To understand the history of the modern Indian mind is to learn how Indians understand historical memory

On December 1, 1881, the British governor of Bombay, James Fergusson, informed the residents of that city that from that day onwards, “Madras time shall be kept in all offices under the control of Government and shall be held to be the official time for all purposes.” Madras time was about 40 minutes ahead of Bombay’s local time. What followed that decision was great acrimony, letter-writing campaigns, and newspaper editorials that bemoaned the rise of confusion over which time to follow where. Meanwhile, the Bombay Chamber of Commerce convinced the Bombay university to hold a referendum on whether the clock tower should display Madras or Bombay time. Predictably, there was no surprise. The vote was to show Bombay time and, like petty bureaucrats, the Fergusson administration cut off funds to light the clock at night for displaying “unofficial time”. It took nearly 44 years after the introduction of the Indian Standard Time in 1906 for the Bombay Municipal Corporation to finally agree to abandon its adherence to Bombay time and bring to an end the little-remembered ‘44-Year-Old Battle of Clocks’.

Organising society

That time itself has a history has a counter-intuitive ring to it. But, when a well-worn cliché such as ‘India is a country where different centuries coexist’ is employed by many Indians and foreigners, liberals and conservatives, what they are doing is presenting a mental model of India wherein historical time becomes a way to organise society. According to this cliché, India is merely an assemblage of various historical moments placed contiguously, chock-a-block, which, through some miracle, manages to function. In this view, Indians are merely stand-ins for historical moments, human synecdoches if you will. However, most Indian lives belie such convenient metaphors. Instead, many Indians derive their self-conceptions of who they are from a variety of strong and weak commitments towards different social institutions that arose in a variety of historical contexts.

From music to social order, from religious ideas to aesthetics — within each Indian, there exist residues of centuries past. Thus, any description of Indian history is inextricably tangled up with the simultaneity of historical memories that reside within Indians. Viewed thus, most Indians are merely vessels through which ‘time’ manifests in the guise of traditions and historical memories. This, of course, is true of most people across the world. But unlike much of the secular West, Indian self-representations relies on memories — call it culture — that may not be old in itself but is nevertheless granted the imprimatur of age.

The study of time

Despite this importance of time in memory and historical self-representation, historians worldwide have been relatively slow to study the understanding of ‘time’ itself as a subject in human societies. This is even more pronounced in India. After some fascinating work in the late 1970s and mid-1980s by the German philosopher of history, Reinhart Koselleck, and the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, the study of ‘time’ itself as a proper historical subject of enquiry was eclipsed by the study of memory. Questions such as how does historical memory operate, what is sacralised in social memory, how does nostalgia take over societies, etc. became more prevalent. However, the dynamics of how time inveigles itself into social imagination began to make a comeback in the English-speaking world thanks, in part, to the great historian Benedict Anderson’s landmark work Imagined Communities. Anderson noted that the rise and proliferation of modernity was marked by the transition from “a medieval conception of simultaneity-along-time” to ideas about “homogenous, empty time… measured by clock and calendar”. Thus, echoing Koselleck’s and Walter Benjamin’s work, what he suggested was that as modernity emerged, human instincts and institutions that understood time underwent a transformation.

Time, at least in European traditions, instead of being bookended by Creation and the Second Coming of Christ, now became more open-ended, agnostic, and homogeneous in its flow, sweep, and explanatory powers. Irrespective of your belief in religion or membership in a community of co-believers, modernity declared that individuals and societies belong in the same flow of time — each subject to the same imperium of the clock wherein one second follows another. However, implicit in this understanding, as the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty noted, is that if we are all swimming in the same river of time, some of us will need to be represented as ‘ahead’ and some ‘behind’. Those left ‘behind’, like India, he notes, are in turn described as having failed to “keep an appointment with its destiny” and thus forever condemned to playing catch up with Europe. Thus, what follows are postcolonial complexes and reactionary efforts to compensate for the perceived lack or the proliferation of what V.S. Naipaul calls “mimic men”.

In essence, to understand the history of the modern Indian mind then is indistinguishable from learning how Indians understand historical memory and, more fundamentally, how their understanding of time itself has changed as they arrived late into the pageant halls of modernity.