Footnote 2 In 1948 Indians had led the charge for UNESCO research on the problems of the ‘arid lands’, based around a climatological perspective on underdevelopment. So too did Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, a keen solar booster who had dined a year earlier on ‘sun-cooked cabbage and vegetables’ prepared on an indigenously developed solar cooker. In 1953 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) approached the Government of India with an eye-catching proposal: would the new nation host the world’s first major international conference on wind power and solar energy? Over the next months, Indian scientists and officials weighed in on the idea. While solar experts emphasized the regional exceptionalism of the arid tropics, the teleological linkage between modernity and ever-rising energy abundance was rejuvenated from below as rural communities began to imagine the high-energy good life as a universal aspiration. This impoverished, feminized Third World projected user base resulted in persistent underinvestment and failed commercialization, helping to explain why solar technologies did not take off earlier. At its heart lay a dualistic conception of the modern energy economy: flexible and resource-intensive grid electricity for urban centres, inferior off-grid devices to meet the minimal and static needs of the rural poor. In parallel with the well-known postcolonial focus on high-modernist energy mega-projects, the narrow transnational community of solar experts retained a competing tendency to think small.

Focusing especially on India and detouring through Mexico, two important arenas for early solar experimentation, this article traces an alternative history of solar technologies as austere everyday fixes for developing countries. This overlooks a long episode of ‘low-modernist’ solar research in and for the global South. Solar energy often appears a resource without a history, perpetually novel and promising futuristic abundance.

Horae race hinterlands