पंखा

Punkah comes from Hindi paṅkhā (पंखा), which derives from Sanskrit paksha, meaning wing or feather. In its original form, a punkah was a hand-held fan made of palm leaves or feathers. By the time the British established themselves in India, the word had come to mean something larger: a rectangular cloth frame suspended from the ceiling, swung back and forth by a rope to create a breeze in the rooms below.

The person who pulled the rope was called the punkah-wallah. This was among the lowest-paid jobs in the colonial household, and it was performed for hours in stifling heat. The punkah-wallah sat outside the room, often behind a wall, pulling a cord rhythmically while the sahibs and memsahibs dined or slept in comfort. E.M. Forster described the arrangement in A Passage to India (1924) — the invisible labour that made colonial comfort possible.

British officers brought the punkah system to other colonies. Punkah fans appeared in Singapore, Hong Kong, and British East Africa. The word entered English dictionaries by the 1780s. When electric ceiling fans arrived in the 1880s — the first was installed by the Crompton Company in Calcutta in 1882 — the punkah-wallah's occupation began its slow extinction.

The mechanical ceiling fan did not erase the word. In parts of India, paṅkhā still means any fan, including the electric ones whirring in every office and home. But in English, punkah froze in time. It conjures a specific image: a cloth swaying overhead, a rope disappearing through a hole in the wall, and a man on the other side whose comfort was never part of the equation.