Transactions of the Royal Historical Society· 2026Q1
‘Dust is a Great Enemy of Health’: Recursive Cleaning in House Construction Manuals from 1930s Poona
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- Q1SCImago
- 2026year
Short summary
1930s Indian construction manuals conflated ritual and actual cleaning, modernizing caste-based domestic labor relations and replicating inequalities through house design.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- 1930s Indian construction manuals blended international modern ideals with regional typologies.
- Manuals promoted daylight, ventilation, and modern standards for middle-class homes.
- The manuals conflated ritual purity with actual cleaning practices.
- This conflation modernized caste-based domestic labor relations, replicating inequalities.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Abstract In Residential Buildings Suited to India (1931) and Cheap and Healthy Homes for the Middle Classes of India (1935), two construction manuals from Poona, British India in the 1930s, engineer Raghunath Shripad Deshpande instructed his upper-caste middle-class readers on how to build their own single-family homes based on modern standards of daylight and ventilation. The manuals’ sample house plans combined international modern ideals with a regional house typology to reshape production and consumption selectively within their vision of small-town Hindu upper-caste domestic modernity. This article argues that the manuals’ conflation of ritual cleaning and actual cleaning recursively replicated temporal and spatial inequalities via the modernisation of caste-based domestic labour relations.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 2026 · DOI ↗
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Field: Architecture
ArchitectureEngineering