304, of ‘culpable homicide’. He explained that it would ‘be unreasonable to hold that Fox was actuated by the reckless vindictiveness contemplated by Sec. 304’—rather Fox was evidently ‘dissatisfied and irritated by the lazy and inefficient manner in which the punkha cooly Tulsia was managing the punkha’. ¹³⁹ Thus notwithstanding the coolie’s death, Fox’s conviction had to be on the grounds of causing ‘simple hurt’ only. ¹⁴⁰

Jordana Bailkin studies Fuller’s and Fox’s judgments to show that along with the racialised conceptions of the vulnerability of native bodies, the judgments were also grounded in the scope in (British-)Indian law to identify acts like being late to work as ‘provocation’ and the expectation of ‘correction’ to follow, as mitigating circumstances. ¹⁴¹ She does not however develop the implications of this in her argument that is otherwise about the trivialisation of ‘white violence’ with the aid of the medico-jurisprudential notion of the enlarged spleen. What Fox’s case shows is that the de-criminalisation of racial violence could be affected at different levels. Tulsia’s supposedly ‘enlarged spleen’, as Bailkin would argue, made it impossible to murder him. On the other hand, his apparent neglect of duty practically emptied Fox’s intention to hurt him of any further spite or ‘vindictiveness’ that could make ‘culpabale homicide’. In more than half the cases of fatalities suffered by punkah coolies in the barracks, the pathological frailty of the native was the main mitigating factor. But much like Fox’s instance, most of these cases also yielded the minimal conviction of ‘simple hurt’, with ‘culpable homicide’ being routinely ruled out. ¹⁴² ‘Annoyance’ at being bereft of the services of the punkah-puller could legitimately ‘provoke’ violence—irrespective of whether the servant was ordinarily injured or extraordinarily hurt/dead, the character of the violence did not receive any different consideration.

A somewhat contrasting case was Curzon’s campaign against what he in no uncertain terms considered the ‘racial prejudice’ in the way European soldiers treated their native servants and how the colonial judiciary allowed this. ¹⁴³ One significant step in this campaign was to compel the army to strictly implement a regulation that any misconduct between soldiers and natives was to be reported immediately to the Military Department of the Government of India. ¹⁴⁴ This was already ruffling military feathers as in 1900 the Adjutant General wrote to the Viceroy to make a distinction between ‘serious’ and ‘trivial’ cases, with the regulation of reporting to the headquarters applied to the former only. ¹⁴⁵ After this was disallowed, a similar application was made again which noted that ‘assaults by British soldiers on natives on the menial establishments attached to their corps’ be considered ‘technical assaults’ of ‘no political importance’ and thus be exempted from reporting. ¹⁴⁶ This time Curzon accepted that such ‘trivial reporting to which so much objection has been raised’ was counter-productive. He then decreed that all ‘assaults of a positively insignificant character’ need not be reported anymore. ¹⁴⁷

If colonial judicial practice made the extraordinary out to be one version of the ordinary, Curzon’s eventual strategy seems to have been to differentiate between ordinary and extraordinary forms of violence in order to keep up pressure on curbing the latter. The native press too seemed to have partly shared in this stand. Its criticism of judicial practice, while stringent, remained concentrated upon establishing the extraordinary character of the soldiers’ actions. An example is that of Private Rigby being accused of causing the death of the punkah coolie Menghee in 1893 at Benares and then being let off. The Amrita Bazar Patrika strongly attacked the Civil Surgeon’s testimony that Menghee was so debilitated that even a single ‘rude shock’ would cause his death. It argued that being in the profession that he was, Menghee must have been used to such ‘rude shocks’ now and then. ¹⁴⁸ The implication was that Rigby had dealt repeated, deliberate blows to cause Menghee’s death. Such criticism was aimed at bringing ‘adequate punishment upon the offenders’ as the ‘surest and most natural way’ of deterring violence. ¹⁴⁹ But on the other hand, it seems to have left unconsidered the problem of the reproduction of everyday ‘ordinary’ violence in the work of punkah-pulling, in some degree of analogy with Curzon’s interventions.

In repeatedly rendering the more extreme forms of such violence as having only ordinary import, the colonial judiciary certainly confirmed a racial right to ‘white violence’. But by way of a paradox, the judiciary’s manufactured equivalence between expected and fatal forms of violence can be understood to have been more attuned than its critics to deciphering the underlying continuity between the two. This continuity also becomes visible in the apparent inconsistency between Curzon’s claim that assaults by soldiers on punkah coolies were reducing since the government had become ‘vigilant and alert’, ¹⁵⁰ and his recommendation of an expanded scale of military expenditure towards electrifying barrack punkahs to stop the same assaults. ¹⁵¹ While this certainly evinces the genuineness of Curzon’s intent in pacifying the barracks, it nonetheless leaves open the more difficult question, as to why it was so ordinary to assume that Europeans could have their punkahs pulled only by some amount of violence.

One route following Elizabeth Kolsky would be to understand ‘ordinary’ violence against punkah-pullers as continuous with a racist disposition to violence constitutive of the everyday colonial condition, and rendered generalisable by the colonial justice system. ¹⁵² Another modality would be to think the case of punkah-pulling alongside a set of work sites in colonial India like plantations or those of convict labour, historically studied for their specific conditions of coercion or systematic violence, in order to decipher the same in the case of punkah-pulling. ¹⁵³ To take the case of Assam tea plantations, a legal allowance of privatised penal powers to white planters paved the way for intensely fatal outcomes, even as this allowance was justified time and again in terms of the limitations of labour recruitment/control in the region. ¹⁵⁴ In thinking the case of punkah-pulling alongside such sites there is of course a risk of explaining these sites and forms of work as exceptional. ¹⁵⁵ And yet, without asking after the specificity of these work forms and rendering all violence continuous with the generality of the racialised colonial condition, we lose sight of both how race relations were also work relations as well as why certain work relations bore a greater incidence of violence than others.

European masters spoke in highly affirmative tones about the use of everyday violence necessary in the conduct of punkah-pulling. ¹⁵⁶ In the case of native households, such views are certainly not found with any comparable frequency. ¹⁵⁷ Exceptions however did exist. A pro-establishment figure, the Raja of Burdwan, B. C. Mahtab, proclaimed that even those (natives) ‘who are more accustomed to heat’ could very well lose their temper when the punkah stops at night. ¹⁵⁸ This singular example of course does not void the racist character of the violence against punkah-pullers. Yet it invites us to consider how the affirmation of such violence had a very specific target, who was not any and every racialised other, but rather the sleeping or slacking punkah-puller interrupting the continuous cooling of his master. Alongside legally sanctioned racial impunity, we then need to think of how this target of racial violence was consistently reproduced, if we hope to undo the near naturalisation of the role of ‘ordinary’ violence in punkah-pulling.

The systematic production of the exhaustion of the punkah coolie in the barracks of European troops was only very possible, given the contractor-mediated conditions of their work, of pulling heavy trains of punkahs over too-frequent shifts. To think of why punkah wallahs were tiring faster at their jobs in other sites, like European households of colonial Calcutta, might however yield other reasons. There was a point in the early decades of the nineteenth century when some could still exclaim that the punkah ‘hardly ever stops!’ ¹⁵⁹ It is still possible that even with the earliest uses of the punkah, the punkah-puller could be taken over by the soporific tendency generated by the repetitive routine of his work. And the wide allowance of personal violence was also available then to awaken him. It does however seem notable that complaints about the sleepy punkah-puller multiplied with the coming of the separate de-domesticated occupation of punkah wallahs/coolies towards the middle of the nineteenth century. With the need to be fanned through the whole day starting to peak since this period one option as already demonstrated in this article was to economise by designating punkah-pulling to servants other than punkah wallahs at least during day-time. But the night presented challenges of a more acute kind, of keeping punkah wallahs/coolies enjoined to their tasks in both households of lesser means as well as in those in which the practice of hiring 3–4 punkah wallahs for the whole day was more generalised.

To meet such challenges, since the 1860s a principle of requiring the night punkah wallahs to rest during the day so that they could pull the punkah uninterrupted at night was prescribed for European households in colonial Calcutta. ¹⁶⁰ In some cases, the sirdar-bearer, unhindered by any moral or protectionist concerns for outsider ‘punkah coolies’, was specifically entrusted with overseeing the change in shifts and assigned the authority to conduct adequate violence, draw fines and issue threats in the course of his handling of night-time punkah-pulling. ¹⁶¹ But this nocturnal activation of the intermediary ‘higher’ servant was hardly a ubiquitous feature in the attempted management of night-time punkah wallahs/coolies, hired seasonally and separately from regularised servants. The more common practice seems to have become the direct dealing (in racial violence) between the European master and his night punkah wallahs. Such encounters lacked any pretence of intimacy of domestic service but still aimed at meeting a domesticated expectation of ceaseless work. Yet they also involved the exasperated master ‘rising six times in the night to kick his punkah-bearer awake’. ¹⁶² By the last two decades of the nineteenth century such scenarios became more frequent as the measure of compelling night punkah wallahs/coolies to rest during day-time seemed difficult to implement. ¹⁶³ One gentleman in Calcutta wrote about moving up from three to four punkah wallahs in order to ensure a good night’s sleep but to his surprise ‘found that the work was far worse done than when I (he) had only three’. ¹⁶⁴ His punkah wallahs did not hesitate to let him know that they were falling asleep at their jobs since ‘they had gone out and engaged themselves to pull punkahs for someone else’ when they were off duty. ¹⁶⁵ European masters detested this but could not stop it. An 1886 description of the enterprise of punkah-pulling in Calcutta understood it to be common practice that ‘large bodies of men’ worked at the offices during the day and then proceeded ‘to the humble homes of the fatigued bread-winners … to add to their earnings by hauling for the further period of eight hours at the end of a rope’. ¹⁶⁶

In the case of night punkah wallahs/coolies not obliging their masters with the privatised control over their time beyond designated work-hours, we do get a distinct sense that the various assertions—violent or legal-contractual—made by the master over the punkah-pulling servant’s time, did not always prove successful. The refusals also were not necessarily sporadic opposition. Cases were being reported since the 1870s in which punkah wallahs took their masters to court on the charge of personal violence. ¹⁶⁷ A few instances were also described in which they physically retaliated. ¹⁶⁸ It is likely that the ‘litigious punkha coolie’ in Calcutta had as his new ally the ‘Congress agitator’. But as S. M. Mitra lamented, in relation to punkah wallahs, the agitator thought ‘his duty as patriot is confined … to talk alone’, with not a single instance being known ‘in which the Congress has paid for the prosecution of a European’. ¹⁶⁹ A definite collectivised orientation of the punkah wallahs of Calcutta is nonetheless evident from reports of May and June 1898, when they conducted strikes at various employment sites in Calcutta. Oriya punkah coolies contracted by private firms seem to have initiated this. The first wave subsided with ‘their services replaced by those of Mahomedans’ or by female pullers. ¹⁷⁰ But soon after, every punkah-puller struck work at the Municipal Office, and private houses too felt a sharp dearth of them. ¹⁷¹ The demand was the increase of wages, though it was also discussed whether this was a panicked defection at the height of the plague. ¹⁷² Eventually, replacements were reported to have been sought out. It is difficult to fathom whether such resources of collective mobilisation survived since an earlier time of Oriya Paramanicks and councils, but we do know that in the following decades a formal working-class body, the ‘Central Uriya Labour Union’, had emerged in Calcutta. ¹⁷³

In any case, given that the strike was one among other acts of relative defiance over some time, it could be suggested that towards the end of the century, racial violence of the European master had much more to deal with than simply the waking up of his sleepy menial. Law helped with his impunity, but did not really make his sleep any more peaceful. The problem then was not simply that of the inevitability of racist violence in conducting punkah-pulling. Rather the problem was that violence, as also supplemented by the legal-regulatory compulsions facilitating despotic regimes of domestic work, was not really proving enough. And in this perhaps could be located the very real limits of the regimes of having the punkah pulled cheaply and continuously, that had consolidated over the long nineteenth century.

Conclusion

In this article, the short-lived strike by Oriya bearers of Calcutta in the early nineteenth century served to describe the opposition that had to be overcome in order to inaugurate a regime of service work that bound certain domestic servants in European households to an oddly unforgiving task, that of punkah-pulling. Another strike, of punkah wallahs in the same city, by the end of the century marked the culmination of what this work regime was no longer able to contain. Private and public establishments of Calcutta made a swift shift to electrical devices not long after this strike which roughly overlapped with the commencement of public electric supply in the city. ¹⁷⁴ After years of trying out various mechanical substitutes, the strike then perhaps did more for the push towards electrical alternatives to the punkah, than any exclusively technical ‘improvement’. While the question of electrical transition demands separate treatment, it is useful to note here that electrified alternatives to punkah-pulling in army barracks took considerably longer to be adopted on a general scale after their experimental introduction in the early twentieth century by Curzon. ¹⁷⁵ The alternative eventually was the rotating ceiling fan, a device substantially different from the swinging punkah, whose electrified versions were repeatedly found inadequate since they missed the unique ‘jerk’ that a human puller would apparently render. ¹⁷⁶ The punkah then remained a device that remained fated (on real or imaginary count) to be run by labour and not without it, by work rather than by energy.

By way of a conclusion, we could sum up the observations made in this article towards attempting an explanation of this ineluctable association between the punkah and human labour. The punkah turned out to be a bizarrely labour-intensive ‘machine’. But such ‘machinery’ was also in a way a reflection of the despotic regime of work that facilitated its operation. Long before the advent of sleepless and fatigue-less ‘24/7’ work, prophesied to be the hallmark of a ‘late capitalism’, ¹⁷⁷ the colonial order in India had devised such a regime as a not-so-extraordinary and not-really-illegal modality of bequeathing to the master increasingly greater portions of his/her servant’s time over day and night. A large portion of this time came to be increasingly dedicated to working the punkah. Against frequent resistance, albeit often on grounds of caste and custom, this was facilitated through the active involvement of the colonial state in private and public establishments alike, at times through its executive power of crushing organised opposition, and at other times by judicial endorsement of employment contracts heavily weighted in favour of European masters. As continuous punkah-pulling came to be externalised as a function to be carried out by de-domesticated servants, racist violence (with its legal legitimisation) assumed prominence as a mode of conducting this work. Such externalisation of punkah work also served to create a hierarchical differentiation among the service class that mapped onto the caste distributions of Indian society. Sliding down this hierarchy, de-domesticated punkah-pullers, were in turn made to walk the tightrope of liminality and precarity as they remained excluded from both the moral order of the household as well as the formal recognition as public servants. The domesticated expectation of continuous service was however continuously imposed on them. Meanwhile a parasitic agreement between the colonial state and labour contractors ensured that the seasonal hiring of punkah coolies continued in the most corrupt yet ‘economic’ fashion in the army. The respective systems in private and public establishments worked for decades and so did the punkah, beating any and every mechanised alternative that came its way. Through much of the nineteenth century the device often appeared as something of a technical anachronism, hardly offering the comfort it promised. But at the end of this article, we can perhaps surmise that the question concerning the punkah was hardly a technical one of how well it worked, but rather how a certain regime of work could perform the requisite exactions from its pullers. And so the punkah started making way when its pullers eventually began unravelling this regime’s control mechanisms. Or when such exactions left too many of the pullers dead by the side of the punkah rope, by a violence that was as systemic as it was (so often) purely personal.