In the days of British India (before modern air conditioning), rooms were cooled by enormous flaps hung from the ceiling on pivots. These were moved back and fourth, by a guy sitting outside, pulling on a rope. I imagine it wasn’t highly paid work, yet there was probably a big demand for these guys (India being so hot).
Kipling mentions these guys, but never notes how much they were paid-anyone know?
According to this book, around 1850 a punkah wallah would get about four rupees per month. In British currency, that was about five shillings per month or three pounds per year.
Try four rupees a month.
If, as this cite suggests, a company ensign was making about 100 rupees a month, then the punkka wallah was making 1/25th of that. So, say the ensign was making the equivalent of a modern middle-manager’s $50-100K a year. The punkka wallah was then making about $2,000 to $4,000 a year. Fun times.
This may be the best simulpost ever. Both of you referenced and linked to the same book, with the same answer, at exactly the same time. I think you must be twins separated at birth.
I heard that it was four rupees a month, but it’s nothing to raise a flap about.
Same page and everything. Awesome.
Yes – Google is an awesome tool. I didn’t really expect to find a web-based source on what you should pay your household servants in India in the 19th century, but there it was.
While we’re on the subject of 19th Century Indian Wages, the Sepoys (Indian soldiers in the employ of the East India Company) got something like 10-15 rupees a month and the Cavalry-mounted Sepoys got about 30 rupees a month. Except, from that 30 rupees, they were expected to provide their own horse, feed it, and maintain their gear, so they were basically perpetually broke.
Suffice it to say the Indian Mutiny wasn’t solely about religiously controversial new developments in small arms or alleged attempts to break the Caste of Hindu Sepoys, despite what popular history says.
^
I would disagree on that issue slightly. Pay was not a factor 30 rupees was quite a lot of money back then , but the treatment certainly was. You should remember that in 1857, the British in India had been at war for nearly 17 years, continiously. And these were not colonial police actions, these were proper wars against big nation-states, the Afghan Wars, the Anglo-Sikh wars, the Anglo-Persian war etc. These wars had pretty much decimated the local troops as well as British officers who had served with them. They were replaced often by people fresh of the boat from the UK and THAT caused a lot of resentment.
The famous incident which sparked off the war, the floggings and cashierings of soldiers in Meerut was casued in part by this, the soldiers had served for many years, the officers who ordered the floggings were all reletivly new, the one officer who protested had served for the better part of a decade with the regiment.
Its notable that the above problems did not exist with the newly raised regiments from the Punjab and the Frontier, indeed pretty much none of those mutinied. Almost all of the mutineers were from “old regiments”, 21st Native Infantry for instance.
Back to the OP, “Punkka Wallah”, literally the guy with the fan, was not a full time job, it would be something one of the servants would do when needed. The merchants who sold fans, the real “punkka wallahs” would make a pretty penny in the south and centre of the coutry. Not so much in the North West where no doubt they would be replaced by “lakri wallah”, the firewood guy.
The causes of the Indian Mutiny deserve their own thread, I agree, but I will recommend anyone looking for a readable oversight to the entire thing try either Saul David’s The Indian Mutiny, or- and I’m serious here- George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman In The Great Game.
But yes, back to the OP, I’m pretty sure that most households in Colonial India didn’t have one guy whose job it was to work the fans all day- I recall a mention somewhere that most of the household staff would “have a turn in the barrel”, so to speak.
And whilst the fan merchants in the central/southern parts of India would make heaps of cash, the real Chai Wallahs (Tea Merchants in this context, as opposed to The Guy Who Brought The Colonel His Tea Every Morning) could also rake in the loot if they were good- for many, many years one of the highlights of London Society was the Tea Race, in which ultra-fast clipper ships raced to see who could get the first shipment of tea back from the Subcontinent or China.
Now I’m going to have to dig out my old VHS tapes of ‘It Ain’t Half Hot Mum’ 
“Don’t be such a clever dickie”.
How much did that Arabian Ostrich Feather Induction Engineer earn? Eunuchs fanning milady’s harem?