Unequal Heat: Race, Bodies and Thermal Histories with Dr. Bharat Venkat

In this episode, Susan Mathews is in conversation with Dr. Bharat Jayram Venkat, an associate professor at #UCLA’s Institute for Society & Genetics with joint appointments in the Departments of #History and #Anthropology. His first book, At the Limits of Cure (Duke University Press, 2021), was the winner of the Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences. His current work focuses on the experience of thermal inequality in contemporary India and the United States, the history of how heat has been studied and its effects over the long twentieth century. He is also director of the UCLA Heat Lab.
With accelerating climate change, one of the fallouts is extreme heat. In this conversation, Dr. Venkat defined thermal inequality, which is not just the differential impact of heat, but the unequal distribution of heat effects. These effects are filtered or mediated by our environments, by our lives and by the social and political infrastructures that determine how vulnerable we are to heat. The UCLA Heat Lab employs interdisciplinary methods to study the experience of thermal inequality.
We spoke in some detail about a journal article he wrote in 2022 on race and thermal sensation in late colonial India. We discussed ‘tropicality’, how central the problems posed by heat were and how various kinds of bodies were understood to be differentially affected by heat, producing both biological variation and pathology. Meteorology and racial ideology intersect in the late 19th and early 20th century and climate science is sutured to racial difference.
Heat is a persistent obstacle to the British empire, where sensitivity plays out as both fragility and is treated as something only white bodies can feel as opposed to brown and black bodies. In 1889, Henry Francis Blanford, an imperial meteorologist reporter, is quoted as saying that “the sun is hotter in India than in England”. For the empire, the Indian sun was more threatening than the Indian sepoy, as they depended on these armies to hold on to their empire. With this racial ideology also came a hierarchy of labour, which Dr. Venkat illustrates with contemporary examples of workers who face extreme heat in construction, agriculture and delivery jobs.
We conclude the conversation by speaking about a book he is writing entitled Swelter where he explores the history of heat in an unequal world, focusing on heat science and the kinds of heat thresholds we will face, along with how we might need to change our categorization of climate related illnesses which come about through extreme heat. When we factor heat into our observations, it will transform how we see climate change and its effects.