# Meena Khandelwal, "Cookstove Chronicles: Social Life of a Women's Technology in India" (U Arizona Press, 2026)

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-women-s-history-4096544/meena-khandelwal-cookstove-chronicles-social-life-of-a-women-s-technology-in-india-u-arizona-press-2026
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-women-s-history-4096544/meena-khandelwal-cookstove-chronicles-social-life-of-a-women-s-technology-in-india-u-arizona-press-2026.md
Podcast: [New Books in Women's History](https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-women-s-history-4096544)
Published: 2026-07-08T08:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK5642930063.mp3
Audio file: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK5642930063.mp3
Processing state: not_requested
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/new-books-in-women-s-history-4096544/episodes/meena-khandelwal-cookstove-chronicles-social-life-of-a-women-s-technology-in-india-u-arizona-press-2026
Duration seconds: 3710

## Resource

Stove improvers have been designing and promoting “clean” or “efficient” biomass cookstoves in India since the 1940s and have been frustrated to find their carefully engineered stoves abandoned in trash heaps or repurposed as storage bins, while the traditional mud chulha retains a central place in the kitchen. Why do so many Indian women continue to use wood-burning, smoke-spewing stoves when they have other options? Based on anthropological research in Rajasthan, Cookstove Chronicles: Social Life of a Women’s Technology in India (University of Arizona Press, 2024) by Dr. Meena Khandelwal argues that the supposedly obsolete chulha persists because it offers women control over the tools needed to feed their families. Their continued use of old stoves alongside the new is not a failure to embrace new technologies but instead a strategy to maximize flexibility and autonomy. The chulha is neither the villain nor hero of this story. It produces particulate matter that harms people’s bodies, leaves soot on utensils and walls, and accelerates glacial melting and atmospheric warming. Yet it also depends on renewable biomass fuel and supports women’s autonomy as a local, do-it-yourself technology. Dr. Khandelwal, a feminist anthropologist, describes her collaboration with engineers, archaeologists, and others. She employs critical social theory and reflections from fieldwork to bring together research from a range of fields, including history, geography, anthropology, energy and environmental studies, public health, and science and technology studies (STS). In so doing she not only demystifies multidisciplinary research but also highlights the messy reality of actual behavior. Cookstove Chronicles critically examines why, despite extensive development efforts, use of the ch…

## Actions

- request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/new-books-in-women-s-history-4096544/episodes/meena-khandelwal-cookstove-chronicles-social-life-of-a-women-s-technology-in-india-u-arizona-press-2026/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.
- read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-women-s-history-4096544/meena-khandelwal-cookstove-chronicles-social-life-of-a-women-s-technology-in-india-u-arizona-press-2026.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.

A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed.

## Transcript

Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.