By Karli Korszeniewski
Servant quarters, and other small spaces long overlooked by historians, offer new insight into the infrastructure of the British Empire in India and the marginalized people who held it together, says Swati Chattopadhyay, author of Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire.
By observing architectural history on a smaller scale than is usually researched —specifically small architectural spaces, objects, and landscapes — scholars are better able to understand the people who lived within them and their world of labor, Chattopadhyay recently told a UC Santa Barbara audience.
“I’m just changing the idea of how we think about the Empire,” said Chattopadhyay, a professor of History of Art and Architecture at UCSB. “It’s also about the very basic infrastructure of servants, enslaved labor, indentured labor, women —all kinds of marginalized folks who really do not have a history in this Empire.”
Chattopadhyay was speaking at a UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center event, Humanities Decanted: Swati Chattopadhyay, about her book, published in 2023. Cristina Venegas, a Film and Media Studies professor at UCSB, moderated the event.
Swati Chattopadhyay, a professor of History of Art and Architecture at UCSB spoke with Cristina Venegas of UCSB Film and Media Studies, on her book Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire.
Chattopadhyay specializes in modern architecture, urbanism, and the British Empire’s cultural landscape. She is a founding editor of ‘PLATFORM,’ a digital forum for conversations about buildings, spaces, and landscapes. She is also the author of Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field and Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny.
Her inspiration for Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire started about three decades ago when she was researching dimensionally small spaces. She said this led her to look into obscure places people do not typically care about.
Chattopadhyay explained that before the 19th century if someone wanted to be cool, they would fan themselves, and if one were elite, such as a prince or noble, somebody would stand next to them fanning. “These elite traditions became embedded in everyday aspects of keeping white bodies comfortable and cool,” she said.
During the British Empire, servants stood outside holding a rope tied to a large plank of wood with cloth attached, pulling the rope back and forth, which fanned the inside of the house, typically for elite households.
A watercolor portrait originally published in 1863 shows the fanning methods used during the British Empire, when servants would stand outside pulling a rope tied to a plank of wood with hanging fabric. Published by the British Library on Flickr
Chattopadhyay also mentioned the term ‘cook room,’ which was used to describe kitchen spaces outside households during the Empire. She said these kitchens were solely the domain of servants and cooks. The lady of the house wouldn’t supervise them, as the families wanted to avoid hearing kitchen noises or having the servant labor close to them.
“It’s not unusual in colonial houses, anywhere, to have a cook room, a kitchen outside because of the smell, labor, and sounds,” Chattopadhyay said.
The Interdisciplinary Humanities Center will host Nima Bahrami, a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at UCSB, on June 6th for a talk on animator Winsor McCay’s cultural significance, specifically his comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland.
Karli Korszeniewski is a second-year Film and Media Studies major at UC Santa Barbara. She is a Web and Social Media Intern with the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.