ABSTRACT
In electrical engineering, the English word ‘current’ is used to describe the flow or movement of an electrical charge, measured in amperes. Across much of India, however, ‘current’ or ‘karant’ is a vernacular keyword for talking about the flow or movement of electricity from networks of pylons and wires into everyday life. Electricity and fuel have remained almost entirely absent from the twentieth-century sociological and anthropological record of rural life in modern India. Anthropology reminds people that the continued absence of an electricity infrastructure – substations, transformers, poles and cables – can also have material effects. In India, physical connection to the electricity grid is no longer seen as the only sustainable or achievable model for increasing the access of poor people to modern forms of energy, or ‘current’. Just like the hydraulic infrastructures built to distribute water in India’s mega-cities, rural India’s electric infrastructures do not just distribute ‘current’; they also distribute difference and inequality.
