The Concept of Time in South Asia
Fluid Time/Creating
Futures / CoVA Seminar Series 2021
Centre of
Visual Arts, University of Melbourne
The best indicator of the South Asian
attitude to time lies is in the Urdu/ Hindi word “kal”
The word “kal” can be used for
yesterday or tomorrow, as are its extensions, parson , tarson and narson words
to describe up to three days before or after today ( aaj). The context of the sentence in which the
words are used indicate whether the past or the future is indicated.
This suggests time is not an objective
truth but in fact is relative to perception, open to interpretation, variable,
and places the narrator in control.
The objective approach focuses on the “what”
outside of self; while subjective focuses on the agency of the “who”.
South Asians live simultaneously, and
with great ease, in many different time frames.
For daily business and civil matters, the international Gregorian
calendar and the 24-hour clock are used. Office and school times, train
schedules or keeping appointments, all follow these systems.
But then it gets complicated. In 1952,
it was determined that there were 30 different calendars in use in India. Many variations of Hindu Jain, Buddhist,
Zoroastrian, Islamic calendars. Some are lunar some solar. Some follow lunar
months but solar years.
The January to December calendar is
used alongside a calendar based on Seasons:
spring, summer, monsoon, autumn, prewinter and winter; or religious
festivals such as Holi,Diwali, Raksha Bandhan and Dusera for Hindus, and
festivals such as Eid ul Fitr, Eid ul Azzha and Eid e milad un Nabi, and the
mourning month of Muharram for Muslims.
The chronology of time is equally
varied: The Hindu calendar takes us back to over 300 trillion earth years,
divided into cycles. The Muslim Hijri calendar begins with the migration of the
Prophet Muhamad to Medina in 622 CE. For example, this year for Muslims is
1443, for Buddhists its 2563.
Ancient South Asian religious texts
describe events in a timeless context. Modern historians try to place the
narratives in the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Vedas in a time frame, but
the message is intended to be an eternal message and the memory of the
narrative is what matters.
The Mughal Emperors on the other hand,
seemed to be conscious of making history, and wrote extensively and in minute
detail every aspect of the battles fought, impressions formed, even what was
cooked in the royal kitchen.
The first Mughal Emperor, Babar, wrote
a daily diary even during battles from his camp tent. This desire for accuracy
may go back to the ancient Arab system of scrupulously giving the sequential lineage
of each account of the Prophet Muhammad’s sayings or actions. Muslim prayers offered five times a day also gave
importance to the accurate measurement of time.
The sighting of the first sliver of
the moon is an important event for Muslims to determine the start of the lunar
month which can be 29 or 30 days. This is especially significant at the end of
the month of fasting, Ramadhan when people gather on rooftops just after sunset
hoping to catch a glimpse of the new moon.
In Pakistan, an official committee takes
the final decision after reports of sightings arrive from different parts of
the country, which while a serious event, creates an opportunity for poking fun
at the committee.
Just to complicate things further, the
dependence on the sighting of the moon also means the Muslim calendar varies
from country to country.
All the ascetic and Sufi traditions of South
Asia believe the world is transient -Maya or Fana- and therefore of little
consequence in comparison with eternal time.
Time in the West gradually became independent
of nature. Instead devices such as hourglasses, measured candles, water clocks
and finally the quartz clock that can measure milliseconds freed timekeeping
from the movement of the sun
These measuring devices are
universally used including in South Asia. Although in the early 19 Century,
Rajah Jai Singh II built five observatories called Jantar Mantars that could
measure the time of day with an accuracy of about 2 seconds, for the majority
time is negotiable.
Years were once known by significant events
rather than numbers such as the Year of Sorrow, or the Year of the Elephant.
The smallest unit of time in the ancient texts was the time taken to blink the
eye. At the other end, one day for
Brahma is equal to 4 billion human years. Muslims believe that after we die,
our time on earth will seem as if it was but three or four days.
It is often said the people of South Asia live
simultaneously in many eras. Traditional lifestyles live side by side with the
latest technologies. Migrant workers bring their village lifestyle to the city
and take back urban attitudes and technology back to their villages.
Within the city itself time slips
easily between past and present. Many
South Asian cities have an ancient history and practice traditional rituals at
festivals or Sufi shrines alongside urban modernization.
Varanasi on the banks of the holy
Ganges river, has remained a major pilgrimage site throughout history, but also
has new shopping malls and modern apartment buildings. Even a modern city like Karachi has the
Mahadev Temple where Shiva dwelt and the 8th century shrine of
Abdullah Ghazi with festivals and visitors throughout the year.
Time can also stand still: the pattern
on the garment worn by the priest king of the 8000 year old Indus Civilization
continues to be used in modern ajrak textiles of Sindh.
Time can be constantly renewed. When a
newly redecorated truck writes Model no 2021 on a 1970s Bedford Truck with the
phrase “ time has once again made me a bride” it suggests time is whatever the
decorator wants it to be.
Time is an important component in
music and dance. Classical music and
dance of South Asia is rarely either slow or fast, but incorporates all tempos.
The Alaap that a raag with begin with
is slow, creating the atmosphere of the raag. It will then establish a moderate
rhythm with the main verses, and end in a breathtaking speed of flourishes or
Dhrut.
The same devices are used in classical
dance. Specific Ragas are to be played
at specific times of the 24 hour day, usually in three hour blocks reserved for
each raga.
The value of a classical musician is
gauged by his skill with free improvisations, picking up the mathematical
framework at the summ beat.
Fleeting time or
endless waiting are recurrent themes in South Asian poetry . The poet
Sahir Ludhianvi’s poem became a famous Bollywood song
Mai Pal Do
Pal Kaa Shaayar Hun
Pal Do Pal
Meri Kahaani Hai
Pal Do Pal
Meri Hasti Hai
Pal Do Pal
Meri Javaani Hai
I am the
poet of a few moments
My story
will last only a few moments
My life is
only for a few moments
My youth
will last only a few moments.
Mughal Miniatures play with both time
and space. Instead of the single perspective of Western painting, multiple
events are presented in what has been called piled up perspective using
separate eye levels.
Artists and Art critic Quddus Mirza
writes “the perspective in miniature painting was about perceiving the tangible
world not entangled in ephemeral and sensory encounters, but as a calculated
cartography of eternal reality”.
One senses the intensity of the artist
studiously depicting the layered reality of a space or a time in its entirety.
The Neo miniatures of Lahore, such as
Shahzia Sikander and Nusra Latif Qureshi ironically reach back 700 years in the
past to find an old medium, to depict contemporary subjects, and make playful
reference to the compression of different time frames, and multiple
perspectives.
Rashid Rana’s play on images embedded
within images is another interpretation of piled up perspective such as his Red Carpet 2006 and Desperately Seeking Paradise 2007-8
Bhupen Khakar and N.S Harsha while not working in the genre of
miniature painting, nod towards it, as well as the Ajanta murals and temple
carving.
Many have asked the question: Does
time exist? Or is it a human construct? How can time be anything but fluid?
Jalauddin Rumi said you cannot put your hand in the same river twice. In the
time taken to remove and re-dip the hand, the waters have changed. So to it is
with time – ever flowing and ever changing.
Durriya Kazi
Karachi
September 27 2021
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