The University of Arizona Press
February 13, 2025
Meena Khandelwal, author of Cookstove Chronicles, Social Life of a Women’s Technology in India, used her book as a lens to investigate “What Counts as ‘Drudgery’ and Who Decides?” in Anthropology News. A serendipitous encounter with an engineering professor in 2011 sparked Khandelwal’s curiosity about solar, biomass, and modern gas cookstoves in southern Rajasthan. A decade of collaboration with engineers, archaeologists, and others has led her to reimagine the humble mud stove as a women’s technology. In Anthropology News, Khandelwal described the replacement of the chulha, India’s traditional wood-burning mud stove, with modern stoves; and she suggests the transition is not necessarily welcomed by women who report missing time socializing with their friends while chopping trees and carrying wood.
Khandelwal wrote, “The word ‘drudgery’ evokes the physical work women chulha users do to feed their families, as if it is a straightforward description of fuelwood harvesting when it is actually an ideological claim. As a development buzzword, ‘drudgery’ uses emotional calls to action (i.e., development interventions) while being profoundly decontextualized, vague, and formulaic; it is precisely these features that make buzzwords powerful. Undoubtedly, having to cut and haul fuelwood home from a forest is hard, physical work and a burden that in India falls primarily to women, but this doesn’t necessarily make it drudgery.”
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.
Meena Khandelwal employs critical social theory and reflections from fieldwork to bring together research from a range of fields, including history, geography, anthropology, energy and environmental studies, public health, and science and technology studies (STS). In so doing she not only demystifies multidisciplinary research but also highlights the messy reality of actual behavior.
