In his 1935 manual Cheap and Healthy Homes for the Middle Classes of India, Raghunath Shripad Deshpande informed his readers: ‘If one starts to clean a house from one end, before one reaches the other, the former is again ready for cleaning. We have thus to wage a war continually against dirt, and our enemy is such that it is impossible to completely vanquish him.’Footnote 1 Not content with picturing dirt as an anthropomorphic combatant, Deshpande attached a temporal dimension to this conflict: ‘At the most we can keep him under control. The moment of our rest is the moment of our defeat’.Footnote 2 In Deshpande’s opinion, cleaning the house could thus never actually be completed, and time off from vanquishing the enemy was out of the question.
Deshpande was an engineer based in Poona in the Bombay Presidency of British India who wrote a number of manuals advising lay readers on how to build their own homes over the 1930s and early 1940s.Footnote 3 He frequently used descriptions such as the one above to instruct his readers on building their own single-family homes. Deshpande’s manuals were an authoritative voice in the larger Bombay Presidency, although his influence may not have extended beyond western India.Footnote 4 The manuals were published in Hindi, Marathi, and English and advertised in periodicals such as The Illustrated Weekly of India. Footnote 5 Deshpande even collaborated with prominent Bombay-based architecture firms such as Master, Sathe & Bhuta and Marathe & Kulkarni, whose designs for flats in the city of Bombay were published in his later manuals.Footnote 6
The manuals were disseminated alongside similar materials like brochures and pamphlets from the Cement Marketing Company of India and house plans published in the Journal of the Indian Institute of Architects.Footnote 7 Although Deshpande did not intend his manuals for women readers, he was clearly familiar with manuals for British housewives and advice on domestic hygiene dispensed in Marathi and Hindi women’s magazines like Grihini and Chand.Footnote 8 Deshpande’s contemporaries included Prasanna Kumar Acharya, a professor of Sanskrit in Allahabad University who had begun work on a translation of Manasara, a seventh-century Sanskrit text on Vastu-vidya or ‘the ancient Hindu science of architecture’ in 1914.Footnote 9 Another of Deshpande’s contemporaries was K. C. Joshi, an architect based in Punjab whose book of house plans Joshi’s Modern Designs was published in 1937.Footnote 10 The manuals’ own list of references included G. Gordon Samson’s Houses and Villas for Britishers Abroad, J. A. Turner and B. K. Goldsmith’s Sanitation in India, and Ram Raz’s Essay on the Architecture of the Hindus.Footnote 11 While Deshpande’s manuals adapted ideas from each of the above, his vision for modern homes was distinctive.
This article uses ‘recursion’ – a cyclical process in which a concept posits and realises itself in iterative feedback loops – to argue that the two manuals created modern upper-caste spaces via a recursive definition of caste-based ‘cleaning’.Footnote 12 Originally defined in metaphysics, the concept of recursion has application in mathematics and computer science to describe algorithmic thinking in which systems use iterative functions to generate complex forms from simple ones by integrating new information with each iteration.Footnote 13 In cybernetics, recursion has been used to refer to the tendency of human societies and cultures iteratively to assimilate new technologies into their traditions.Footnote 14 Drawing on scholarship from these disciplines, this article uses ‘recursion’ to characterise the enduring ability of caste to reiterate itself in South Asia despite centuries of anti-caste uprisings.Footnote 15 More specifically, this article describes the early twentieth-century recursive ‘loop’ of caste, in which colonial discourse on hygiene dovetailed conveniently with upper-caste Hindu prejudices around purity and pollution.Footnote 16
In showing how Deshpande’s manuals devalued the skills of dais, domestic workers, and manual scavengers while being dependent on them for cleaning, this article contributes to scholarship by Sujata Mukherjee, Priyanka Srivastava and Vijay Prashad on the adverse impact of the modernisation of healthcare, industry and municipal infrastructure on lowered caste communities in late colonial India.Footnote 17 This article also adds to scholarship on the political forces that shaped modern residential architecture and urban form in colonial South Asia (particularly William Glover’s work on Lahore and Swati Chattopadhyay’s work on Calcutta) by demonstrating that Deshpande’s insertion of ‘purely Hindu’ features and caste-based labour into the modern home were rooted in regional political movements in early twentieth-century Poona.Footnote 18 Additionally, this article extends Nikhil Rao’s argument that modern house forms in Bombay were inspired by local Hindu mansions by showing that textual sources such as translations of Sanskrit treatises on ‘the Hindu science of architecture’ – highly prized amidst nationalist anxieties over Indian identity – also influenced their design.Footnote 19
The article is structured in three sections. The first section describes how the then-emerging tenets of climatology, public health policy and regional nationalist ideals were used by Deshpande to shape a tropical modern house form. The second section shows how Deshpande’s adaptation of sample house plans from other sources combined the international modern ideal of functionally specific rooms with a regional house typology to reshape production and consumption selectively within the home. The final section shows how the manuals’ conflation of ritual cleaning and actual cleaning recursively created temporal and spatial inequalities via the modernisation of caste-based domestic labour relations.
Disease and purification
Deshpande established a need for his manuals by telling his readers: ‘the reason, why Malaria, Cholera, Plague, Small Pox etc., take such a heavy toll of human life in India, will be found in the most devitalizing conditions caused by deficiency of adequate light and ventilation’.Footnote 20 In framing the problem in these spatial terms, he was rehashing statements from colonial public health reports to claim that insanitary houses were responsible for disease transmission.Footnote 21 However, his criticisms were based not just on colonial public health policy but also on the concept of ritual purity central to the Hindu caste system, in which the bodies of individuals who belonged to lowered caste communities were considered ‘polluted’.Footnote 22 Deshpande complained further that within the home, ‘the necessary precautions are not taken in the case of the females before, during, and after confinement’, as a result of which ‘the incidence of deaths amongst females on account of this disease has, of late years, been very large’.Footnote 23 Deshpande’s own Brahmin identity was revealed by this description of childbirth as a ‘disease’: the belief that childbirth was ‘impure’ because it involved bodily secretions was specific to upper-caste communities like Brahmins.Footnote 24 His criticism focused on the fact that women gave birth ‘in ill-ventilated; dark rooms on the rear side’ of upper-caste homes, assisted by a dai or midwife, usually from a lowered caste community.Footnote 25 This type of sanitary instruction to new mothers was part of ongoing attempts in the Bombay Presidency to modernise reproductive health and was based on blaming the ‘unclean and unscientific’ forms of care used by the dai as being responsible for maternal and infant deaths, even while being dependent on the dai’s skills in shifting childbirth out of the home.Footnote 26
Deshpande’s manuals were written in the broader context of reform to improve domestic hygiene, to instruct on scientific motherhood, and to combat overcrowding in workers’ housing by multiple state agencies as well as philanthropic organisations in the Bombay Presidency.Footnote 27 The manuals intended to solve the problem of the ‘prevalence of general insanitary conditions’ by ‘educating the public mind in domestic sanitation and personal hygiene by every means possible’.Footnote 28 Deshpande’s definition of the issue as being ‘on account mostly of poverty and partly of ignorance’ was reminiscent of M. K. Gandhi’s rhetoric on ‘untouchability work’.Footnote 29 Under the Hindu caste system, individuals from some lowered caste communities were considered ‘untouchable’ and required to perform tasks such as cleaning toilets, which those of the upper castes did not do for fear of ‘ritual pollution’ by contact with bodily wastes.Footnote 30 Gandhi’s attempts to integrate ‘untouchable’ communities into the Hindu nationalist fold involved neighbourhood volunteer programmes urging people of the upper castes to break caste rules and perform ‘polluting’ work with their own hands.Footnote 31 However, unlike Gandhi, who personally cleaned toilets and encouraged his upper-caste followers to do the same, Deshpande did not expect his upper-caste Hindu male readers to perform any cleaning tasks themselves.
The manuals’ first instruction on creating the new modern home as distinct from existing homes involved a list of ‘fundamental principles underlying perfect domestic sanitation’.Footnote 32 Two of these principles were:
(4) That every room of the house must be provided with adequate means for admission of fresh air and expulsion of used air, so that it is continually charged with a stream of fresh air.
And
(5) That every part inside the house including every nook and corner should be fully lighted as far as possible, by the direct light of the sun.Footnote 33
In order to achieve these, Deshpande instructed readers to orient the home optimally ‘in respect of comfort in the elements of nature, such as, the sun, wind and rain’.Footnote 34 Systematic records of wind direction, annual temperatures and rainfall had been compiled by colonial engineers since the mid-nineteenth century, and these had helped codify light and air requirements into simple rules as part of the new science of climatology, on which Deshpande relied to advise his readers in the Bombay Presidency.Footnote 35 For the admission of fresh air, Deshpande instructed: ‘one large window situated in the centre of an outer wall is not sufficient, but there should be another window or windows in the opposite wall’, explaining that this was called ‘through ventilation’.Footnote 36
Deshpande extolled the virtues of direct sunlight as being a ‘potent destroyer of organic poisons of spreading diseases’, advising that ‘a kitchen should have an Eastern aspect so that, the morning sun would purify the air in it’.Footnote 37 This conflation of an eastern orientation with ‘purification’ came from the newly invented Vastu-vidya or ‘the Hindu science of architecture’.Footnote 38 Based loosely on Manasara, a seventh-century Sanskrit text, the twentieth-century translation incorporated the latest ideals of early twentieth-century sanitary reformers, who valued sunlight for moral reasons as well as for its therapeutic uses.Footnote 39 One part of the translation, for instance, stated that smoke from the kitchen should not ‘contaminate the air entering into the living or public rooms’.Footnote 40 These new architectural convergences between Victorian sanitary ideas of sunlight and nationalist reclaiming of Hindu ‘traditions’ were clearly familiar to Deshpande.Footnote 41 Deshpande wrote his manuals amidst contestations for Hindu Maratha identity by Brahmin and non-Brahmin communities.Footnote 42 A Brahmin himself, Deshpande demonstrated his implicit alignment with the Hindu Maratha Brahmin movement by attempting to incorporate what he called ‘purely Hindu’ features into his sample house plans, which included principles from Vastu-vidya.Footnote 43 Figure 1 presents a typical example of Deshpande’s suggested house plans with a kitchen on the eastern side, and windows opposite one another for through ventilation. The removal of the dais, ‘purification’ via building orientation, and through ventilation in modern upper-caste homes were all architectural manifestations of the ongoing early twentieth-century recursive reinvention of caste.
Ground Floor Plan for Plan No. 12 (Figure. 52), R. S. Deshpande, Residential Buildings Suited to India (Poona, 1931), 131, Digital Library of India, Item 2015.351612: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.351612.
Consumption time and production time
For the home of a ‘lower middle-class family’, Deshpande instructed that the minimum requirements should be ‘a verandah, a kitchen-cum-dining room and two bed rooms, the principal one of which serves also as a parlour’.Footnote 44 While functionally specific rooms were commonly prescribed in similar materials of the period, Deshpande’s assignment of functions to rooms and their placement was distinctive in that he borrowed features from wadas, mansions built by Hindu upper-caste aristocrats under the Peshwa dynasty who had ruled the region in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Footnote 45 The wadas in Deshpande’s home city Poona housed large feudal families and their domestic workers, were arranged around two or more central courtyards containing tulsi vrindavan (shrines for a basil plant, considered ‘sacred and purifying’) and placed rooms on a square grid according to principles that corresponded to Vastu-vidya.Footnote 46 According to these principles, each cardinal direction was assigned elements and deities, and rooms had to be placed in order to appease ruling deities. For example, the centre of the house was ‘ruled by Brahma’ (to be left empty), and the east was ‘ruled by Aditya’ (the sun, intended for the kitchen).Footnote 47 While the single-family homes Deshpande sought to design were much smaller than the wadas, they shared programmatic features. Figure 1 was an example of a wada-inspired house plan in Deshpande’s manuals, based on an incomplete square grid with functionally specific rooms placed around a central open space, the kitchen placed on the east, and a ‘tulsi plant’ in the rear of the house. Unlike similar material from the same period which left orientation up to site conditions, Deshpande took care to include a north arrow with every sample plan.
For his new modern homes, Deshpande intended to retain some existing arrangements unchanged when he insisted that the kitchen ‘should be kept out of the view of the passers-by’ so that the ‘smoke and strong smells emanating from the kitchen, should at once escape out of the house through windows in the outside wall, instead of escaping into other rooms of the house’.Footnote 48 Similarly, Deshpande wrote ‘the main bathroom should be located in a place opposite to the direction of the prevailing wind’ in order to ‘preclude the possibility of the smoke entering the house’.Footnote 49 In addition, Deshpande suggested that a guest room or sick room be located close to the kitchen, ‘so that it should be possible for the ladies to attend or render prompt service’ to its occupants.Footnote 50 Figure 1 above shows each of these features. Modern homes envisioned in the manuals thus involved everyday inequalities between the ‘consumption’ spaces of the house (the sick room and parlour) and the ‘production’ spaces of the house (the kitchen and bathroom). Different inhabitants of the home experienced time differently: domestic labour in the manuals’ functionally specific rooms was performed on ‘consumption time’ and ‘production time’. Housewives and lowered caste domestic workers had to be continually aware of consumption time in order to produce cooked meals, hot water and freshly laundered linen on production time, at an optimum rhythm, periodicity and sequence.Footnote 51 Although the labour which produced them was crucial, ‘smoke and strong smells’ were required to be contained within the production spaces without disturbing the consumption spaces even as meals and hot water were provided to the latter on time.
‘Dust unfailingly finds its way in dry weather through every chink, and door and window opening in the house walls’ Deshpande warned his readers, adding ‘it mingles with the food we eat and with the liquids we drink’.Footnote 52 This preoccupation with dust had its roots in reporting since the mid-nineteenth century on the impact of industrial dust on the health of workers in cotton mills, jute mills and other industrial units in Bombay.Footnote 53 Colonial fear of tropical disease had combined with reports on the dangers of dust within an enclosed space to acquire a link with sanitation, such that advice manuals of the time repeatedly warned against dust formation even inside homes.Footnote 54 Deshpande stressed the urgent imperative of cleaning the house: ‘darkness is synonymous with dirt. If a room is generally dark, it is sure to be dirty. A housemaid’s broom is bound to fail, in its circular sweep in corners; to penetrate into the depth of the recesses to clear the dust and dirt away.’Footnote 55 Since at least the eighteenth century, women from the lowered caste Kunbi, Shudra and Ati-shudra communities had been employed to wash clothes and clean for Hindu Brahmin families in wadas.Footnote 56 While caste-based notions of clean and unclean had previously existed in houses with multifunctional rooms, functionally specific rooms separated clean from unclean as much as possible. In his role as expert, Deshpande could have chosen to eliminate caste prejudice from his vision of modern living. Instead, by implying that the ‘housemaid’ was careless, Deshpande helped modernise caste inequality by recursively inscribing it onto a partially capitalist relation of production: the idea that domestic workers’ time could be thoughtlessly expended at the upper-caste homeowners’ will.Footnote 57
Producers of cleaning
‘Method and system,’ Deshpande told his readers, ‘are the key-note to success in cleaning. They consist in having a clear idea of what is exactly to be done, and in pre-arranging as to when, how, and by whom exactly it has got to be done.’Footnote 58 The manuals’ extensive lists of cleaning tasks began with the injunction: ‘In order to maintain a house and its premises in a perfectly clean state, certain rounds of duties have to be done daily, weekly, monthly and periodically.’Footnote 59 There were two distinct kinds of cleaning that Deshpande attempted to conflate in these instructions. One was actual cleaning, involving the physical removal of dust. The other was ritual cleaning, involving growing tulsi plants to ‘purify’ the home, sprinkling cow dung on floors to ‘remove pollution’, and other Hindu Brahmin practices that had little to do with actual cleaning.Footnote 60 The association of ‘pollution’ with caste and the relegation of ‘unclean’ tasks to lowered caste domestic workers had first been recorded in legal texts around 300–500 ce.Footnote 61 By the early twentieth century, lowered caste men had gained access to organised employment, but lowered caste women often could not move out of paid domestic work owing to their perceived lack of physical strength and poor access to education.Footnote 62 Domestic cleaning tasks such as the ones listed above occurred in a complexity of production times which needed to be synchronised with consumption times, and were disproportionately performed by lowered caste women on very low wages.Footnote 63
Deshpande’s sample plans were targeted at a newly created social class of upwardly mobile upper-caste families who could form co-operative societies to purchase land in Poona and build their own single-family homes for the first time.Footnote 64 While the focus on cleaning was not new, Deshpande’s merging of actual dust with ritual pollution to create a Hindu upper-caste modernity was new. This made cleaning difficult to quantify, since ritual cleaning was shifting and indefinable.Footnote 65 Just as textile mills in Bombay obscured their need for flexible labour by propagating the view that factory workers had no social engagements outside of their work, Deshpande accused domestic workers of ‘scamping on work’ to obscure the volume of cleaning labour that his manuals prescribed.Footnote 66 Domestic work, however, involved inherent slippages in time since it was based on complex personal relationships between employer and employee.Footnote 67 Unlike lowered caste textile mill workers who organised to negotiate reasonable working hours, lowered caste domestic workers worked in precarious circumstances which included the threat of their employers’ sexual advances and of arbitrary dismissal.Footnote 68 The domestic workers’ enforced inferior position within the upper-caste household compelled them to negotiate unequal social relationships with their employers, which often meant working longer hours to prove their loyalty.Footnote 69 In prescribing extensive cleaning as being ‘necessary for health’, Deshpande’s instructions recursively reproduced Hindu caste-based labour relations within the modern home.Footnote 70
Another example of the manuals’ reproduction of caste-based labour relations in the modern home was the design of a latrine (Figure 2), which Deshpande described as ‘not differing much from the ordinary ones usually constructed in municipal areas where the night soil is collected in baskets and removed to a distant place by sweepers’.Footnote 71 Before the advent of piped water supply and sanitation, municipalities in the Bombay Presidency had adapted the existing system of caste-based labour as sanitation infrastructure by requiring scavengers from so-called ‘untouchable’ communities to collect faecal matter from houses.Footnote 72 However, manual scavenging had previously been a customary right, which meant that manual scavengers had the right to provide services to a fixed number of households, and this right could be sold, bought, inherited and mortgaged.Footnote 73 While the nature of the work was demeaning, the system of customary rights enabled manual scavengers to exercise some autonomy over their work. This autonomy was compromised by the well-meant but misguided campaign against scavenging led by Gandhi as part of his ‘untouchability work’.Footnote 74 The manuals’ specifications for latrines revealed that customary rights had been abolished in the Bombay Presidency, but caste-based scavenging had not, which meant that municipal scavengers had simply become low-paid municipal workers with little say in their scope of work.Footnote 75
Plan and Section of latrine with basket for faecal matter to be removed by municipal scavenger (Figs. 46, 47), Raghunath Shripad Deshpande, Cheap and Healthy Homes for the Middle Classes of India (Poona, 1935), 185, courtesy of Digital Library of India, Item 2015.351612: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.351612.
Similar material from the same period located latrines on the roof or within bedrooms in the main house, but Deshpande’s removal of the latrine from the floor plan responded uniquely to the Hindu upper-caste prejudice that neither upper-caste bodily waste nor the bodies of lowered caste scavengers could be allowed into the same house in which upper-caste families cooked, ate and slept.Footnote 76 Deshpande was writing in Poona, which in the 1930s lacked extensive piped water supply and sewerage connections, necessitating the basket privy and the scavenger to collect it.Footnote 77 Collecting night-soil had a specific kind of temporal demand, since it required alignment with householders’ latrine use. The municipalisation of this service took away the manual scavengers’ ability to plan their own time and replaced it with the municipalities’ one-sided definitions of time. ‘Untouchable’ communities like the Balmikis and Mahars had previously engaged in many other occupations besides scavenging, and in the 1930s, they struggled against the association of caste with profession by organising, striking and allying politically with nationalist groups.Footnote 78 Ultimately, however, upper-caste nationalist leaders ‘restored the caste order’ by colluding with colonial municipalities to associate caste with profession instead of bringing about revolutionary change for all.Footnote 79 By the time flushing systems became more widespread, specific lowered caste communities had already been locked into occupational scavenging by the state, and continued to be made to clean toilets and manually clear obstructions from sewage drains after Independence.Footnote 80 Upper-caste engineers like Deshpande thus had a hand in recursively reinventing caste-based discrimination by spatialising occupational scavenging into modern architectural form.
Conclusion
In his manuals, Deshpande framed dust as a great enemy of health to prescribe ‘principles of perfect domestic sanitation’, which conformed not only to the rules of the emerging science of climatology, but also to ongoing nationalist excavations of the textual sources of ‘ancient India’, especially Sanskrit texts prescribing a ‘Hindu science of architecture’.Footnote 81 Deshpande’s manuals also belonged to a series of attempts by Brahmin (upper-caste) communities to revive Hindu traditions as part of a Maratha nationalist identity which sought to exclude lowered caste communities.Footnote 82 Deshpande demonstrated his political affiliation by adapting features from wadas, mansions built by Hindu upper-caste families who had established feudal rights over the domestic labour of women from lowered caste communities since the eighteenth century.Footnote 83 For his vision of the new ‘modern’ home, Deshpande accused domestic workers of ‘scamping on work’ to obscure the volume of cleaning labour that his manuals prescribed.Footnote 84 However, in reality, the low-waged, gendered and informal nature of caste-based domestic work forced domestic workers to work longer hours than industrial workers.Footnote 85
This article’s main intervention is to show that these new modern homes were part of a recursive attempt to institutionalise and legitimise caste as ‘traditional’ Hindu practice in the early twentieth century. The manuals’ placement of rooms for ‘purification’ by the sun, tulsi plant shrines, long lists of cleaning tasks, and the removal of the latrine from the main house recreated caste-based exclusion by justifying them in the language of scientific rationality and hygiene. This article also contributes to scholarship on ‘improvement’ as a twentieth-century means of controlling the built environment in late colonial South Asia, evident in Deshpande’s relegation of workers like dais and manual scavengers to the margins of the upper-caste home despite continuing to be reliant on their skilled labour.Footnote 86 Such spatial insertions of caste prejudice into architectural form even influenced later attempts at housing design in independent India. Scholarship on post-Independence workers’ housing developed by the Bombay Development Directorate show that model house designs in the 1950s were marked by the same neglect of lowered caste workers’ needs as their precursors in Deshpande’s manuals.Footnote 87
Acknowledgements
This article has been prepared as part of the five-year research project ‘Expanding Agency: Women, Race and the Dissemination of Modern Architecture’ which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 101019419). The author would like to thank the reviewers and the special section editor for their extensive and constructive feedback on the first draft of this manuscript.
Data availability statement
The data that support the findings of this study are available at https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.351612 and https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.231910, with reference numbers Digital Library of India Item 2015.351612 and Digital Library of India Item 2015.231910 respectively. These data were derived from the following resources available in the public domain: in JaiGyan: Bharat Ek Khoj (https://archive.org/details/JaiGyan) and the Public Library of India at (https://archive.org/details/digitallibraryindia).
Author contributions
The author confirms sole responsibility for the following: study conception and design, data collection, analysis and interpretation of results, and manuscript preparation.
Ethical standards
In this manuscript, the author has attempted to observe fairness and equity in the conduct of this research, and representing credentials accurately and honestly. The author has attempted to behave and act with integrity where summarising, interpreting or translating material for publication or communication so as not to misrepresent the historical record.
Open access
