Timely Histories: A Social History of Time in South Asia

Project Information

TIMEHIST

Grant agreement ID: 866421

DOI

10.3030/866421

Project closed

EC signature date 16 April 2020

Start date 1 January 2021

End date 30 June 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 996 089,00

EU contribution

€ 1 996 089,00

Coordinated by

GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTLICHE ZENTREN BERLIN EV
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - TIMEHIST (Timely Histories: A Social History of Time in South Asia)

Reporting period: 2024-01-01 to 2025-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Comprising of five modules, TIMEHIST is the first of its kind to explore a social history of time in early modern and modern South Asia. For South Asia, much of the history of time is conditioned by two scholarly approaches: one, time primarily stands as a proxy to consciousness of the historical past and its various modes of categorization (mainly the past, the present, the future). Important but limited in its approach, it tells us about different genres, traditions, and techniques in which temporal consciousness existed. Two, and more applicable on studies for the modern period, time is suspended in the crucial but limiting moment of colonial encounter. It appears as a metaphorical and ideological constituent of the politics of imperialism and modernity. It is indicative of ideological constructions of ways in which the past and the future were thought about in the present of the nineteenth and twentieth century. It is integral to historical accounts of time-unification in which the western timeframe of measurement gradually spread across the world, creating conditions of unification but also of contestations. Methodologically, a majority of historical studies on time has remained focussed on the use of devices, technologies, historicity, trajectories of modernity, and global conditions of adaptability and contestations. TIMEHIST prioritises the study of the social. It duly acknowledges the importance of devices, technologies, and articulations related to historical periodisation, but the overall thrust is to understand what people did with and in time. How did time become a resource of power and authority for a few and a source of resistance and insubordination for the others? How were unequal social relationships temporalized? In diverse spheres of social life related to work, contract, marriage, domesticity, and law, spread across varied sites such as the port, the home, the farm, and the nocturnal habitus of urban and rural clusters, and encompassing a longue-durée perspective from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, TIMEHIST’s primary objective is to tell stories of how workers, women, peasants, nocturnal sojourners, and other social groups dealt with, encountered, and employed time. In doing so, it lays the ground-work for studying time in both structural and experiential manner. It looks at the making of temporal regimes and cultures in various spheres of social life and how and why they changed over a period of time.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In the last thirty months, the project has progressed along various axes. Some of them were of the nature of ground preparation; others were related to research, writing, and planning of activities for possible future impact and output. Of the first nature was, and continues to be, regular discussion-meetings held amongst five members of the project, sometimes also involving invited experts. Particularly, for doctoral students it was important to get familiarized with the key texts and frameworks used in the history of time. Later, once fieldtrips were undertaken by various members in their second year, we also organized discussions around interpretation of primary sources. This period was also used to present individual and overall project hypotheses and objectives at various academic centres (mostly virtually) to gather the necessary feedback.
The scope of the project is wide and hence keeping feasibility in mind we organized events with varying focus in each of them. For instance, in October 2021, we organized a workshop, Early Modern Temporalities, to specifically address the concerns of time and temporality in the early modern period of South Asia. In June 2022, we collaborated with CeMIS (University of Goettingen), in organising The Time and Space of Railways, a conference in which modern technologies and industrial work organisation, with deep bearing on time-standardisation and time-discipline, were addressed. In the last one year, the project has moved from its formative to intermediate level where some members have finished considerable parts of their archival research and have written drafts of chapters and articles. This was also the time when such findings were presented to the larger academic community in various established conferences such as the European Social Science History Congress (Gothenburg, April 2023) and European Conference on South Asian Studies (Turin, July 2023). Besides, in October 2022, we also organized the first international conference of TIMEHIST at Centre for Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi, in which more than twenty-five participants presented their papers.
The main results at the time of the reporting are: satisfactory progress of doctoral and postdoctoral work in terms of preparation of draft chapters and journal-articles; and, organization of three main events (workshops and conferences) from which presentations are now being processed for future publications.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

For various reasons, TIMEHIST will be at the forefront of opening a new field of inquiry in South Asian history. The existing studies have very marginally explored a social history of time through people’s practices, as and when they interacted with ideas and ideological constructions of time across the period of three centuries. The paucity of studies can be gauged from the fact that unlike other world regions, South Asian history does not have a basic empirical study on devices such as the water clock and the mechanical clock. Even for the very usual topics such as the standardization of time across modern institutions such as the army, the school, the office, and the factory, our existing scholarship is very patchy. Similarly, barring a few studies on colonial modernity and its deferred temporal characteristic emerging out of imperial polemics or of middle-class engagement with the tyranny of clock-centric clerical work, we do not know much about how time-keeping practices changed in South Asia. When did certain transformations occur, say, from measuring time through the use of water clocks to that of the mechanical clock? How did people assimilate the growing use of Gregorian calendar with their other vernacular calendars, which continues to define ritual practices for a majority of South Asians even now? How did practices based upon such transformations then reflect in changing conceptions about time as encapsulated in sensory and social practices registering time’s passage through leisure and waiting, speed and delay? How were work-patterns across agrarian fields and industrial complexes changing due to the interlacing of various temporal rhythms ranging from monsoon to international shipping and trade, from irrigation wells to urban migration? The research units of this project are geared to generate a first-time account on many of these questions. The project will question the device/technology-centrism in the existing scholarship while at the same time situate the changes of the modern time in the practices existing through previous centuries.
The expected results include two doctoral theses; five to seven peer-reviewed individual journal articles; and two to four edited volumes or special issues in prestigious journals. The result also includes a blog with thematic and methodological pieces. It is highly possible that by the end of the project Sengupta would have significant parts of his draft monograph written.

Goddess Kali in Defence of Devotees @"From the Priya Paul Collection at Tasveer Ghar"