Timely Histories: A Social History of Time in South Asia

This project aims to write the history of time and temporal cultures in South Asia between the 1500s and the 1950s on a practice- and process-based history.

Covering this broad timespan under five modular units, the objective is to investigate and write the graded pasts of shifts and transformations within them.

In doing so, it departs from the usual approaches that focus either on the device (clock) or on the modern nation-state institutions such as army, school, factory, and office.

Instead, while going beyond device-centrism, it puts othered spaces of temporal practices such as field, farm, jungle, and river in the centre of the times history.The projects novelty is in the combined strength of transcending the widely applied frameworks across regions as well as in opening new fields of inquiry for South Asia.

By generating rich empirical works, guided by interdisciplinary theoretical approaches, five clearly laid-out units will achieve this.One, the history of work and time in which instead of factory and clock the focus is on ecology and legality across agrarian, informal, and industrial sites; two, the role of nocturnal time in shaping the practices of social transgressions but crucially in constituting the rule of law; three, the history of hidden scripts of waiting and delay that have been neglected under the weight of technologies of speed; four, the history of the future as imagined and shaped by people using diverse resources ranging from life insurance to visiting religious time-tellers; and five, an independent unit on the early modern period that would break the rigid periodisation in history writing by exploring continuous and changing time-practices.

Temporal modernity, the project argues, emerged from the existing temporal cultures rather than supplant them.

Through its bold yet feasible scope, TIMEHIST promises to establish temporality as an independent analytical category in studies on spatiality, colonialism, and social history.