In the 1950s, Hindi writer Phanishwar Nath Renu wrote a short story called Panchlight – named for the petromax lamp, a corruption of “Petromax light” that had worked its way into the rural vernacular. The story describes a village’s encounter with this object: a source of light but also a spectacle. People gathered to see it, passed it around, admired it. Yet, in a quiet irony that Renu understood to be the whole point, no one quite knew how to operate it..
