ABSTRACT This article introduces a Special Issue that brings together interdisciplinary studies—historical, anthropological, sociological, and literary—to examine time and temporality in South Asia. It advances the argument that time, as a foundational dimension of human experience, and temporality, as its lived expression, are best understood as socially constituted, and embedded in everyday relationships and practices. Individually, the essays examine macro-orderings of time shaped by natural, economic, and political structures, while elucidating how individuals and collectives engage with and reconstitute these temporal regimes in socially situated ways. Not stopping at narrating the plurality of temporal experiences, the Issue offers critical insight into time’s relationship with power, value, affect, and the like. The Issue also departs from two dominant approaches to time in South Asian studies. First, it moves beyond an exclusive focus on canonical time-determining devices such as the clocks and the railways, and instead highlights how they and other material objects performed time-keeping functions in a socially contested manner. Second, it distinguishes temporality from an overemphasis on historicity that has characterised thinking around time in South Asian writing. This Issue recentres temporality through themes of work-time, ecology, governance, religiosity, and agrarian processes as lived practices of social life.

ABSTRACT This paper considers the crucial point that, when the hegemony of Western modes of time reckoning began expanding over the structure and experience of childhood in colonial Bengal, it yielded a negative evaluation for child-initiated unstructured sport and a positive thrust for study. By analysing mid-nineteenth-century Bengali didactic children’s literature, mostly produced to meet the ever-increasing demand for Western pedagogy in colonial primary and secondary schools, this paper traces how the Western valuation of disciplinary time influenced the colonial commentators’ (both European missionaries and Bengali intelligentsia) understanding of children’s sport. It shaped the literary opposite binaries of the good studious child and the bad playful child as well as between playing at the proper time and ill-timed play. In other words, this paper explores the literary design through which the emergence of the disciplinary aspect of clock time in colonial Bengal made children’s sport a site of ethical intervention and an important trope of colonial discourse on fabricating a useful individual.

ABSTRACT In the chars or the river islands of Assam, northeast India, flood has more than one meaning. They are products of the two competing temporal frameworks existing in the regions. One of them is a relational framework, where flood is an everyday process. It is built around the social practices central to char inhabitants, who rely on the three interrelated seasonal river processes of inundation, erosion, and accretion. The second is an episodic framework, where a flood is seen as a single and sudden river process. The state projects this disaster discourse through the various flood-management infrastructures, which include high-yielding variety (HYV) rice, agri bunds or mud embankments, and raised platforms. Further, while these two temporal frameworks may seem like extremes, with one emerging from the char and the other from the state, I show that they exist dialectically. I also caution against considering char inhabitants’ relationship to the floods and ecology as intrinsically more relational. For various political and economic reasons, some within the char are adherents of the state discourse. The relationship between the two frameworks is complex. This has consequences for the overall understanding of flooding and the river islands of the Brahmaputra. Overall, this paper has two goals: (a) to outline the two competing meanings of flood in the chars of Assam, and (b) to critique the episodic understanding of flood in Assam.

ABSTRACT This article explores the ideas of speed and delay in early colonial eastern India. Focusing on the construction of the Kedgeree Road in coastal Bengal, it talks about the repeated colonial attempts to change the environmental balance of a marshy landscape. Drawing material from the colonial postal archives, it charts the desperate British ambitions to connect India to a global trading network. The scholarship on speed studies hardly touches upon the era before industrialization and the arrival of the railways. This article fills this gap by studying the road survey programmes of early colonial eastern India. Kedgeree was well-connected to Calcutta through water transport. But the common notion that roads serve as speedier communication arteries compelled the Postal Department to build an effective road on that route. The officers made a range of experiments to make the project successful. They replaced human runners with horses and mail carts, and invited contractors to transport mails at the stipulated speed, though ‘speed’ was never standardized in the pre-railway era. I conclude that the invisible Kedgeree Road symbolized the colonial failure to change the environment. The road was nothing but a metaphor of speed.

ABSTRACT Histories of the railways in South Asia accumulated in the last years but their labour history, especially that of the railway workshops, remains partial. Labour historians investigating other industries on the subcontinent have argued for the historical dynamism of workplaces and their role in shaping patterns of labour deployment. This article investigates the changes of production inside the Great Indian Peninsula Railway workshops at Parel (Bombay) during the 1920s. While it substantiates the importance of the historical dynamism of workplaces, it does so by looking at the changing control of labour-time. The latter is accessed through the central reorganization of production in the workshops in the mid-1920s and situates these developments within the contentious relationship between management and labour. It becomes discernable that the increasing control of labour-time within the confines of the working day by changes in management methods was implemented due to increasing labour militancy and shaped by global management debates.

ABSTRACT The association of corruption with state planning is a key trope in the literature on India’s erstwhile planning regime, pejoratively named the ‘License Raj.’ Writers often shore up temporal ideas to advance this association, alleging that corruption is an inevitable feature of state planning. These temporal ideas range from an association of corruption with inefficiency, the division between the ‘modern’ and the ‘pre-modern,’ and, finally, various horizons of the past which notions of corruption conjure up: ancient, colonial, or otherwise. Through close reading of texts that depict corruption as inherent to India and to industrial policy, this article explores how temporal ideas advance a view of corruption that legitimates market liberalisation. As such, it reveals insight into the relationship between time and dominant notions of corruption.

ABSTRACT This article explores the idea of peasant time as recorded in the compact-sized diaries of a Kashmiri peasant. The recordings which appear in the form of short and terse notations and manifest the diarist’s persistent concern over weather conditions represent an example of what may be described as textual time. Weaving a narrative that employs the practice of microhistory, the article not only seeks to comprehend the specificities of textual time but argues that conceptions of time, and more specifically peasant time, while implicated in the temporalities of nature are socially and culturally determined and may vary across contexts and historical periods. Thus while peasant time may be associated with ‘task-orientation’, the peasants may yet have a lively sense of ‘time discipline’ and therefore, the two aspects need not necessarily be postulated in terms of a duality or difference.

ABSTRACT The North Indian city of Allahabad is perhaps best known today for its two religious fairs – the annual Magh fair, and the twelve-yearly Kumbh fair, both of which attract millions of pilgrims to the city (the latter having the distinction of being the largest gathering of humans on earth). The city, however, is home also to a large community of pilgrimage priests (panḍās). In addition to facilitating countless everyday rituals, each family of priests is distinguished by its possession of centuries-old pilgrimage ledgers (bahīs), in which they maintain genealogies for the pilgrims to whom they cater. Even though Hindu panḍits have received extensive ethnographic attention in their capacity as ritualists, surprisingly little has been written about their role in gathering and preserving genealogical knowledge. Rather than merely securing ascriptive (i.e. caste) identities, these ledgers represent complex processes of memorialisation, tethering pilgrims not just to caste, region, and broader kinship networks, but also to particular temporal rhythms. I show how attending to these ledgers ethnographically opens up a rather different aspect of temporality than textual studies of, say, Purāṇic texts might reveal. Specifically, I find that not only is one’s allegiance (whether one is a priest or a pilgrim) to the ‘cyclical’ time of Purāṇic yugas purely nominal, but also, by way of an examination of the genealogical records maintained by pilgrimage priests at Allahabad, that these putatively ‘linear’ genealogies end up performing a rather different kind of temporal work as well: that of subtly eliding the historicity of Purāṇic tradition altogether.