The University of Arizona Press
October 24, 2024
Why do so many Indian women in India continue to use their wood-burning, smoke-spewing stoves called “chulhas” when they have other options? Meena Khandelwal, Associate Professor of Feminist Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Iowa, explores this paradox in her new book Cookstove Chronicles: Social Life of a Women’s Technology in India. Based on multidisciplinary collaboration with engineers, archaeologists, development specialists, and others, Khandelwal discusses chulhas as women’s local low-tech technology as well as craft and work.
In The Jugaad Project: Material Religion in Context podcast, Khandelwal explains the questions that led to her research: “Why do these old technologies persist? Why does the chulha persist? I believe that re-imagining the chulha as a dynamic technology helps us understand the reasons that people and especially rural women may retain older technologies . . . despite the allure of modern energy infrastructures.”
The author also addressed the multidisciplinary aspect of the book: “We’re all trying to have a conversation. The language that we use is very different. The methods in each discipline are different. What counts as reliable data?” For example, the engineers wanted GIS data on forests and harvesting wood, with women’s stories as narratives about that data. But as an anthropologist, Kehandelwal believes women’s words and stories were the actual data. She said, “I pushed back at that moment and said stories are data too, not just embellishment of so-called ‘hard data.’”
Listen to the entire podcast interview here.
About the book:
Based on anthropological research in Rajasthan, Cookstove Chronicles argues that the supposedly obsolete chulha persists because it offers women control over the tools needed to feed their families. Their continued use of old stoves alongside the new is not a failure to embrace new technologies but instead a strategy to maximize flexibility and autonomy. The chulha is neither the villain nor hero of this story. It produces particulate matter that harms people’s bodies, leaves soot on utensils and walls, and accelerates glacial melting and atmospheric warming. Yet it also depends on renewable biomass fuel and supports women’s autonomy as a local, do-it-yourself technology.
