Advent, appropriation, and aesthetics of electric light in the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, (1900–1920)

Abstract

At the start of the twentieth century, Jammu and Kashmir witnessed an energy transition in its urban centres of Srinagar and Jammu, where electric lights entered the illumination mix along with the already existing oil lamps. They did not simply replace the oil-lit lamps as access to electric lighting was strictly determined on colonial, racial, and class lines. The electric lights also provided an apparatus of surveillance at night for the state and deepened the already existing divisions of urban–rural and backward–modern. In the first decade of the twentieth century, electricity was mostly limited to the palaces, residency offices, the silk factory, and the telegraph office. From 1910 onwards, there was a large-scale extension of electric lighting in the cities of Srinagar and Jammu, and even the reverse salients of financial cuts due to the first world war did not deter this electrical expansion. Colonial electrification in European colonies, like South Asia, has been seen to be driven by the biblical imperative of ‘Let there be light’, to literally spread electric light in colonies that they considered lingering in ‘darkness’. These spectacles were symbolized by palaces and government offices shining with electric light, especially at night, whereas the areas of the natives were lingering in proverbial darkness. After elaborating on these overviews, this paper commences to problematize the aesthetics of light and darkness and study how electric light was being appropriated in the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir from 1900 to 1920.