scholarly journals Muscular energy and water: Servants and cooling technologies in Colonial India

Author(s):  
С.Е. Сидорова

Во времена Британской Индии, попадая в колонию, британцы оказывались в трудно переносимых климатических условиях. В стремлении уберечься от зловредного воздействия окружающей среды, они воспроизводили элементы привычной им обстановки, одним из атрибутов которой была прохлада. В знойные и дождливые месяцы британцы тратили немало усилий на охлаждение воздуха вокруг них, для чего использовали приспособления разной степени сложности, а также приводивших их в действие специальных слуг. Сопротивляясь естественным природным условиям, европейцы организовывали локусы своей колониальной культуры, существовавшей по принципу разбросанных по субконтиненту оазисов, где искусственно создаваемый холод обеспечивал не только комфорт для работы и жизни, но и условия для поддержания достойного имиджа властителей. In the days of British India, getting into a colony, the British found themselves in difficult climatic conditions. In an effort to protect themselves from the harmful effects of the heat, they reproduced elements of their familiar environment, one of the attributes of which was coolness. In the hot and rainy months, the British spent a lot of effort to cool the air in their homes, for which they used devices of varying degrees of complexity and special servants who powered them. Resisting natural conditions, the Europeans organized the loci of their colonial culture, which existed on the principle of oases scattered over the subcontinent, where the artificially created cold provided not only comfort for work and life, but also the conditions for maintaining a decent image of colonial rulers.

1994 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 739-791 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kartik Kalyan Raman

The role of legal tradition in the reformist rhetoric of Benthamite Utilitarianism presents us with a contradiction. On the one hand, there is the common observation that Utilitarian jurisprudence was necessarily ahistorical and rejected the past as a source of concepts for reworking the criminal justice system existing in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For philosophic reformers such as Bentham, contemporary British criminal justice was to be replaced by a scientific jurisprudence, abstract, universal, and secular in outlook, and antipathetic to the more conservative insistence that the foundations of the penal law continue to be tradition-based. ‘If society was to see any improvement, its law must be reformed; if its law was to be reformed it must be burned to the ground and rebuilt according to a new and rational pattern.’ On the other hand, we find that the very same Utilitarian thinkers, in works describing the state of the law in British India, were concerned with local rather than universal conceptions of criminality. In his 1782 Essay on the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation, Bentham, for instance, urged the philosophic reformer to temper change in India by fitting Utilitarian judgments about the law to the frames of local society.


2020 ◽  
Vol 89 ◽  
pp. 140-153
Author(s):  
Ali Raza

Abstract This paper charts communist print worlds in colonial India during the interwar period. Beginning in the early 1920s, self-declared ‘Communist’ and ‘Bolshevik’ publications began surfacing across India. Through the example of the Kirti Kisan Sabha (Workers and Peasants Party: a communist group in the north-western province of Punjab), and its associated publications, this paper will provide a glimpse into the rich, diverse and imaginative print worlds of Indian communism. From 1926 onwards, Kirti publications became a part of a thriving print culture in which a dizzying variety of revolutionary, socialist and communist publications competed and conversed with the equally prolific and rich print worlds of their political and ideological rivals. Removed on the one hand from the ivory towers of party intellectuals, dense treatises and officious theses, and on the other hand from the framing of sedition, rebellion and fanaticism in the colonial archive, Kirti publications show how the global project of communist internationalism became distinctly provincialized and vernacularized in British India.


2020 ◽  
Vol 164 ◽  
pp. 08006
Author(s):  
Marat Kuzhin ◽  
Ekaterina Chepik ◽  
Angelina Baranova

In this research the influence of natural and climatic conditions on the organization of construction production are examined. Our purpose was to identify the nature of the dependence of the duration of construction work on natural and climatic factors. The analysis of normative and technical documentation in terms of accounting for the influence of natural and climatic factors was made. The system of estimation of influence of natural conditions on preparatory, ground, facade, roofing works, and also the appliance of monolithic structures, installation of prefabricated ferroconcrete items, and on works – implementation of internal finishing is offered. It was estimated, that the norms of construction production take into account a certain number of natural and climatic factors affecting the performance of work, but most of these factors have not yet been given in the normative and technical documentation. It is necessary to study this issue more comprehensively and to establish exact dependences on natural and climatic conditions, which will allow to quantify these factors already while calculating. This is necessary to compile more accurate calendar plans and schedules of production of works, as close as possible to real conditions. The study of this issue is one of the most important issues in the design of construction production. With insufficient consideration of these factors, the final actual figures are very different from the projected ones, which also lead to an increase in the cost of construction and installation work and the duration of their implementation. Taking into consideration the influence of natural and climatic factors will allow planning construction production more accurate.


1961 ◽  
Vol 3 (30) ◽  
pp. 1089-1096
Author(s):  
I. P. Gerasimov

Abstract The Siberian pole of cold is situated in the extreme north-east of Eurasia (in the region of the Cherskiy mountain system, in the upper parts of the basins of the Yana, Indigirka and Kolyma Rivers). Particularly low air and soil temperatures have been observed in the intermontane areas. Among these localities is the famous Oymyakon, where the lowest minimum temperature in the Northern Hemisphere has been recorded. In the climate of this area extreme aridity, connected with the intracontinental position of the territory, is combined with intense cold. In the two highest massifs (Ulakhan-Chistay and Suntar-Khayata) small centres of recent glacierization (chiefly kars) are developed; there are also distinct traces of a more extensive older mountain glaciation. In the intermontane areas and on the principal level of the dissected hilly peneplain positive indications of a former glaciation are absent. However, the recent cryogenic phenomena represented by fossil ice, permafrost, taryns, as well as thermokarstic, solifluction and congelation features, are very abundant and diverse. The widespread development of all these features gives this territory a periglacial aspect, and also provides the possibility of using the study of many recent phenomena for palaeogeographical purposes. From this point of view, the processes leading to the formation of loess deposits (cryogenic facies) and the formation of structural and thixotropic soils arc of particular interest. The recent natural landscapes in this region are represented by a dominant type of larch tundra–forest associated with comparatively typical taiga bog formations in the depressions and xero-cryophile meadow–steppe landscapes on the steeper and warmer southern slopes. Such a unique landscape combination connected with the specific climatic conditions of this region provide a basis for interpreting the recent natural conditions of the Siberian pole of cold as a survival of the “late glacial.” At present these natural conditions are being intensively developed economically.


2018 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Goodman

Abstract This article considers the significance of eating and drinking within a series of diaries and journals produced in British colonial India during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The discussion of food and drink in this context was not simply a means to add color or compelling detail to these accounts, but was instead a vital ingredient of the authors’ understanding of health and medical treatment. These texts suggest a broader colonial medical understanding of the importance of regulating diet to maintain physical health. Concern with food, and the lack thereof, was understandably a key element in diaries, and in the eyewitness accounts kept by British soldiers, doctors, and civilians during the rebellion. At a narrative level, mention of food also functioned as a trope serving to increase dramatic tension and to capture an imagery of fortitude. In references to drink, by contrast, these sources reveal a conflict between professional and lay opinions regarding the use of alcohol as part of medical treatment. The accounts show the persistent use of alcohol both for medicinal and restorative purposes, despite growing social and medical anxieties over its ill-effects on the body. Close examination of these references to food and drink reflect the quotidian habits, social composition, and the extent of professional and lay knowledge of health and medicine in colonial British India.


2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUNIL PURUSHOTHAM

AbstractThis article explores the idea of federation in late-colonial India. Projects of federation sought to codify the uncodified and fragmented sovereign landscape of the British Raj. They were ambitious projects that raised crucial questions about sovereignty, kingship, territoriality, the potential of constitutional law in transforming the colonial state into a democratic one, and India's political future more broadly. In the years after 1919, federation became a capacious model for imagining a wide array of political futures. An all-India Indian federation was seen as the most plausible means of maintaining India's unity, introducing representative government, and overcoming the Hindu–Muslim majority–minority problem. By bringing together ‘princely’ India and British India, federation made the Indian states central players in late-colonial contestations over sovereignty. This article explores the role of the states in constitutional debates, their place in Indian political imaginaries, and articulations of kingship in late-colonial India. It does so through the example of Hyderabad, the premier princely state, whose ruler made an unsuccessful bid for independence between 1947 and 1948. Hyderabad occupied a curious position in competing visions of India's future. Ultimately, the princely states were a decisive factor in the failure of federation and the turn to partition as a means of overcoming India's constitutional impasse.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-58
Author(s):  
Vijayakumar M. Boratti

Literary writings such as poetry, drama or novel in colonial India manifest themselves into, react or subscribe to the larger discourse of colonialism or nationalism; rarely do they hold uniformity in their articulations. As colonial experiences and larger nationalist consciousness varied from region to region, cultural articulations—chiefly dramas—not only assumed different forms but also illustrated different thematic concerns. Yet, studies on colonial drama, thus far, have paid attention to either colonialism/orientalism or nationalism. There is a greater focus on British India in such studies. However, the case of princely states demands a momentary sidestep from the dichotomy of colonialism versus nationalism to understand the colonial dramas. The slow and gradual entry of nationalism in the princely states did not have to combat the British chiefly and directly. Much before its full blossom in the princely states, it had to grapple with a range of issues such as monarchy, democratic institutions, constitutionalism, bureaucracy and other pressing issues locally. In the present article, the Kannada dramas of Devanahalli Venkataramanaiah Gundappa (DVG) in the early decades of the twentieth century are examined to throw light on the ways in which they act as political allegories which imagine and debate democracy and its repercussions in the social and political spheres of the Mysore princely state.


1961 ◽  
Vol 3 (30) ◽  
pp. 1089-1096
Author(s):  
I. P. Gerasimov

AbstractThe Siberian pole of cold is situated in the extreme north-east of Eurasia (in the region of the Cherskiy mountain system, in the upper parts of the basins of the Yana, Indigirka and Kolyma Rivers). Particularly low air and soil temperatures have been observed in the intermontane areas. Among these localities is the famous Oymyakon, where the lowest minimum temperature in the Northern Hemisphere has been recorded. In the climate of this area extreme aridity, connected with the intracontinental position of the territory, is combined with intense cold.In the two highest massifs (Ulakhan-Chistay and Suntar-Khayata) small centres of recent glacierization (chiefly kars) are developed; there are also distinct traces of a more extensive older mountain glaciation. In the intermontane areas and on the principal level of the dissected hilly peneplain positive indications of a former glaciation are absent. However, the recent cryogenic phenomena represented by fossil ice, permafrost, taryns, as well as thermokarstic, solifluction and congelation features, are very abundant and diverse.The widespread development of all these features gives this territory a periglacial aspect, and also provides the possibility of using the study of many recent phenomena for palaeogeographical purposes. From this point of view, the processes leading to the formation of loess deposits (cryogenic facies) and the formation of structural and thixotropic soils arc of particular interest.The recent natural landscapes in this region are represented by a dominant type of larch tundra–forest associated with comparatively typical taiga bog formations in the depressions and xero-cryophile meadow–steppe landscapes on the steeper and warmer southern slopes. Such a unique landscape combination connected with the specific climatic conditions of this region provide a basis for interpreting the recent natural conditions of the Siberian pole of cold as a survival of the “late glacial.” At present these natural conditions are being intensively developed economically.


1959 ◽  
Vol 63 (587) ◽  
pp. 659-668
Author(s):  
B. T. Cheverton

The aircraft designer must clearly ensure that his aircraft will fly in all climatic conditions normally to be expected. Over and above this, aircraft must be able to cope with a change in weather also.Since the last war, research into the problem of ice accretion on aircraft has done much to widen understanding of this serious flying hazard. In the flight testing and development of ice protection systems for aircraft, however, one of the principal difficulties encountered is that of finding natural icing conditions sufficiently uniform through which to fly the test aircraft. Because of this it has been found more profitable not to seek natural conditions, but instead to fly in clear air at temperatures below 0°C, while spraying the test surface from a water spray rake fitted to the test aircraft.


2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Simpson

During the second half of the nineteenth century, land frontiers became areas of unique significance for surveyors in colonial India. These regions were understood to provide the most stringent tests for the men, instruments, and techniques that collectively constituted spatial data and representations. In many instances, however, the severity of the challenges that India’s frontiers afforded stretched practices in the field and in the survey office beyond breaking point. Far from producing supposedly unequivocal maps, many involved in frontier surveying acknowledged that their work was problematic, partial, and prone to contrary readings. They increasingly came to construe frontiers as spaces that exceeded scientific understanding, and resorted to descriptions that emphasized fantastical and disorienting embodied experiences. Through examining the many crises and multiple agents of frontier mapping in British India, this article argues that colonial surveying and its outputs were less assured and more convoluted than previous histories have acknowledged.


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