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.
