History of Lighting in Homes: Diyas, Gas Lamps, Bulbs and LEDs

Every Indian home still lights a flame. On Diwali the whole house is lined with diyas; every evening, in millions of homes, a lamp is lit in the pooja corner; at weddings, a brass samai or a tall lamp stands at the centre of the ceremony. Yet the rest of the house is lit by LEDs that would have seemed like magic a century ago. Few objects show the distance a home has travelled as clearly as the lamp.

The history of domestic lighting is not only a story of brighter and cheaper light. Each new source changed how houses were designed, how families used their evenings, where furniture went and what rooms looked like. The flame kept life close to the hearth and the window; kerosene let children study after dark; the electric bulb moved light to the centre of the ceiling; the tubelight flattened the Indian living room into one bright, cool, shadowless box; and the LED, because it is small, cool and controllable, has let designers put light almost anywhere.

This article follows that story from the clay diya to the LED, with the Indian home at its centre. It explains how each source works, how much light it gives, how it shaped rooms, and what a modern home can borrow from each era — including how to keep real flames safely in a modern interior. Where exact dates are uncertain, it describes eras rather than years.

Before electricity: the house designed around daylight

For most of history, artificial light was precious, dim and dangerous, so houses were designed to make the most of daylight. Traditional Indian houses in hot climates gathered light from courtyards rather than from large external windows: the aangan of the north Indian and Gujarati house, the nadumuttam of the Kerala house and the courtyards of Rajasthani havelis brought soft, reflected daylight into the rooms around them, while thick walls, deep verandahs, jharokhas and jaalis kept out glare and heat. Daily life followed the sun. Cooking, reading, crafts and work were done by day, often in verandahs and courtyards; evening life was short, communal and gathered around a few lamps.

The light source itself was a small flame. The diya — a shallow vessel of fired clay holding oil or ghee, with a twisted cotton wick resting on its lip — is among the oldest lighting devices in the subcontinent, and simple clay oil lamps have been used here for thousands of years. Sesame oil, mustard oil, castor oil and ghee were common fuels, depending on region and purpose. A single wick flame gives only a little light — of the same order as a candle, roughly ten lumens — so a room was lit by several lamps placed where they were needed: at the entrance, in the kitchen, in the shrine, and in wall niches.

The niche, the lamp stand and the brass lamp

Indian builders created a whole architecture for these small flames. Walls were given niches — in Gujarati homes the small arched gokhla — that held a lamp safely at a useful height, protected it from draughts and reflected its light from the plastered or whitewashed surround. Doorways often had lamp niches on either side. Brass and bronze lamps developed into regional forms: the tall, tiered samai of Maharashtra, the Kerala nilavilakku with its wicks facing different directions, hanging chain lamps in temples and halls, and the deepastambha, a lamp tower outside temples that carries rows of flames on festival nights, seen especially in Goa, Maharashtra and the south. Brass and bronze were chosen because they did not burn, could be polished to reflect the flame, and lasted for generations.

Candles, kerosene and the lantern: brighter flames

The first improvements to the flame came from better fuels and better burners. Candles of tallow and beeswax were long known; cheaper paraffin wax candles appeared in the mid-nineteenth century. In Europe in the 1780s, the Argand lamp introduced a hollow, circular wick with a glass chimney that drew air through the flame; it burned far more brightly and cleanly than a simple wick, and its principle — feed the flame more air through a chimney — was used in the oil and kerosene lamps that followed.

Kerosene, refined from petroleum from the 1850s onwards, changed lighting worldwide, and India was no exception. The kerosene lamp with a glass chimney, and the hurricane lantern with its metal frame and protected flame, gave several times the light of a diya at a low running cost, could be carried, and could be hung from a hook in a verandah or a shop. For more than a century the lantern — the laltain — was the light by which much of India studied, cooked, kept shop and travelled after dark, and in many villages it remained the main source of household light into the twenty-first century. The pressure lamp, widely known by the Petromax name, used pressurised kerosene and an incandescent mantle to give a brilliant white light; carried on the heads of bearers, rows of these lamps lit wedding processions and night markets for decades.

Kerosene had real costs. It gave off smoke and fumes that blackened ceilings and affected health in poorly ventilated rooms, and lamps were a constant fire risk, especially in homes with thatch, cloth and wooden fittings. Ceilings were often whitewashed regularly for exactly this reason. The lantern also kept light low and local — on a table, a shelf or a hook — so rooms at night were pools of light in darkness rather than evenly lit spaces.

Gas: the first light from a pipe

Coal gas lighting was developed in Britain in the 1790s and early 1800s, and from the early nineteenth century gas lamps lit the streets of London and other European cities; piped gas soon reached theatres, factories and wealthier homes, where gas brackets on walls and gasoliers hanging from ceilings replaced candles and oil lamps. Gas light was brighter and steadier than oil, especially after the incandescent gas mantle arrived late in the century, but it also produced heat, fumes and soot, consumed oxygen in closed rooms and carried the risk of leaks and explosions.

Large Indian cities saw gas street lighting and gas supply to some public buildings in the second half of the nineteenth century, but gas never became the ordinary household light in India that it was in some European cities. For most Indian homes, the step was directly from oil and kerosene to electricity, often within a single lifetime — and for many rural homes, much later than in the cities.

The electric bulb: light moves to the centre of the ceiling

The incandescent electric lamp, in which a thin filament glows white-hot inside a glass bulb from which air has been removed, was made practical at the end of the 1870s. Joseph Swan in England and Thomas Edison in the United States both demonstrated working lamps in 1879–80, and Edison's company built one of the first central power stations to supply electric light to customers in New York in 1882. Early lamps used carbon filaments; tungsten filaments, which are brighter and more durable, took over in the early twentieth century, and gas-filled bulbs improved them further.

Electric supply began in a few Indian cities and hill stations from the closing years of the nineteenth century and spread through the twentieth, first to the cities and then, slowly, through rural electrification after independence. The bulb transformed the house in ways that are easy to forget. There was no flame, no smoke and no fumes, so light could hang from the ceiling, sit inside fabric shades and go into cupboards. The single central light — a bulb on a flex or in a batten holder, switched from a board beside the door — became the defining feature of the Indian room for most of the twentieth century. Rooms began to be furnished on the assumption that light came from the middle, and the warm, yellowish light of the incandescent bulb, at about 2700 K, became what people thought of as normal home light.

The bulb's great weakness was efficiency. Only a small fraction of the electricity it uses becomes visible light; the rest becomes heat. A 60 W bulb gives roughly 700–800 lumens — perhaps seventy times a diya — but in an Indian summer, rooms full of bulbs added noticeably to the heat, and electricity bills and limited supply kept most homes to one or two bulbs per room.

Tubelights and CFLs: the cool, bright decades

The fluorescent tube, commercially introduced in the late 1930s, works differently: an electric discharge in mercury vapour produces ultraviolet radiation, which a phosphor coating on the inside of the tube converts into visible light. It produces several times more light per watt than an incandescent bulb, and lasts much longer. In India, the tubelight became the standard fitting in homes, shops and offices through the post-independence decades, mounted horizontally on a wall at about door height, giving an even, bright, cool-white light.

The tubelight shaped the look of the Indian home for two generations. Its cool daylight colour, often around 6500 K, and its flat, shadowless spread suited reading, sewing and studying, and it cost much less to run than bulbs. But it also flattened rooms: one bright source on one wall, little contrast, cool light on warm skin tones, and the characteristic flicker and hum of old magnetic chokes. The compact fluorescent lamp (CFL), a folded fluorescent tube with its electronics in the base, appeared in the 1980s and spread widely in India in the 2000s as an energy-saving replacement for the bulb in the same holder. CFLs contained small amounts of mercury, took time to reach full brightness, and many cheap ones failed early, but they taught households to think about watts and efficiency.

The LED: light becomes small, cool and controllable

A light-emitting diode produces light directly from a semiconductor when current flows through it. Red and other coloured LEDs were used for decades as indicator lights, but white lighting needed an efficient blue LED, which can be combined with a phosphor to produce white light. The development of efficient blue LEDs in the early 1990s — recognised with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2014, awarded to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura — made white LED lighting possible, and through the 2000s and 2010s LEDs became bright, efficient and cheap enough to replace almost every other source.

India adopted LED lighting at remarkable speed. The government's UJALA programme, launched in 2015, distributed LED bulbs to households at low prices on a very large scale, and together with falling market prices it made the LED bulb the default replacement for bulbs and CFLs within a few years. Today a 9 W LED bulb gives about as much light as a 60 W incandescent bulb, lasts many times longer, and, with good drivers, does not flicker. The Bureau of Energy Efficiency's star labelling and the Indian standards for LED lamps and luminaires help buyers compare products.

For designers, efficiency is only part of the LED story. Because the source is tiny and runs cool, light can now be built into coves, shelves, handrails, steps, mirrors, niches and furniture; it can be dimmed, tuned from warm to cool, and controlled in scenes from a phone. That has freed Indian interiors from the single central light and the wall tubelight, and made layered lighting — ambient, task and accent light from several sources at different heights — affordable in an ordinary flat.

What each era changed in the Indian room

Looking at the light sources together shows how strongly lighting shaped the room itself. With flames, light was low, local and warm, and the architecture — niches, brass, white plaster, courtyards — was designed to make a little light go a long way. With the bulb, light moved to the middle of the ceiling and became a general wash. With the tubelight, it moved to the wall at door height and became bright, cool and even. With the LED, light can be anywhere, and the design question has changed from 'how do we get enough light?' to 'where should the light be, and what should it feel like?'

The cost of light: then and now

The running cost of light has fallen dramatically, and the comparison is useful when choosing lamps today. The worked example below assumes one lamp used for five hours a day and an assumed tariff of ₹7–9 per unit (kWh), the same assumption used in this site's garden-lighting guide. It shows why replacing old bulbs and tubes is one of the cheapest energy savings available to a household.

Keeping the flame: diyas and lamps in a modern home

The diya has never left the Indian home, and modern interiors can make room for it properly instead of placing it wherever there is space. A pooja unit or shrine benefits from a non-combustible base — stone, brass or a metal tray — under the lamp, a clear zone above it free of shelves and fabric, and a material behind it that will not scorch: stone, tile, metal or a fire-resistant board rather than bare veneer or wallpaper. Wall niches for lamps at entrances and in courtyards are a lovely way to bring back the gokhla, and a niche lined with stone or tile can hold a real diya on festival nights and a small LED candle at other times.

Real flames in a modern home also need ordinary fire sense, which matters more today because modern interiors contain far more combustible material — synthetic curtains, foam sofas, veneered panels, paper lanterns and plastic decorations — than traditional homes did. Keep lamps on stable, non-combustible surfaces, away from curtains, drapes and flowers; never leave a lit lamp unattended or within reach of small children and pets; keep a fire extinguisher suitable for home use in the house; and on festival nights, prefer clay diyas on balconies and thresholds to candles on wooden furniture. LED diyas and candles are a sensible choice for decoration in children's rooms, near fabrics, and anywhere a lamp would otherwise be left burning.

Where home lighting is going

Lighting is still changing quickly. Tunable-white LEDs can shift from cool, bright light during the day to warm, dim light in the evening, an idea known as human-centric or circadian lighting, which this site discusses separately. Smart controls let a household recall scenes — dinner, reading, festival, night — with a tap or a voice command. Efficacy continues to improve, and attention is turning to quality rather than raw brightness: high colour rendering, freedom from flicker, low glare and good dimming. Solar-powered and battery LED lamps have replaced kerosene lanterns in many places that the grid reached late. And, in a pleasing return, designers are once again making rooms around warm, low, local light and the play of shadow — the qualities the diya and the brass lamp always had.

Seven lessons from the history of home lighting

• Design for daylight first: courtyards, verandahs, light shelves and well-placed windows reduce the need for artificial light by day.
• Put light where people are and what they do, not only in the centre of the ceiling.
• Use warm light (about 2700–3000 K) for living and sleeping, and brighter, cooler light only where tasks need it.
• Layer the light: a soft background wash, task light at working surfaces, and a few accents for depth.
• Choose LEDs by lumens, colour rendering and driver quality, not only by wattage or price.
• Give real flames a proper place — stone or metal bases, clear space above, nothing combustible nearby.
• Keep control simple: a few well-chosen scenes are used every day; a complex system often is not.

Frequently asked questions

What did Indian homes use for light before electricity?

Clay diyas and brass oil lamps burning sesame, mustard or castor oil or ghee, candles in some homes, and from the second half of the nineteenth century, kerosene lamps and lanterns. Houses relied heavily on daylight from courtyards and verandahs, and evening activity was limited and gathered around a few lamps.

Who invented the light bulb?

Many inventors worked on electric light, but Joseph Swan in England and Thomas Edison in the United States both demonstrated practical incandescent lamps in 1879–80, and Edison's system of power stations and wiring made electric lighting a commercial service from the early 1880s.

Why did Indian homes use tubelights for so long?

Tubelights gave much more light per watt than bulbs, lasted longer and suited the bright, even light people wanted for reading, studying and household work, at a time when electricity was costly and supply was limited. Their cool colour and flat light are why many homes are now moving to warmer, layered LED lighting.

How many lumens does a diya give?

A single small wick flame gives roughly the light of a candle — of the order of ten lumens, depending on the wick, the oil and the flame size. A 9 W LED bulb gives around eighty times as much.

Is it safe to light diyas in a modern flat?

Yes, with care. Place them on stable, non-combustible surfaces, away from curtains, drapes, flowers and decorations, never leave them unattended, keep them out of reach of children and pets, and keep a home fire extinguisher handy. Use LED diyas where a real flame would be near fabric or left burning.