‘Dust is a Great Enemy of Health’: Recursive Cleaning in House Construction Manuals from 1930s Poona

Abstract In Residential Buildings Suited to India (1931) and Cheap and Healthy Homes for the Middle Classes of India (1935), two construction manuals from Poona, British India in the 1930s, engineer Raghunath Shripad Deshpande instructed his upper-caste middle-class readers on how to build their own single-family homes based on modern standards of daylight and ventilation. The manuals’ sample house plans combined international modern ideals with a regional house typology to reshape production and consumption selectively within their vision of small-town Hindu upper-caste domestic modernity. This article argues that the manuals’ conflation of ritual cleaning and actual cleaning recursively replicated temporal and spatial inequalities via the modernisation of caste-based domestic labour relations.