1930s Kitchens in Bombay and Buenos Aires

What did kitchens in India and Argentina look like a century ago? Interwar Argentina and 1930s British India had no diplomatic relationships or cultural connections, but they were both key contributors to the global economy. In both territories, periodicals like The Illustrated Weekly of India (in Bombay) and Caras y Caretas (in Buenos Aires) showed readers images of modern domesticity, including instructions for women on decorating new modern homes. Recipes in both periodicals attempted to create ‘national’ cuisines and advertisements for gas stoves and refrigerators responded closely to fluctuations in each territory’s economy. In the kitchens of Bombay and Buenos Aires in the 1930s, it was not professional architects but wives, daughters, mothers, aunts – and domestic workers – who shaped domestic built form. Via these periodicals, global political shifts were spatialised into the everyday architecture of two far-flung territories in surprisingly similar ways.