THE TYRANNY OF TIME

Do some pasts have no future?

It was the Santals who helped us understand that colonialism is an undeserved intervention into another time, forcing the colonised to painfully begin to live in terms of a time, a calendar, not its own. When they rebelled against the colonial authorities, declaring that they could make `two days into one, and two nights into one', they were reminding us that time is what we make it. That the time of modernity and the Christian calendar do not fit, or need to fit, the entire world.

by Prathama Banerjee

Now, those who said, like Augustine, that they could intuit but not quite know time, were no longer taken as philosophers. In fact, they were exiled from the time of history itself. They became anachronisms in the contemporary world -- peoples who lived in a time which was far past and peoples who, therefore, lived in lands, far, far away from the centre of the world. The catch-line -- `the past is another country' -- took on meanings that defied the neat divisions of national and territorial boundaries which had promised to make life simple with the advent of modernity and historical self-consciousness.

These peoples, who expressed incredulity about the assumed self-evidence of a universal, linear, chronological, empty, `objective' time, came to be variously known as primitives, aborigines, tribes, adivasis and so on.  Though, or perhaps because, they were posited outside mainstream historical time, `primitives' became extraordinarily important in the discourses of modernity. Everybody needed the `primitive' -- the white man needed him/her as the slave, he also needed him/her to prove the `white man's burden', the ideology par excellence of colonialism. And paradoxically, the colonised middle-classes of even India needed them badly. They not only needed `primitives' as indentured and migrant labourers who could do the hard work of reclaiming forests, planting tea and mining coal. They also needed `primitives' to alleviate the colonised man's historical guilt for being colonised in the first place. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, author of the song Vande Mataram and the first Indian intellectual to call for the writing of a collective nationalist historiography, got himself in a fix when he unquestioningly accepted, in the terms of 19th century European thought, that history was synonymous with succession/inheritance, and succession coterminous with time/chronology. He insisted that the nation, now colonised, inherited a glorious past. Yet, in order to causally explain how such a valorous nation could fall prey to foreign (British/Muslim) invasion in the present, he had to admit an internal weakness in this past, thus having to contaminate the flawless past that a nation must succeed to, in order to become a nation at all. There was only one way out of this double-bind -- the invocation of the `primitive'. Bankim  resolved his historical guilt by arguing that when Muslims conquered Bengal, Bengal was inhabited by `aborigines' -- Aryans/Hindus from the north were yet to settle in the East. The triumph of foreign conquest, to Bankim therefore, was the defeat of `primitives', not a defeat of the Hindu nation that he stood for and that he wrote the history of. And not just Bankim, even those who, in modern times, argued against the pace, ruthlessness, alienation of the present, needed the `primitive'. The 'primitive' became for them the natural, the sensual, the aesthetic savage -- a resolution which even Satyajit Ray had to take recouse to at the end of his final film, Agantuk.

In this elaborate, modernist invention and appropriation of `primitive' time as a counterpoise to history and modernity, what was missed was the fact that historical time as we understand it and colonialism itself came as a single package. While this missing out was the result of the wishing away of the words and practices of the many peoples henceforth labelled `primitive' or `backward', this exercise of labelling and exclusion itself put such peoples or `tribes' in a crucial position, from where a total critique of modernity and its attendant idea of history became possible. The Santals, for instance, known as the `tribe' inhabiting Bengal and South Bihar today, had formulated an alternative way of living and articulating the event of colonialism, the rhetorical and critical significance of which was missed by the authors of history, precisely because it, along with questioning the temporal notions of colonial-modernity, also questioned the time of history and historicism, the only way in which self-conscious moderns seemed to be able to make sense of time, as it were. Thus, while the authors of Indian/nationalist history ended up by making colonial conquest, a unique, one-time and evidently much later event, into a common metaphor of all time-markers of national history -- a history which began with Aryan `conquest', entered the second phase with `Muslim conquest' and passed into modernity with British conquest, thus succumbing in its very time-reckoning and periodisation to the colonial idea of political history. The Santals saw colonialism as an irreversible interruption of their story. So much so that their ancestors' story, which  began from the time of creation and ran unmediated into the present, had to suddenly stop growing with the coming of colonialism. It was clear that the same narrative could not accommodate the past and the colonial present -- for the two belonged to two times. They did not belong to the same history. In the first place, colonialism must be understood for what it was -- an undeserved intervention into  another time, which required the colonised to painfully and often at the cost of self-destruction, try to begin to live in terms of a time, a calendar, a measuring unit, not its own. After all, that is how the `primitive' was defined in the last instance -- as an obsolete people living in modernity, in a time which has already and irrevocably passed, as a residual survival subsisting in a time which belonged somewhere else, and to somebody else.

No wonder, when the Santals rebelled against the colonial authorities and Bengali moneylenders in the mid-19th century, they exclaimed that their time had finally come -- when they could make, by the intent of their own political practice, `two days into one, and two nights into one'. While this may seem like a curious poetic flourish in the midst of the violence of rebellion, this statement had said something which the most polemical of national histories never did. It had said that, after all, time is only what we make it. Time is how we practice time -- not something we must catch up with, nor something, like sedentary property, which we lack and others own, in the way the nationalist ideas of great pasts and modern presents would have us believe. The Santals, because they were forced to appear as `primitives' and `tribes' in colonial modernity, reminded  historians like no one else did, that the colonial present was neither the chronological nor the logical succession to our past, our time. It was a contingent visitation, neither explained nor deserved, by our historical pasts. It is not that we don't fit in, it is rather that the time of modernity and the Christian calendar do not quite fit, nor need to fit, the entire world.

If the Santals said that the colonial present was not the logical future deserved by their own pasts, it is perhaps time to take this extra-historical assertion seriously. Especially by a post-colonial nation like ours, which lives under the perpetual anxiety of having to repeat ad nauseam its great antiquity and glorious history while all the time longing to  become a wee bit more modern than others of its kind. Such an anxiety only produces the image offered by the Hindu right -- the image of great traditionalism and high modernity, of traditional values and modern achievements, of traditional women and modern men, of traditional domesticity and modern history! The suffering caused by this national schizophrenia would simply appear unnecessary if we acknowledge with the so-called `primitive' Santals that our past had possibilities of different futures, a set of possibilities that might take us along paths different from the `third-world modernity' that we take as fait accompli, and perhaps might make us as a nation more at ease with ideas of time and death and obsolescence and extinction.

The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one
 -- Albert Einstein