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Modern Asian Studies47, 4 (2013)pp. 12521282. C Cambridge University Press 2012doi:10.1017/S0026749X11000527 First published online13 November2012

Time-Sense: Railways and Temporality in

Colonial India

R I T I K A P R A S A D

University of North Carolina at CharlotteEmail: [email protected]

Abstract

This paper traces the establishment of standardized railway time in colonialIndia between1854 and1905, and explores how the colonizedas passengersand populationnegotiated the temporal re-structuring introduced throughrailways. Millions were affected by the process through which the time ofa single meridian was selected as an all-India railway time, and graduallydeemed civil time, continuing even today as Indian Standard Time. The paperexplores everyday responses to this dramatic change in time-sense engenderedthrough railways, both as speedy transport and as standardized time. This

allows for a historical analysis of how individuals and societies deal in practicewith abstract technological transformations, and of how colonized populationshave navigated the modernizing intervention of imperialist states. It arguesthat the ways in which the population of colonial India accepted, contested,and appropriated the temporal standardization instituted through railways andrailway time challenged imperial policies determined by reified presumptionsof metropolitan versus colonial time-sense. Since these responses were oftenanalogous to how people and societies across the globe were responding totemporal standardization, they disrupt imperial strategies that used time-senseto locate colonized populations outside of History, in effect excluding them from

their own present. They thus serve to materially de-stabilize a narrative of colonialtime-lag and to reclaim the historical present as a time in which the colonizer andcolonized exist contemporaneously. Consequently, they reconfigure modernity asan experiential rather than as a normative historical present.

I am grateful to my colleagues at UNC Charlotte and to the Modern Asian Studiesreviewers for their careful reading of the draft; also to John David Smith and DavidGilmartin for their generosity and advice.

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R A I L W A Y S A N D C O L O N I A L T E M P O R A L I T Y 1253

Introduction

All hours of the twenty-four are alike to Orientals,and their passenger traffic is regulated accordingly.1

In 1919, a shopkeeper from Gujranwala who had been accused ofwaging war against the British imperial state, defended himself withan alibi based on railway timetables. Under section121of the IndianPenal Code regulating offences against the state, Jagannath wascharged with fomenting agitation in Gujranwala on 12and13April1919.2 Offering railway timetables as his alibi, Jagannath argued thatit was physically impossible for him to have done so. He explained that

he had left Gujranwala for Kathiawar on12April by the five p.m. train;producing witnesses to corroborate his presence in Dhoraji on16April,he argued that since it took44 hours to reach Dhoraji from Delhi bythe fastest train, it was impossible for him to have been in Gujranwalaafter 6 p.m. on 13 April. The court permitted him to summon

witnesses to prove his alibi, but actually pronounced judgment withoutwaiting for them. Jagannaths Case became somewhat of an albatrossaround the imperial neck, particularly when Mohandas Gandhithe

Indian nationalist himself trained as a lawyerspoke out against thismiscarriage of justice, insisting that railway timetables completelyestablished Jagannaths alibi.3

The use of railway timetables as a legal defence by Jagannathaman of humble position and statuspoints to how the introductionof railways as a popular mode of travel in the mid-nineteenth centuryaffected everyday life in colonial India. The imperative of adaptingto this dramatic technological change was certainly not specific tocolonized populations. In the nineteenth century railways were viewed

globally as heralding progression to the modern, both as transport

1 Rudyard Kipling,Kim (London: Penguin,1989[1901]), p.74.2 The meetings were against the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act which

allowed the imperial government to retain coercive powers assumed under theDefence of India Act (1915). The prosecution argued that the meetings of12 and13 April were central in Gujranwalas decision to replicate the violence exhibitedearlier in the city of Amritsar. Government of India, Legislative Department,Indian

Penal Code (Act XLV of1860): modified to 1 May, 1896 (Calcutta: Superintendant ofGovernment printing,1896), p. 66. M. K. Gandhi, Jagannaths Case, Young India,30July1919, reproduced in idem,Law and the Lawyers, compiled and edited by S. B.Kher (Ahmedabad: Navjivan,1962), pp.7174.

3 Gandhi, Jagannaths Case, pp.7174.


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1254 R I T I K A P R A S A D

technology and historical stage.4 However, in colonial India (andcolonial contexts more broadly), the imperial state perceived theintended effect of railway transport and travel rather specifically: as a

speedy mechanism to literally transport temporally backward societiesinto a normative historical modern. According to an imperial official

writing in 1846, railways were that mighty engine of improvementwhich would cause the slumbering spirit of India to awake from thesleep of ages, the sleep of apathy, superstition, and prejudice.5

The temporal emphasis of such anticipation was heightened in theprocess of developing a standardized railway time for scheduling andcoordinating Indias railway network.6 In1905a half century afterthe first passenger train ran in India (1853) and 14 years before

Jagannaths trial (1919)the imperial government completed theprocess of standardizing railway time in British India. Set five hoursand thirty minutes ahead of the time of the Greenwich meridianin England (0 0 0), this all-India railway timecontinuing eventoday as Indian Standard Time (IST)was intended as more than atechnical mechanism for coordinating the safe movement of Indiasrailways. Instead, the imperial state expected it to provide a uniformtime for India and, by linking it mathematically with Greenwich time,

to make the colony temporally modern and rational.By tracing the process and effects of temporal restructuring

engendered by railways, this paper examines how railways and railwaytravel affected practices, sensibilities, and relationships in colonialIndia. It probes not only how societies grapple in everyday life with

vast technological transformations, but also how colonized populations

4 See, for instance, Ian Carters Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of

Modernity(Manchester: Manchester University Press,2001).5 W. P. Andrew,Indian Railways and their Probable Results, with Maps and an Appendix

Containing Statistics of Internal and External Commerce of India (London: T. C. Newby,1848[1846]), preface, p. vii.

6 In 19191920, India had a railway network of36,616miles, on which roughly520million passengers had travelled.Statistical Abstracts relating to British India: 191011 to191920(London: HMSO,1922), p.138. The initial commercial line from Bombayto Thana became operational in 1853. Railway construction was undertaken byprivate, London-based firms, with capital raised predominantly from British investors.The East Indian Railway Company (EIR) and the Great Indian Peninsular RailwayCompany (GIPR), both formedin1845, were the early entrants. The British East IndiaCompany leased to them for99 years all land required for railways without charge,and guaranteed a five per cent return on stockholder investment. The enterprise wasprivate, though the Government of India possessed extensive powers over railwayplanning, finances, and execution. Ian J. Kerr, Building the Railways of the Raj (Delhi:Oxford University Press,1995), pp.1819.


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have navigated the administrative intervention of imperialist states.Given that the annual number of railway passengers in 1905 wasabout250million, remarkable numbers were affected by the ensuing

changes.

7

In addition to those regularly encountering train schedulesand railway timetables, the eventual institution of railway time as civiland national time in colonial India further broadened the purview ofeveryday negotiations of standardization.

Substantial scholarship on the relationship between railways andcolonial India, particularly the seminal work of economist DanielThorner in the 1950s and historian Ian Kerr in the 1990s, hassubstantively focused on how the financing and building of railwaysaffected capital and labour relations, industrial production, and

market integration in India.8 Though brief, the investigation of adeveloping colonial travelling public in work by Manu Goswami (2004)and Laura Bear (2007) is critical in two recent attempts to understandhow the unprecedented circulation of people engendered by railwaysaffected identity and community in India.9 Thus, chapter three ofGoswamis study of the spatial production of India as a national entity

7 Increasing from0.8 million in 1855, to 3.9 million in 1860, to 26.8 million in

1875, to80.9million in1885, to153 million in1895. (The estimated population ofIndia in 1901 was 294 million.) Statistical abstracts relating to British India: from 1840to 1865(London: HMSO,1867), p.58; from 1860to 1869(London: HMSO,1870),p. 30; from1867/8to 1876/7(London: HMSO,1878), p. 90; from 1876/7to1885/6(London: HMSO,1887), p.178; from189495to 190304(London: HMSO,1905),p.138;from190304to191213, p. 136.

8 Daniel Thorner,Investment in Empire: British Railway and Steam Shipping Enterprisein India 18251849 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950); idem,Capital Movement and Transportation: Great Britain and the Development of IndiasRailways,Journal of Economic History 11: 4 (Autumn1951): pp. 389402. Kerr,Buildingthe Railways of the Raj. Also, W. J. Macpherson, Economic Development in India underthe British Crown, 18581947, in Economic Development in the Long Run, ed. J. A.

Youngson (London: George Allen and Unwin,1972); W. J. Macpherson, The Patternof Railway Development in India,Far Eastern QuarterlyXIV (1995); I. D. Derbyshire,Economic Change and the Railways in North India,Modern Asian Studies 21: 3 (1987);

John M. Hurd, Railways, inCambridge Economic History of India, vol.2:circa1757circa1970, ed., Dharma Kumar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); MukulMukherjee, Railways and their Impact on Bengals Economy, 18701920, Indian

Economic and Social History Review XVII:2 (1980). An early essay by Dipesh Chakrabartyprobed the Bengal Renaissance through the views held by Bengali intellectuals aboutthe introduction of railways: The Colonial Context of the Bengal Renaissance: EarlyRailway Thinking in Bengal, Indian Economic Social History Review, January1974, vol.11: pp.192106.

9 Manu Goswami,Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 104, 117; Laura Bear, Lines of the Nation:

Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate Historical Self(Columbia: New York,2007).


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argues for railways as state spaces of mobile incarceration, while Bearexplores the intimate historical self of Indias premier railway caste.Related is Ian Kerrs more recent analysis of how railways in India have

been represented in textual, aural and visual media, a topic extensivelyexplored by Marian Aguiar (2010).10 The range of new departures iscollated in a2007volume edited by Kerr, entitled27Down.11

This paper begins by examining how assumptions about timeand time-reckoning informed both discussion and policy aboutstandardizing railway time in colonial India, and traces the officialprocess between 1854 and 1905 through which this temporalrestructuring was instituted. It then explores how, during the colonialperiod, Indians grappled in practice with railway temporality, both

as speedy transport and as railway time. It argues that imperialpolicy structured the standardization of railway time around notionsof colonial difference, articulated through reified ideas of colonial(and metropolitan) time-sense. However, the ways in which suchchanges were actually accepted, contested, and appropriated showsremarkable parallels across binaries of colonizer and colonized. Themultiplicity of responses is not surprising in itself given the constantlyincreasing size of the colonial travelling public and the intimate

relationship between railway and civil time. However, the breadth andheterogeneity of reactions and negotiations is materially indispensablein critiquing presumptions that decreed a civilizational hierarchy ofresponses to temporal standardization. Consequently, these responsesare crucial in reclaiming the historical modern as a time occupiedcontemporaneously by colonizer and colonized.

18541905: standardizing time in colonial India

Without coordinated times, cities, towns, and villages functioned on their own times,marking an individuality that remained unimportant before the railroad.12

10 Ian J. Kerr, Representation and Representations of the Railways of Colonialand Post-Colonial South Asia,Modern Asian Studies,37:2 (May,2003), pp.287326.Marian AguiarsTracking Modernity: India, Trains, and the Culture of Mobility (Universityof Minnesota,2010) explores representation of railway spaces.

11 Ian J. Kerr, ed., 27 Down: New Departures in Indian Railway Studies (OrientLongman,2007). This is in addition to his earlier anthology titledRailways in Modern

India (Delhi: Oxford, University Press, 2005), which had brought together bothprimary sources and existing scholarship on railway history.

12 Peter Gallison, Einsteins Clocks: The Place of Time, Critical Enquiry: 26: 2(winter2000): pp.355389, quote p.361.


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In the nineteenth century, the question of railroad time generatedextensive discussion globally. E. P. Thompsons classic work onthe relationship between work-discipline and industrial capitalism

demonstrates that clock-time was already widely in use.

13

However,it was the demands of coordinating railway transport that effectivelyspurred the spread of standardized time.14 The half-century between1854and 1905was rife with discussions about standardizing railwaytime in India. This involved (i) replacing local time with that ofthe presidency/province served by a particular railway system; (ii)replacing presidency/province time with an all-India time; and (iii)ensuring that this all-India time was mathematically related tothat of an internationally accepted base meridian at Greenwich.15

Although generated by railway companies concerned with technicalco-ordination and safety at junction points, these discussions alsoinvolved administrators at local and national levels, most notably civilservants in the public works department. They demonstrate not only adeep reliance on imperial imaginings of a reified and singular Indiantemporality, even among technical men and administrators, but alsoand frequently despite conflicting policy positionsthe remarkablestability of such reified understandings.

13 E. P. Thompson, Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism, Past andPresent, vol.38 (December1967): pp.5997.

14 David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 94; WolfgangSchivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Timeand Space in the19th Century

(Berkeley: University of California Press,1986[1977]), pp.4344; Todd S. Presner,Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains(New York: Columbia University Press,2007),pp. 6162. Eviatar Zerubavel points out that while the British mail-coach service,

which started in1748, nudged some towards recognizing the need for standardization,yet: It was not until the introduction of railway transportation, which affected a muchwider population, that the need for introducing a uniform standard of time at a supra-local level became crucial (p. 6). The Standardization of Time: A Socio-historicalPerspective,American Journal of Sociology88:1(July1982): pp.123. According to IanBartky, discussions about standardization of time in north America resulted fromthe scientific pursuits which in the1870s required simultaneous observations fromscattered points. However, he continues by saying that in response to pressuresfrom scientists, railroad superintendents and managers implemented a standard timesystem on18 November 1883. The Adoption of Standard Time, Technology and Culture30:1(January1989): pp.2556, quote on p.25.

15 The difference calculable in complete hours. Later, for India, the half-hour wasaccepted.


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Time and distance

In colonial India, these discussions about standardization were

integrally premised on an idea of colonized spaces and people beingtemporally distant from the historical present. This distancing iseffectively captured by Johannes Fabians notion of allochronism,

which he describes as a conjuring trick that separates in historicaltime those who actually exist in shared time.16 His understanding ofit as a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s)of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producerof anthropological discourse is morphologically similar to how ateleological rendering of temporality was used to understand the

historical role of railways in colonial Indiaand to underpin theprocess of standardizing time here. This temporal distancing ofcolonized populations was argued through defining a singular Indiansense of time, characterized as pre-modern, which was then juxtaposedagainst anormativeidea of modern, which excluded the colonized fromtheir own present.17 In the colony, modernity thus became a world ofco-existent yet non-contemporary beings.18

This characterization of colonial temporality was not new to the mid-

nineteenth century when discussions about standardized railway timebegan to take place. Romila Thapar has traced how eighteenth-centuryIndologists, who were unable to cross-reference Biblical and Classicalinformation with Indian texts, deemed time-sense in India as cyclicaland, consequently, incapable of comprehending historical change,arguing that cyclicality prevented any event from being unique.19 Thiscyclical and mythic pre-modern Indian time-sense was then juxtaposedagainst a reified idea of a modern metropolitan time-sense, described

as linear and historical: capable of emphasizing the uniqueness of

16 Johannes Fabian,Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object(New York:Columbia,2000[1983]), quotes on pp. x,23,31,32.

17 Ibid., p. 31. See also Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, eds, Culture, Power andPlace, Explorations in Critical Anthropology (London: Duke, 1997); Anthony Giddens,The Consequences of Modernity(Stanford: Stanford University Press,1990), p.174; andDipesh Chakrabarty,Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference(Princeton: Princeton University Press,2000).

18 See Prathma Banerjees discussion of History-writing inPolitics of Time: Primitivesand History-writing in a Colonial Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,2006),p. 4.

19 Romila Thapar, Time as a Metaphor of History: Early India (Delhi: Oxford UniversityPress, 1996), especially pp. 46. Also Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Bloomington:Indiana University Press,2002[1990]), and Peter Marshall, ed.,The British Discovery

of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1970).


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particular events, whilst making them non-recurring. Indologicalscholarship thus used temporal distancing devices (cyclical, repetitive)and adjectives (mythical) to distance in time societies and people who

actually existed contemporaneously in the present.

20

Of immediaterelevance here is not the palpable ahistoricity of such reificationwhich misrepresented temporality in both colony and metropole21but how deeply these influenced official discussion and policy decisionsabout standardizing time in colonial India.

Synchronizing the colony

Almost as soon as passenger trains began running in India, officialdiscussion about the time to be observed generally on Indian railwayswas initiated by Colonel Baker, the governments consulting engineerfor railways. In1854, when railway mileage in India stood at35milesin Bombay presidency (with 121 miles in Bengal presidency beingadded in 1855), he argued that Indias vastness necessitated thatlocal mean timebe kept at each station on Indian railways.22 Presidencyofficials in Madras and Bombay agreed with him, However, they arguedthe case not by emphasizing that rail mileage remained limited and

in discrete pockets at this juncture but instead by juxtaposing time-sense in India and England.23 Colonel Pears thus stated that while in

20 Fabian,Time and the Other, p. 30.21 Thapar points out that secularization of time in western Europe was a

nineteenth-century phenomenon; furthermore, that cyclic and linear time were bothused in India, depending on function. Thus, whilst cyclic time was part of the cosmologyin early Indian texts such as the Mahabharata, the Dharma-shastra of Manu andthe Vishnu Purana, it co-existed with linear conceptions of time. For instance, the

Vishnu Purana itself had a section on genealogies and dynasties premised on linearconceptions of time. Thapar,Time as a Metaphor, pp. 46; idem, Early India: From theOrigins to AD 1300(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004 [2002]), p. 37.See also Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 18801918(Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1983), especially pp. 1035; and Henri Lefebvres The

Production of Space, tr. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Blackwell, 1991), pp. 2223.Internal colonization of varying notions of temporality in metropolitan contexts isanalogous to the broader argument made by Ashis Nandy about imperialism involvinginternal colonization (of difference) in metropolitan contexts before it expandedoutwards. Cf. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Delhi:Oxford University Press,1983).

22 Home: Railway A, 4 August 1854, no. 57, National Archives of India, Delhi(NAI); Home: Railway, 4 August 1854, no. 58, NAI; Statistical abstract from 1840 to1865, p. 58.

23 J. J. Pears, Consulting Engineer for Railways (Fort St George), to Chief Secretary,Fort St George,12September1854, in Home: Railway A,15 September 1854, nos


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England the need for standardization derived weight from the numberand influence of men of businessfor whom it was very important thatthere should be no mistake about timeyet in India, it would be very

long before the mass of people could be made to understand a railwaytime.24

Dissatisfied with governmental support for local mean time, theEast India Railway argued for a standardized railway time by invertingthe argument about Indias vastness: its traffic-manager believed thatIndias size made it impossible to construc[t] an intelligible Time Bill,

without the establishment of some universal.25 J. C. Batchelor wentas far as to determine the time by which all Railway Station clocksmay be regulated from the15th October next.26 The Government of

India declined this request, deciding that stations on the East IndiaRailway would followpresidency timethat of its capital, Calcuttaupto the extreme limit of local Bengal supervision, continuing with

Allahabad time from there to Delhi.27 However, this move from localto presidency time was instituted unwittingly. The Secretary of Statefor India in London belatedly informed the Indian administrationthat their decisioninstituting Calcutta time as railway time onEast India Railway stations in Bengalcontravened their 1854

decision supporting local mean time.28 While admitting this error, theGovernment of India decided to stay with the 1864decision: by now,the East India Railway had worked for nearly a year up to Allahabad

with Calcutta time, and from Allahabad to Delhi with Allahabadtime.29 However, Cecil Stephenson, the East India Railways deputy

8991, NAI; Captain Crawford, Superintending Engineer for Railways (Bombay) toH. E. Goldsmith, Chief Secretary, Government of Bombay,21August,1854, in Home:Railway A,15 September1854, nos6061, NAI.

24 Pears to Chief Secretary, 15 September 1854. In the 1840s, English railwaycompanies standardized time, each on its own line, with no attempt to co-ordinatethe efforts. However, five years after the formation of the Railway Clearing House(1842), it was suggested in 1847 that Greenwich Mean Time be introduced as thestandard time on all lines. Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, pp.4344.

25 J. C. Batchelor, Traffic Manager, EIR to E. Palmer, Agent, EIR,31 July1862,in Public Works Department (PWD): Railway,15 August1862, nos2628, NAI. Hesuggested Jubbulpoor time, midway between Calcutta and Bombay.

26 E. Palmer, Agent, EIR to Secretary, PWD,4August1862, in PWD: Railway,15August1862, nos2628, NAI.

27 PWD: Railway,15August1862, nos2628, NAI; and PWD: Railway, April 1862,nos7881, NAI.

28 Secretary of State for India to Government of India,17 November 1864, in PWD:Railway, February1865, nos 1415, NAI; also PWD: Railway, June1864, no. 49, NAI.

29 Government of India to Secretary of State for India, 17 November 1865, inPWD: Railway, February1865, nos1415, NAI. The Government of India informed


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agent challenged the governments orders by insisting that an all-Indiarailway time was necessary for guards and pointsmen to ensurepassenger safety.30

The Bengal government disagreed with Stephenson and argued thatan all-India railway time would militate against the interests of thepublic of the large centres of business, such as Calcutta and Bombay,entitled to the greatest consideration.31 The East India Railwayschairman countered this argument by alleging that a failure tostandardize an all-India railway time meant that the government wasneglecting passenger safety.32 The request focused on standardizationon the East India Railway, but between 1855 and 1867, railwaymileage in Bengal had burgeoned and the East India Railway had

also spread westwards out of the presidency.33 However, when BengalsDeputy Consulting Engineer chose to support the East India Railwaysrequest and suggested that the local time of Madras (Madras time)be accepted as the Railway standard in India as London time is inEngland,34 its Lieutenant-Governor disagreed: in his opinion, theinstitution of Madras time or that of any other foreign city wouldbe unacceptable to the public.35 Though it had already instituted

the Secretary of State of their 1864 decision in a letter dated 13June 1864; the latterexpressed his objection in a letter dated17 November1864; and the Government ofIndia responded in a letter dated17 November1865.

30 PWD Circular (no. 7): To Governments of Madras, Bombay, North WestProvinces and Punjab; Chief Commissioners of Oudh and Central Provinces; Agentto Governor-General, Central India and Rajputana,16April1864, in PWD: Railway,

April 1864, nos 7881, NAI. Cecil Stephenson to Deputy Consulting Engineer,Government of Bengal (Railway), 19 May1865, in PWD: Railway, July1865, nos2527, NAI.

31 J. Hovenden, Assistant Secretary, Government of Bengal (PWD: Railway), toSecretary, Government of India (PWD),1 June1865, in PWD: Railway, July1865,nos 2527, NAI. C.H. Dickens, Secretary, Government of India (PWD), to JointSecretary, Government of Bengal (PWD: Railway), 5 July1865, in PWD: Railway,

July1865, nos2527, NAI.32 E. Palmer, Chairman, Board of Agency, East India Railway, to Consulting

Engineer, Government of Bengal (Railway), 16 April 1867, in PWD: Railway A,June1867, nos12831, NAI.

33 The 121 miles of 1855 stood at 1,311 miles (in Bengal and the NorthwestProvinces) by1867, an increase of over 900 per cent.Statistical abstracts from1840to1865, p. 58;Statistical Abstracts from1860to1869, pp.3031.

34 Deputy Consulting Engineer, Government of Bengal (Railway),22 April1867,in PWD: Railway A, June 1867, nos12831, NAI.

35 Assistant Secretary, Government of Bengal (PWD: Railway) to Secretary,Government of India (PWD), 23 April 1867, in PWD: Railway A, June 1867, nos12831, NAI.


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Figure1. Longitudes and Time Meridians

Madras time as an all-India telegraph time, the government rejectedit as an all-India railway time in 1867.36

Across the globe, spatially specific local time was the only validstandard till about the mid-nineteenth century.37 Any form oftemporal standardizationbe it railway, national, or Greenwichtimerequired that local time be substituted with supra-local time,capable of being divided into commensurable units. In contrast to localtime, supra-local time thus broke the link between time and place, aprocess that Wolfgang Schivelbusch describes as a loss of temporalidentity for regions whose local time was replaced.38 Furthermore,

whilst supra-local time was theoretically inter-subjective, it actually

privileged a specific location whose local time was selected as thestandard.39 Thus, temporal standardization was challenged in variouscontexts across the globe, particularly by communities whose local

36 C. H. Dickens, Secretary, Government of India (PWD) to Joint Secretary,Government of Bengal (Railway), 21 June 1867, in PWD: Railway A, June 1867,nos12831, NAI.

37 Zerubavel, Standardization, p.5.38 Using Walter Benjamins notion of aura in The Work of Art in the Age of

Mechanical Reproduction (1936): Schivelbusch,Railway Journey, p. 42.39 Defining modernity as a particular Western project seeking to universalize

itself: (Consequences of Modernity, pp. 1720), Giddens follows Jrgen Habermasargument that modernization dissociates modernity from its modern Europeanorigins and stylizes it into a spatio-temporally neutral model for processes of social


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times differed substantially from the standards they were to adopt.40

Despite Greenwich time being suggested as Englands standard in1847, railroad time was not accepted as anything but schedule

time until much later in the [nineteenth] century. There was alsoconsiderable psychological and social resistance in Scotland, Irelandand the west of England to standardization by those anxious topreserve the hour of their locality.41

Given Indias breadth, challenges to temporal standardization bythose whose local time varied substantially from the standard wouldhave been expected and congruent with reactions across the globe.However, possible equivocation about this new temporal orderingin the colony was read normatively. The imperial presumption ofa singular Indian time-sense engendered the conclusion that acolonized population would be unequivocally hostile to temporalstandardization. This perhaps explains the responses that imperialfunctionaries anticipated of the colonial population. While ColonelPears had argued in 1854 that the need for standardization inEngland derived weight from the number and influence of the menof business, in India it was the public of the large centres of businesssuch as Calcutta and Bombay who were presumed to be unwilling

to accept any but local time.42 The governments invocation in1867of native prejudice sounded fundamentally similar to Colonel Pears1854 suggestion that in India it would be very long before peoplecould be made to understand railway time. The fact that annualpassenger traffic had increased almost 2,500 per centfrom 0.5 to13.8 millionbetween 1854 and 1867 did not substantially affectthe argument of the colony as a site ofdifference.43 It could, perhaps,explain why the same government that standardized time on the

telegraph system was more hesitant to introduce it on the railways:

development. Jrgen Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures,trans. Frederick Lawrence, (Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000), p.2.

40 Zerubavel, Standardization, pp.1619.41 Schivelbusch,Railway Journey, pp.4344.42 Jim Masselos traces the actual complexity of reactions and discussionespecially

to the question of civil time being synchronized with railway timein the city ofBombay in his piece Bombay Time, in Meera Kosambi, ed.,Intersections: Socio-CulturalTrends in Maharashtra(New Delhi: Orient Longman,2000), pp.161186.

43 Statistical Abstracts: from1840to 1865,p. 58;from1860to 1869, pp.3031. Thepost-1857/8 governments reluctance to interfere in aspects deemed as customary toIndian society can be read through Partha Chatterjees discussion of inner domains(though he himself does not focus on time) inThe Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and

Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, Princeton University Press,1993), pp.613.


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the former being dominantly an official instrument arguably posedless threat of affecting public opinion or native prejudice.44 Finally,in 1870, Madras timenow used by the telegraph and regulated

from the only government observatorywas suggested as a standardrailway time, first to be adopted on the Great Indian PeninsularRailway.45 It was also advocated as civil time. However, when thechange was made, Calcutta, Bombay and Karachiperhaps becausethey remained commercially, financially, and administratively criticalto a post-Rebellion imperial state obsessed with stabilitywere to bepermitted to continue with their local time(s) for civil purposes.46

Rationalizing the colony

After the establishment of an all-India railway time, the next stepwas to link this mathematically with a meridian accepted as aninternational base. This impetus became part of wider discussionsabout selecting a prime meridian and a single, universal timefor the whole world.47 The India Office in London forwarded tothe Government of India suggestions made by Sanford Fleming, a

Canadian railway engineer who was advocatingas had the 1884Washington Conferencea prime meridian corresponding with thetime of the Greenwich meridian in England.48 However, this choiceof zero longitude was far from uncontested. France held out againstGreenwich, and even the establishment in1911 of Paris Mean Timedescribed by David Landes as nothing other than Greenwich MeanTime, without the word Greenwichwas seen as instrumentalto salving national susceptibilities.49 Similarly, the General Time

Convention in north America hotly debated the choice of Greenwichin the selection of a national meridian for time purposes. Manyemphasized that there was no reason to base a time system for rail

44 Mentioned in PWD: Railway, April1870, nos136137, NAI.45 Note from Colonel Kennedy (Bombay) to Major Williams (Madras),28 March

1870, and Resolution by the Government of India PWD, 28 March 1870, both inPWD: Railway, April1870, nos136137, NAI.

46 Office Note,1 November1890, in PWD: Railway Traffic, February1891, nos.3943, NAI. Masselos Bombay Time depicts some of the effects of different railwayand civil time in the city of Bombay. Burma kept Rangoon time.

47 Sanford Fleming, Memorandum on Reckoning Time on a Scientific Basis,20November1889(Ottawa), in PWD: Railway Traffic, February1891, nos3943, NAI.

48 Ibid.49 Landes,Revolution in Time,286; Kern,Nature of Time and Space.


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operations in America on the location of an English observatory, with aparticularly pithy riposte from the scientist Simon Newcombe: See nomore reason for considering Europe in the matter than for considering

the inhabitants of the planet Mars.

50

The Government of India was not immediately amenable to theidea of displacing Madras time but did not fundamentally questionthe choice of Greenwich as base meridian. Instead, it emphasizedthat there seemed no advantage in exchanging our present standardof Madras time, especially if it was to be replaced by time-zonesregulated by meridians which pass through no important places.Instead, there would be time enough to effect these changes, whenIndias neighbours and the chief countries of Europe do so.51 However,

the Committee of the Royal Society insisted that in view of the doubtwhich attends all statements of time in the great majority of casesin India, it was imperative to change railway time in India fromMadras time to that of a longitude exactly five hours and thirtyminutes east of Greenwich. The subtraction of five hours, twenty-oneminutes and ten seconds required to translate events from Madrasto Greenwich time was used to argue Indias temporal irrationality,compared with countries where the calculation involved whole hours.52

Even as the Royal Scottish Geographical Society expressed the hopethat all British stations will adopt the nearest hour to Greenwich timeas their standard,53 an official in the Government of India wrote thatwhen the time for change arrives the experience of other countries

will be available as a guide to the ultimate decision.54

Early in the twentieth century, the imperial government finallycirculated to railway companies their proposal for the colony to fall

50 In the report by William F. Allen, Permanent Secretary of the RailroadsGeneral Time Convention (187285). Bartky, Adoption of Standard Time, pp.4247, footnote65.

51 Office Note,22 December1890, in PWD: Railway Traffic, February1891, nos3943, NAI.

52 On a Proposal for an Indian Standard Time, Enclosure to letter from J.Wilson, Secretary, Government of India (Revenue and Agriculture), Circular 748-2 (Meteorology), 13 July1904, in PWD: Railway Traffic A, India Proceedings,IOR/P/6846, British Library, London (BL).

53 Royal Scottish Geographical Society, Note on Standard Time, 10 November1898, in PWD: Railway Traffic A, India Proceedings, IOR/P/5682, BL.

54 Government of India (Revenue and Agriculture) to George F. Hamilton,Secretary of State for India, 10 August 1899, in PWD: Railway Traffic A, IndiaProceedings, IOR/ P/5682, BL.


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into line with the rest of the civilized world.55 Some, like the GreatIndian Peninsular Railway, objectedits agent in Bombay stressingthe considerable inconvenience that would result from upsetting the

present standard adopted in India to which our business men of allnationalities are wedded by long usage.56 However, most other railwaycompanies viewed this change as desirable, resulting in a favourableconsensus of opinion.57 The Government of India consequentlydeclared that it had decided to adopt on railways a standard time

which in India will be exactly51/2hours in advance of Greenwich and9 minutes in advance of Madras time, the change to be introducedat midnight between the 30th June and the 1st July1905.58 Thisnew all-India railway timeof a meridian roughly two degrees east ofMadrascontinues to be Indian Standard Time.

Negotiating with time

The. . .cyclical and the linear. . .penetrate one another,but in an interminable struggle; sometimes disruption.59

Implementing the changes instituted between1854and1905fromlocal mean time to presidency time, the institution of Madras timeas railway time, and the 1905 establishment of a standard railwaytime linked rationally with Greenwichwas a gradual process.Furthermore, the adoption of railway time as civil time was an evenmore vexed issue. Three decades after Madras time had been decreedrailway and civil time in British Indiawith only Bombay, Calcutta,

55 Quote in reply of Manager and Engineer, Bengal Provincial Railway, to theSecretary to the Government of Bengal, Railway Department, 5 September1904, inPWD: Railway Traffic A, January1905, nos3246, India Proceedings, IOR/P/7086,BL.

56 Agent, GIPR to Consulting Engineer (Railways), 7 October 1904, in PWD:Railway Traffic A, January1905, nos3246, India Proceedings, IOR/P/7086, BL.

57 Government of India Circular771-22from J. Wilson, Officiating Secretary tothe Government of India,27 May1905, in Home: Public A, July1905, nos200201,NAI; PWD: Railway Traffic A, January1905, nos3246, IOR/P/7086, BL.

58 Government of India Circular771-22from J. Wilson, Officiating Secretary tothe Government of India,27May1905;Statement Exhibiting Moral and Material Progress

of India during190405(London, HMSO,1906), p.132. Excluded were small local[railway] lines where the change would be inconvenient. Burmas standard time was61/2 hours ahead of Greenwich and 5 minutes and23 seconds earlier than Rangoontime. This new all-India railway time was also meant for telegraphs.

59 Henri Lefebvre,Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, tr. by Stuart Eldenand Gerald Moore (New York: Continuum,2004[1985]), p.76.


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and Karachi being allowed to continue with their local time for civilpurposesthe General Manager of the Darjeeling Railway could befound complaining of the confusion caused by there being railway

time and telegraph office time, cutchery [court] time, bazar time andalso church time in a small town like Darjeeling.60 However, given thecontinually increasing numbers of railway passengers in India, millionshad to gradually negotiate not only train schedules and railwaytimetables on a regular basis, but also the larger structure of temporalre-organization that underpinned railway time. This section exploresthe discrepant and multiple ways in which a colonized populationgrappled with the temporal changes engendered through railways,both as swift transport and standardized time: how it affected their

everyday lives, how they adapted to it, and to return to Jagannathsalibi, how they appropriated and deployed it.

Time as narrative

The coming of the railway itself performed a temporal function bydemarcating historical time. There is brief yet explicit intimation ofthis inIndira(1873), a novel penned by a leading figure of the Bengalintelligentsia, Bankimchandra Chattopadhya. The story opens withthe narrator-protagonist Indira lamenting that she could not take upher position as wife: her wealthy father believed that his son-in-lawhad not earned enough money to support his daughter. To rectifythis, Indiras mortified husband resolved to travel to the west. There

was then no railway, states Indira, and the way to the west was verydifficult.61 Her husband travelled on foot and was long on the way till

he finally reached the Punjab. He who could do this, she concludesemphatically, could also make money.62 This opening reference isstartling in a novel in which railway travel does not really figure.Even Calcutta, linked in a functioning railway network, is approached

60 General Manager and Chief Engineer, Darjeeling-Himalayan Railway toSecretary, Government of Bengal (Railway),24 August1904, PWD: Railway Traffic

A, January1905, nos3246, India Proceedings, IOR/P/7086, BL.61 Emphasis added.62 Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Indira (1873), tr., Marian Maddern, The

Bankimchandra Omnibus, vol.1 (New Delhi: Penguin, 2005), pp. 253338, quotation,p.255.


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by boat.63 Bankim thus seems to be deploying railways for temporalorientationborn in 1838, his adult life would have been co-terminus

with the spread of railways in Bengal, orienting his sense of historical

time around railways.The slowness and arduousness ascribed to the pre-railway journey

confirms that this orientation is not merely descriptive: Indira con-tends that if her husband could travel on foot, he would not be dauntedby the task of making money. Bankim seems to have both understoodand endorsed the temporal acceleration generated by railways. In themonthly he edited and published in the 1870s, he wrote:

Look at the railways, and the engines, which surpassing a hundred thousand

of the horses of Indra in strength, make a months journey in a day. . .

. Yourfather, who lives in Benaras, has this morning fallen fatally ill. . .and by nightyou sit at his feet and care for him.64

Bankim is unequivocally enthusiastic about temporal shrinkage, orthe dramatic compression of travel time engendered by railways.65 Heexhibits no apprehension, such as is visible, for instance, in the Germanpoet Heinrich Heines characterization of railway travel from Paris toGermany as a terrible idea.66 The increased tempo of movement suf-

focated Heine; imagining the impending completion of railway links,he felt the mountains and forests of all countries advancing on Paris.67

Given Meenakshi Mukerjees understanding of Indira as part ofthe third strand of the nineteenth-century novel in India, one thatattempted to render contemporary Indian society realistically infiction, Bankims enthusiasm records at least one sense of the responseand possibility engendered by the speed of railways.68 Crucial hereis Partha Chatterjees identification of Bankim as (anti-colonial)nationalist thoughts moment of departure: embodying the related

63 Bankim,Indira, pp.265269. This journey by boat when Indira is on her way toCalcutta is bracketed by two journeys on a palanquin: first when she travels from herparental home to her in-laws house (pp.261264); and then at the conclusion, whenshe returns with her husband to her in-laws house (p. 333).

64 Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Bengals Peasants, in Sociological Essays:Utilitarianism and Positivism in Bengal, English translation by S. N. Mukherjee andMarian Maddern (Calcutta, Rddhi,1986), pp.116117, emphasis added.

65 Schivelbusch,Railway Journey, p. 35.66 Presner,Mobile Modernity, pp.5965; quotations, p.61.67 Schivelbusch,Railway Journey, p.37. This anxiety is separate from the critique

of railways (and industrialization more generally) that was found in the work of JohnRuskin and William Morris.

68 Meenakshi Mukherjee, Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India (Delhi:Oxford University Press,1985), p.16.


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assertions that the superiority of the West lies in the materiality ofits culture, exemplified by its science, technology and love of progressand that [t]rue modernity for the non-European nations would lie in

combining the superior material qualities of Western cultures with thespiritual greatness of the East.69 When juxtaposed against Heinesanxieties, the reaction of this colonial elitesmall but politicallyinfluential in the late nineteenth centurythus inverts the imperialstructure of colonial time-lag, the first in Europe and then elsewhererendering of temporality as described by Dipesh Chakrabarty.70

Multiple narratives were generated amongst the colonized whenfaced with the compression of time engendered by railways. In IntizarHusains Kataa Huaa Dabba (A Stranded Railroad Car, 1954),

the elderly Mirza Sahib expresses his preference for travel priorto railways. For him, the speed of railways had robbed travel ofenjoyment. On a train, he stated:

You blink your eye and youve arrived at your destination. But there was atime when kingdoms fell and governments toppled by the time you reached

where you were going; and the toddlers youd left crawling on all foursyoureturned to find them fathers worrying their heads over a suitable match fortheir marriageable daughters. 71

Whereas Indira had invoked the rigours of pre-railway travel, MirzaSahib invoked a romantic idea of it. For him, real journeys were thosebefore railways, when it took ages to pass a single night of travel. Onetravelled hundreds and hundreds of miles, back and forth, with theend nowhere in sight and all traces of the starting point irretrievablyobscured. He thought back with excitement at the fear of tigers, ofsnake-bites, of highwaymen and yes, of ghosts too. One travelled bythe dim star-lit sky overhead and the burning torches below.72 The

speed of railways had destroyed this rich sensory tableau: now thatthe train is in fashion, concluded Mirza Sahib, I just dont feel liketravelling anymore.73

Bankim had been exhilarated by the speed of railways and thepossibilities created by compression of travel time; Mirza Sahibs

69 Chatterjee,Nationalist Thought, p. 50.70 Chakrabarty,Provincializing Europe, p. 8; idem, Postcoloniality and the Artifice of

History: Who Speaks for Indian Pasts?Representationsno.37(winter1992): pp.126.71 Intizar Husain, Kataa Hua Dabba (1954), tr. Muhammad Umar Menon, A

Stranded Railroad Car, inidem, ed.,The Colour of Nothingness: Modern Urdu Short Stories(Delhi: Oxford University Press,2006[1998]), pp.2536, quotes on pp.2526.

72 Ibid., p.26.73 Ibid.


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melancholia is an eulogy for a past whose experiential depthwas effaced by the speed of the new technology, a sentimentstrikingly homologous to the nineteenth-century English naturalist

John Ruskins lament about all travelling becoming dull in exactproportion to its rapidity.74 Schivelbuschs argument about theaesthetic freedom of the pre-industrial subject being discovered atthe very moment when pre-industrial methods of production andtransportation seemed threatened by mechanization, is certainlyrelevant here.75 However, even if romanticized, Mirza Sahibs reactiondemonstrates the heterogeneous responses to temporal shrinkageamongst the colonized.

While annihilating space by shrinking transport time, railways

simultaneously expanded space by incorporating newpreviouslyremoteareas into the transport network. From 35 miles open forpassenger traffic in1854, railway mileage jumped to 2,581miles by1864, was19,466miles by1895and stood at32,090miles in1910.76

Thus, railway travel both diminished and increased travelling time.Railways allowed one to reach a destination faster, but as rail mileageexpanded, so did the time spent travelling. A potent example of theexpansion of travel time, even as railways compressed distance, is

found in the prodigious writings of the nationalist leader MohandasGandhi during many hours of train travel. Gandhis substantialCollected Works bear witness to the extent of writing (and dictating)that he did whilst travelling, hardly surprising when, to quote him,there were times when out of a month almost fifteen nights werespent on trains.77 In fact, stringing together the pieces written byGandhi as he travelled exhaustively by train is tantamount to tracing atextual itinerary of nationalist politics in India.78 Gandhis actual use

74 In a tone remarkably similar to Mirza Sahib, John Ruskin had written: The wholesystem of railway travel is addressed to people who, being in a hurry, are therefore,for the time being, miserable. No one would travel in that manner who could helpit.The Seven Lamps of Architecture (Mineola, New York: Dover,1989[2nd ed.,1880),p.121.

75 Schivelbusch,Railway Journey, p. 121.76 Statistical Abstracts: from 1840 to 1865, pp. 5859; from 189495 to 190304,

pp.138141;from190304to191213, pp.136139.77 M. K. Gandhi, What to do When One Loses Temper,Navjivan,20February1921,

Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG), vol. xix: November 1920-April 1922,(Ahmedabad: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting,1966),pp.373375; quote on p.373.

78 The examples are strewn through the voluminous CWMG. However, as ananecdote it is worth mentioning that when the Kohat disturbances threatened to


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of travel timeespecially when juxtaposed against his unequivocalcritique of railway technology in Hind Swaraj (1909)lends itselfto the idea of consumption as a series of creative and transgressive

acts that dispute and fragment the authorized text, and create in itsomething un-known to the producer.79 The political valence of suchtransgressive consumption is only heightened if one reads his travelsagainst assertions like A native. . .cares little for his time.80

Being ahead of and behind time

The temporal re-structuring engendered by railways was most visiblymanifested in timetables: train schedules directly oriented everydaylife towards the changes instituted. Early railway timetables werebased on the12-hour diurnal system, using ante-meridian (a.m.) andpost-meridian (p.m.) notations.81 By the time the Canadian engineerSanford Fleming penned his1889memorandum suggesting that thetwenty-four-hour notation be adopted on railway timetables globally,the practice seems to have been in use on railways in India andBurma.82 In Flemings view, counting the hours from midnight to

become a conflagration, Gandhi suggested to Shaukat Ali that they travel togetherto Delhi since [t]he train seems to be the best place for such a discussion.Letter to Shaukat Ali,23 February23,1925,CWMG, vol. xxvi: January-April1925,(Ahmedabad: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting,1967),pp.190191.

79 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Rendell (Berkeley:University of California Press,1984). The consumer thus reclaims the meaning ofthe text/action from that authorized by the producer.

80 The Traffic of the Bombay Railway,Friend of India,9 February1854.81 One of the earliest railway timetables in India, for the Bombay-Thana-Bombay

run of the GIPR, which was published less than two weeks after the first passengertrain in India had been inaugurated on 16 April 1853, shows: trains leave Bombayfor Thana at6.30a.m. and4.0p.m., whilst those returning to Bombay, left Thana at8.45a.m. and6.5p.m.The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce,29 April1853.

82 Except for the Madras railway, scheduled to change from 1 October 1890.Fleming, Memorandum on Reckoning Time, 20 November 1889. The system wasbeing used for telegraphs from the1860s: see Lieutenant Colonel C. Douglas, DirectorGeneral of Telegraphs in India, to E. C. Bayly, Secretary, Government of India, 3September1862, in PWD: Railway, 15 August 1862, nos 2628, NAI; and OfficeNote,4 December1890, in PWD: Railway Traffic, February1891, nos.3943, NAI.The change had almost certainly taken effect before the Washington Conferenceassembled. Rule I (a) of the proceedings of the Railway Conference of September1882in Home: Public B, October1882, nos14344, NAI.


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midnight (numbered from zero to twenty-four) was necessary for:

the misprint of a single letter, a.m. for p.m. or vice versa will easily arise tocause inconvenience, loss of time, probably loss of property, or loss of life.83

Though railways were introduced in England about two decades beforethey were in India, the twenty-four-hour notation for railways seems tohave been in use in India firstin 1889, Fleming was urging Englishrailway managers to adopt this system.84 The subject had been underdiscussion for decades: as early as March 1861, the periodical Once

a Week had commented on the imprecision of Englands Bradshawtimetables and guides, asking: who can say at once whether five

minutes past twelve at night is a.m. or p.m..85

Their support forthe alternative notation was bolstered by a belief that it was no greatstrain on the intellect, for those who could read and write wouldunderstand that a train arriving at 15.45 by the table, arrives at3.45 p.m. by the clock.86 This discussion in Once a Week not onlythrew into question the implicit connection between specific ideas ofintellect deemed, in imperial discourse, as necessary for adapting totechnological progress, but alsoagaindisrupted an imperial logicof colonial time-lag.

However, it was not merely imperial discourse that was insensitiveto historical praxis. An 1866 petition to the Viceroy by the BritishIndian Association requested shelter and accommodation at railwaystations for native third-class passengers who could not be expectedto arrive at the station only at the proper time.87 Most of them,stated the petition, had an indefinite idea of time, knowing littlebeyond pruhurs of three hours each. Also, a large number camefrom surrounding villages and rural districts where no time is kept.88

Obviously large segments of the Indian population were confrontedby timetables that, at least till the 1870s, were in English and used

83 Fleming, Memorandum on Reckoning Time,20 November1889.84 Ibid., Memorandum,20 November1889.85 Once a Week, March 1861, p. 273, Appendix C in PWD: Railway, 15August 1862,

nos2628, NAI. Several of the early timetables using12noon have been reproduced inCharles E. Lee, The Centenary of Bradshaw (London: Railway Gazette,1940), pp. 1823.

86 Once a Week, March1861, p.273.87 Petition by the British Indian Association, North-West Provinces, to Viceroy of

India, Aligarh, 16 October 1866, in Home: Public B, December 1866, nos 5051,NAI.

88 Emphasis added.


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the Latin alphabet.89 Considering the demographics and politics of theBritish Indian Association, its internalization of imperial views abouttemporal sense (or lack of it) in the colony might not seem surprising.

Yet, attacking the predominantly English management, the petitionsimultaneously complained of trains arriving so very irregularly andbehind the time, thus faulting the imperial state on the very groundson which it had sought dominance.90

Interestingly, this internalization of imperial critiques of the colony,as well as the fledgling notion of paternalism towards a mass publicthat informs the 1866 petition, can be juxtaposed against a verydifferent moment, embodied in a 1924 piece by Mohandas Gandhientitled Time Sense.91 Excoriating the educated for being late foreverything, he argued that the masses waiting patiently for theirleaders embodied forbearance. Whereas the British Indian Associationhad painted a picture of the poor, the ignorant and the helplessmasses, incapable of punctuality because they could not grasp thestructure of temporality within which timetables existed, Gandhieven as he stressed the need for time-disciplinedissociatedpunctualityfrom education.

However, the question of punctuality was neither stable, nor simple.

Discussing the common charge that Indians have no sense oftime [and] we are as a rule behind timean explicit reference to anallochronistic rendering of the colonyGandhi argued:

One who is too late is admittedly behind time. But it is equally true to say thatone who is four hours before time is also behind time. He has neglected a hundredthings. . . . He may succeed in catching his train, but he will be behind timefor many other things probably more important.92

Re-inserting everyday life into empty time

Even as time-sense functioned as a discursive battleground, railwaypassengers had to negotiate the everyday logistics of railway travel.

89 It is not every person who can say at once whether five minutes past twelveat night is A.M. or P.M.; and no wonder, for first of all these expressions are Latinabbreviations,Once a Week, March1861, p.273.

90 Petition by the British Indian Association,16October1866.91 M. K. Gandhi, Time Sense, Young India, 6 November 1924, CWMG, vol.

xxv: August 1924-January 1925, (Ahmedabad: Publications Division, Ministry ofInformation and Broadcasting,1967) pp.28586.

92 Gandhi, Time Sense, emphasis added.


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Early demands by the travelling public were for railway timetablesto be translated into pertinent local language(s). ThePanjb-i-Akhbrof Lahore had demanded in April 1871 that that the Sindh, Punjab

and Delhi Railway publish Urdu and Hindi translations of railwaytimetables for the benefit of the Native public. Unlike many ofthe reforms demanded by the third-class travelling public, this wasimplemented quickly. In August 1871, the newspaper commendedthe fact that monthly timetables were now being published in English,Urdu, and Hindi.93 The demand gained momentum with the Railway

Act of1879requiring by law that railways exhibit at each station atimetable in one or more vernacular languages.94 Delegates at the1882Railway Conference in Simla emphasized their compliance with

this requirement.95 Few could match the zeal of the Sindh, Punjab andDelhi Railway which displayed timetables in English, Urdu, and Hindi,on the platforms, waiting sheds, outside verandahs, goods sheds andsupplied them to policethanas [stations], court-houses,dakbungalows[rest-houses], hotels, &c., as also to the principal traders within aradius of30 miles of each station.96 However, others did provide themin waiting-sheds and at railway stations.97 Public demands continuedto stress the need for timetables in local vernaculars where this

demand had not been complied with.98This preliminary demand was accompanied by the more vocal

asking for train timings to be tailored to their convenience. As earlyas 1857, repeated applications led the agent of the East IndiaRailway to authorize the 9.20 a.m. up and 10.12. a.m. down trainsto stop at C[i]nnag[h/l]ure and Bidabatty stations.99 The demandsonly increased in the next few decades. TheKoh-i-Nrof August1872complained at length about the trouble suffered by passengers owing

93 Panjb-i-Akhbr (Lahore), 5 August 1871, Selections from VernacularNewspapers in Punjab, North-Western Provinces, Oudh and Central Provinces (NNR:NWP).

94 Railway Conference, September 1882, Home: Public B, October 1882, nos 14344, NAI.

95 In particular, representatives of the SPD, Eastern Bengal, Oudh and Rohilkhand,Madras, South India and Great Indian Peninsular railways.

96 Note by Traffic Manager, SPDR, Railway Conference, Simla, September 1882.97 Delegate for Eastern Bengal Railway, Railway Conference, Simla, September

1882.98 Andhrabhashasanjivani (Masulipatna), no. 12 of December 1882, in Report on

Telegu newspapers for December 1882, in Report on Native Newspapers in theMadras Presidency (NNR: Madras).

99 Letters to the Home Government, no.52 of30 October1857, Railway GeneralLetters,185261, NAI.


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to train timings between Delhi and Ghaziabad. Since the only up-train from Delhi started at2.45a.m., and left Ghaziabad for Meerutat7.35a.m., passengers had to begin the journey from Delhi late at

night and wait at Ghaziabad for four or five hours for the Meeruttrain. Similarly, since the mail-train started from Lahore at2.45a.m.and the passenger-train, which started at 12 a.m., only reached thePhillour Pass at 8 p.m., passengers had to spend the entire night therebefore crossing the Pass.100 Calcuttas Sulabha Samachar complainedthat trains on the Tirhut State Railway were not timed to run inharmony with those on the East Indian Railway, theBurdwan Sanjivanisuggested that the 7.20 up-chord could make time to halt at Mankpurif it omitted unimportant station[s], theKerala Patrikaasked for traintimings in Malabar to be changed to afford greater convenience tothe public, and the Swadeshamitran demanded that the Madras RailwayCompany re-schedule the9 p.m. Olavakode train to meet the specialtrain connecting Tirur to Calicut.101

Train timings were also relevant to emerging time-structures ofwork and leisure. In certain urban areas, railways allowed specificgroups to live at some distance from where they workedto spendthe weekdays in the city and to return home on the weekends.

In a letter to the Englishman (Calcutta) dated 21 August 1857 ARegular Passenger complained that Monday morning trains betweenPundooah and Howrah were inconvenient for those who worked inHowrah and visited their families on weekends.102 He stated thatsince Monday morning passengers usually had to join their officesat nine, at least before ten, it was desirable that the Pundooahtrains start at six instead of seven as present: the changed timing

100 Koh-i-Nr(Lahore),17 August1872, NNR: NWP.101 Sulabha Samachar (Calcutta),15 January1881, in Selections from Vernacular

Newspaper in Bengal (NNR: Bengal); Burdwan Sanjivani (Burdwan), 9 April 1895(NNR: Bengal); Kerala Patrika, (Calicut), 18 February 1888 (NNR: Madras);Swadeshamitran(Madras),21 May1890(NNR: Madras).

102 The improved communication with Calcutta made Howrah a suburb of Calcutta,enabl[ing] many of the people employed in the metropolis to reside on the right bankof the Hooghly.Imperial Gazetteer of India: vol. XIII (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1908),pp. 213214. There is evidence of a pattern of daily and weekly commuters indisparate locations: whether employees at Jamalpur workshops who commuted tonearby village using special workers trains, or those living in the northern part ofBombay island who had to commute regularly to work owing to a housing shortagein the middle and lower part of Bombay Island. See L. S. S. OMalley, Bengal andOrissa District Gazetteers: Monghyr (New Delhi: Logos: (2007[1926]), p. 132 andS. M. Edwardes,The Gazetteer of Bombay City and Island, vol. i (1909).


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would allow passengers to reach Howrah at half-past eight.103 TheEnglishman itself was an elite newspaper, catering to the Englishcommunity in Bengal as well as to a limited circle of bilingual Bengalis

working in the context of a bureaucratic-capitalist time-discipline orchakri.104 Nevertheless, among a limited set of people at least, thedual demands of work and family seem to have been split fairlydiscretely during the week, each circumscribed within its allotted days.Since the East India Railway link between Howrah and Pundooah

was completed only in the second half of 1854, it is remarkablehow quickly this urbansuburban organization of the week emerged,drawing on emerging bureaucratization, an urban-industrial orderincluding clerical and mercantile firms, and the temporal shrinkageprovided by the railways.105 Demands for convenient daily and weeklytrain timings continued to come in, whether it was merchants andofficials living at Saidapet and St Thomas Mount petitioning theSouth Indian Railway to run trains starting at 8 p.m. from thesestations, or employees at merchant offices in Calcutta complainingthat there were only two trains after6p.m. to allow them to return toHooghly, Bandel, or Chandrenagore.106 Station clocks and timetables

were artefacts that marked the establishment of a new temporal

order, albeit one that was realized gradually.107 However, among thedemands of passengers for the alteration of train timings, one seesnot only the spread of bureaucratic-capitalist structures, but equallya tempering of the theoretical abstractness of these with individual

103 A Suggestion to the Traffic Manager of the Railway Company by A RegularPassenger,The Englishman and Military Chronicle,21 August1857.

104 Apropos Sumit Sarkars analysis ofchakriand the time-discipline of the office inhisWriting Social History (Delhi: Oxford University Press,1997), especially pp.186215and pp.282357.

105 G. Huddlestone, History of the East Indian Railway (Calcutta: Thacker, Spinkand Co., 1906), p. 14. In the context of England, Dionysius Lardner relates theepoch of suburbs with the compression of travel time generated by the railroads:in all direction round the metropolis in which railways are extended, habitations aremultiplied.Railway Economy(London,1851) p.36.

106 Bhaskara Gnanodayam (Negapatam), 10 March 1893 (NNR: Madras); Hitavadi(Calcutta),8 April1904(NNR: Bengal).

107 Well into the twentieth century, there is evidence of time-tabulated in the 24-hour as well as the a.m./p.m. format, including by the same railway company. Noticesfor changes in the East Indian Railway trains timings within a week of each other showboth formats in use in thesametimetable. See notices indicating changes in the EastIndian Railway trains in Searchlight(Patna),23September1927 and 30 September1927.


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and local concernsinserting the minutiae of daily life back into thetheoretically empty homogeneity of standardized time.

Emerging structures of work and leisure also engendered a debate

in which a disenchanted notion of leisure collided with sacred time (ofa Judaeo-Christian God). In the1850s, East India Railway officials inCalcutta were isolated in their endeavour to generate profits throughthe running of excursion trains on Sundays: the Government of Indiaand the companys directors in London insisted on limiting SabbathTrains to the absolute necessities of the public.108 The governmentconceded that the East India Railway would eventually be able to runtrains on Sunday but declined to encourage Sunday excursion trains.109

A railway official in Calcutta who petitioned for a passenger train from

Howrah to Ranigung on Sunday had to assure the Companys Boardthat this [was] not to be an Excursion train. To enforce the importantprinciple of limiting Sabbath Trains, no reductions in fares could bemade on Sundays; furthermore, arrivals and departures of even regulartrains had to afford the Employees of the Company the opportunityof attending Divine Worship.110

The issue was aggravated with the Christian inhabitants of Calcuttainsisting that government curtail this new practice of Sabbath trains.

The potency of the complaint was heightened because Sabbath-breaking was included in the list of un-Christian behaviour supposed tohave elicited Gods wrath in the form of the 1857Rebellion. Preachingon a Fast-Day in October 1857, Reverend Charles Forbes SeptimusMoney of the Church of St Johns, Deptford in London had castigatedthe Government of India for patronizing that Sabbath breaking which

was sure to bring. . .swift and terrible destruction.111 Thus, when theEast India Railways London Board discovered an announcement in

the Calcutta papers advertising an excursion train on the occasion ofa Hindu festival for a particular Sunday the response was swift and

108 Letters from Home Government, enclosure to despatch 19, 18 May 1858,Railway General Letters,185261, NAI.

109 Letters to Home Government, 28 February 1856, Railway General Letters,185261, NAI.

110 Letters from Home Government, enclosure to despatch no.19,18 May1858.111 The Indian Mutiny; or, Indias Idolatry and Englands Responsibility. A Sermon Preached

on the Fast-Day, October 7, 1857, by Rev. C.F.S. Money, M.A. (London: Wertheim andMacintosh), BL. Don Randall, Autumn1857: The Making of the Indian Mutiny.Victorian Literature and Culture,31:1,2003, pp.317.


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stern. The railways agent in Calcutta was admonished and excursiontrains on Sunday were forbidden.112

The discussion about excursion trains on the Sabbath actually

mirrored one taking place in England, where the Lords DayObservance Society and the Anti-Sunday Travel Union werecomplaining of attempts by railway companies to fill their excesscapacity on Sunday with excursion trains.113 In India, however, theissue had a different valence, given the limited purview of Judaeo-Christian temporality in the colony.114 Forbidding Sabbath excursiontrains can certainly be read as part of the homogenizing impulse ofimperialism. However, the very issue on which it was premisedSabbathalso points to the multiple, contradictory, pulls through

which the local sought to grapple with a flattened, homogenized, andempty idea of inter-subjective temporality.115

A similar filling-in of empty time is visible in discussions aboutthe public issue of timetables during 19121913. In March 1912,the General Traffic Manger of the East India Railway had suggestedthat public timetables be issued on the first day of March, June,September, and December (instead of on the first of January, April,

July and October).116 He believed his suggestions accorded with the

seasons: March, April and May were the hottest months over thelarger portion of India; June, July and August comprise most of therainy season when Time Tables have to be altered on certain sections;

August, September, October and November cover the Autumn;and December, January and February comprise practically the cold

112 Letters from Home Government, enclosure to despatch123, 8 December 1859,in Railway General Letters,185261, NAI.

113 A. K. B Evans and J. V. Gough, The Impact of the Railways on Society in Britain(Aldershot: Ashgate, 1993), p. 103, n. 10. M. Robbins, The Railway Age (London:Routledge and Paul,1962), p.48. David Norman Smith,The Railway and Its Passengers:

A Social History (Newton Abbot, David and Charles, 1988), pp. 119121. TheSabbatarian extremists even viewed the Tay Bridge disaster of28 December1879(no survivors) as a stern judgment on Sunday train travel. R. C. Richardson, TheBroad Gauge andthe Narrow Gauge: Railways andReligion in Victorian England,in Evans and Gough,Impact of the Railway.

114 The1872census estimates indicate that Christians, along with Buddhists andJains, Jews, Parsees, Brahmoes, and Hill men. . . comprised less than five per cent ofthe population in India. Henry Waterfield, Memorandum on the Census of British India187172(London: Eyre and Spottiswoode,1875), p.16.

115 Resonating with Dipesh Chakrabartys discussion inProvincializing Europe of howa Universalizing History1 is intersected by the local (History2).

116 General Traffic Manger, EIR, to Agent, EIR, 15 March 1912, in Railway Board:Traffic A, January1913, nos12628, India Proceedings, IOR/P/9245, BL.


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weather of India. However, his suggestion represented not simply theinsertion of the dictates of local seasonality but rather of seasonality asit affected thespecificneeds of Europeans in India. Thus,1March was

when the exodus to Europe and Hills takes place; the beginning ofSeptember marked the exodus from the Hills; and timetables issuedon 1 December could include all the Christmas concessions. Thenew schedulepassed at a meeting of the Indian Railway Conference

Association in1912thus exemplified two forms of local specificity,both cyclical and repetitive: the seasonality of colonial India and themigration patterns of an English population struggling to cope withan alien climate.117

Conclusion

How did the colonized, as passengers and population, negotiate thetemporal re-structuring introduced through railways, both as speedytransport and as standardized time? How does the demand by a Lahorepaper for railway timetables in Hindi and Urdu, correspond withanother for railway schedules to be altered to fit the urban-suburban

week of passengers living in Pundooah and working in Howrah? Canone correlate Jagannaths deployment of railway timetables to defendhimself against charges of treason with Gandhis use of railway timefor scripting much of his oppositional politics, despite his trenchantcritique of the technology? What results from juxtaposing Bankimsexcitement about railway speed with Mirza Sahibs lament about howthis very speed had destroyed real journeys?

Most obviously, these responses delineate the complex ways in

which people in colonial India negotiated an abstract administrativeand technological change in their everyday life. They appear infragments, but it is precisely this structure that perhaps capturesthe polyvalence of actual responses.118 Hence, one can read thesenegotiations as representing the complexity of everyday responses

117 Agenda for Indian Railway Conference Association (IRCA) meeting, Simla,23September 1912; letter from R.L. Bliss, Acting Secretary, IRCA to Secretary, RailwayBoard,1011October1912, in Railway Traffic A, January1913, nos12628, IndiaProceedings, IOR/P/9245, BL.

118 And thus making visible potentially richer definitions of experience.Gyanendra Pandey, In Defence of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riotsin India Today,Representations,37 (1992). Also de Certeau,Practice of Everyday Life.


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through a series of historical focal points.119 Furthermore, whencompared with the equally heterogeneous reactions to standardizationof railway and civil time in other parts of the worldparticularly the

imperial metropolethese fragments of experience materially de-stabilize the imperial narrative of colonial time-lag and reclaim thehistorical present as a time in which the colonizer and colonized existcontemporaneously. From a normative world of co-existent yet non-contemporary beings,120 modernity is reclaimed as an experientialhistorical present.

Some of these negotiations also representto borrow from WalterBenjamininstances of now-time, moments in which protagonistscritically evaluate the present, even as they remain implicated init.121 The population of colonial India could hardly escape a worldin which the speed of railways decreased and increased travel time, in

which an order of timetables and schedules marked the transition tostandardized railway time, in which calendars were becoming alien,disenchanted, and homogenous. However, as they navigated thesechanges, some of their responses, albeit tenuous, seem to interrogatethat which they were grappling with, providing in effect a moderncritique of modernity.122

Moments that evaluate the relationship between time, speed, andrailways can be found in three well-known works of fiction: KhushwantSinghsTrain to Pakistan(1956), Saadat Hasan Mantos Kali Shalvar(The Black Trousers, circa. 1940) and Intizar Husains Kataa HuaDabba (A Stranded Railroad Car,1954). All were written after thetemporal re-structuring that marked the period between 1854 and1905, and by authors who were in fact born after1905. However, thestruggles of some of the characters with the changing temporality of

speed and standardization offer instances that interruptto critiquefrom withinthat historical moment in which they are enmeshed.

Mano Majra, the frontier village in Train to Pakistan, has becomeemblematic of competing narratives about South Asias past, present,and future.123 In her reading, Marian Aguiar aptly highlights theextent to which the life of the village is emplotted through its

119 As described by Walter Benjamin in The Life of Students (1915).120 Banerjee,Politics of Time, p. 4.121 See Michael Lwy,Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamins On the Concept of History,

tr. by Chris Turner (New York: Verso,2005), p.2.122 Ibid.123 Cf. David Gilmartins reading of it as an authentic world of community

rooted in the reciprocities of local life. Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History:


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relationship with railway trains passing through it.124 The village isindeed very conscious of trains: it is introduced through its railwaystation; its denizens awake and fall asleep to the sounds of passing

trains; the shopkeepers and hawkers supplying these trains providean appearance of constant activity.125 At first glance, having weldedthe natural circularity of everyday life with the linear impetus on

which railways had been premised, Mano Majra seems to exist ina harmonious conjunction of time-scales, a natural/technologicalsymbiosis as Aguiar terms it.126 However, Mano Majras relationship

with railways is perhaps more unstable than appears at first glance.Even though the presence of modernity through railways is indeeda fait accompli, as Aguiar suggests,127 yet Mano Majra also distancesitself from this authorized teleology by reneging on its relationship

with railways. Just before he explains how railway timetables grid thelife of the village, Singh states:

Not many trains stop at Mano Majra. Express trains do not stop at all. Ofthe many slow passenger trains. . .only two are scheduled to stop for a fewminutes. The others stop only when they are held up.128

Even while steeped in railway temporality, Mano Majra stands apart

from it. Tellingly, the crowd at the railway station is not composedof bona fide passengers oriented around railway timetables but ofhangers-on, wasting time in endless arguments about how late thetrain was on a given day and when it had last been on time.129

Mano Majras ambiguity becomes claustrophobia and fear in therelationship that Sultanathe protagonist of Mantos Kali Shalvarhas with railways. The night-train had delivered Sultana from theprovincial cantonment town of Ambala to Delhi, a move described as

a reorientation of life expectations along national lines.130

Delhi did

In Search of a Narrative,Journal of Asian Studies,57:4 (November1998): pp.10691095; see p.1090, n. 27.

124 Khushwant Singh, Train to Pakistan (New York: Grove Press, 1956), pp. 35.Marian Aguiar, Railway Space in Partition Literature, in Kerr ed.,27Down, pp.3967.

125 Singh,Train to Pakistan, pp.35.126 Aguiar, Railway Space in Partition Literature, p.48.127 Ibid.128 Singh,Train to Pakistan, pp.34129 Ibid., p.31.130 Aamir R. Mufti, Saadat Hasan Manto: A Greater Story-Writer than God,

in Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 190; Saadat Hassan Manto, The


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not bring that which Sultana desired and consequently she beggedher companion Khuda Baksh to return to Ambala with her. Return,however, was foreclosed. To Sultanas entreatyIll pack and we can

leave by the night trainhe responded: we cant go back now. Adespondent Sultana began spending her days watching the railwayyard visible from her balcony: railway engines and carriages going byconstantly, in one direction or the other. The one that she empathized

with, however, was that lone carriage [that] had been propelledon the tracks of life and then abandoned. Though surrounded bymovementby other people. . .changing tracksSultana feared shehad no idea [w]here she was headed for. Fearfully, she thought: Andthen, one day, she would lose the impetus that had moved her and she

would stop somewhere, at a place of which she knew nothing.131

Sultanas temporal despair becomes complete disorientation inIntizar Husains Kataa Hua Dabaa. When Shujaat Ali describes hisfathers first train journey to Delhi, the relationship between time,speed, and railways becomes phantasmagorical:

As the train picked up speed, the same familiar feeling assaulted him: asif the car he was riding in had come unhitched and stood in the middle ofnowhere while the rest of the train whistling and clattering, had steamed

far away. Sometimes he felt that the train had started running backwards,pulling time along with it.132

Black Shalwar, translated in Leslie A. Flemming and Tahira Naqvi, Another LonelyVoice: The Life and Works of Saadat Hassan Manto (Vanguard: Lahore,1985), pp.206219.

131 Manto, The Black Shalwar, pp.206219.132 Husain, Kataa Hua Dabba, pp.2930.

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