Time and Chronology: Historical and Philosophical Disputes

About the Speaker:

Prathama Banerjee is a historian at the Centre for Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi. She studied at JNU and SOAS and has a book called The Politics of Time: ‘Primitives’ and History-Writing in a Colonial Society. She currently works on histories of political subjectivity and political thought in colonial/postcolonial Bengal, and has published segments of her ongoing work as ‘Chanakya/Kautilya: History, Philosophy and Theatre in Colonial Bengal’, Journal of the History of the Present, 2(1), 2012 and ‘Between the Political and the Non-Political: The Vivekananda Moment and a Critique of the Social in Colonial Bengal’, Social History, 39(3), 2014. She is also interested in literature,​music and Adivasi Studies.

Abstract:

This paper begins by arguing that time and chronology are two different concepts. Chronology is a series that charts nothing more than precedence and succession, before and after. Chronologies are defined by the particular entities they serialize, are therefore multiple, and appear to be more a spatializing than a temporalizing imperative. Time, on the other hand, is a concept with no specific referent, because it is experienced in different ways in different contexts. Being difficult to define as a universal, time has remained a deeply contentious philosophical question across the world, not only in European but also in Indic and Arabo-Persian traditions. It is only in colonial modernity that time and chronology begin to appear as identical. This happens through the universalization of calendars/chronologies across the world, through the reconfiguration of different peoples with different temporal sensibilities into different stages of the same time, and needless to say, through the rise of the discipline of history that sets up a universal scheme of periodization for everyone everywhere.

Having made these clarificatory points, this presentation explores how one can rethink the question of time and chronology so as to recover the autonomy of diver​s​e pasts across the world, to unpack our present and think in an open-ended manner about possible futures. Hopefully, such a discussion will be of general interest to all students of history, irrespective of their particular topic of research.

Report:

In the talk, “Time and Chronology: Historical and Philosophical disputes”, Dr. Prathama Banerjee presented us with the concepts of time and chronology and their relationship with each other. Dr. Banerjee argued that time and chronology are actually different concepts, but in our modern discipline of history, we have somehow mixed up both of these concepts. For us, things happen ‘in time’, but we do not approach ‘time’ as an idea itself.

She presents the hypothesis that different cultures thought about time differently, and this imagination was directly related to the imagination of life.The Puranas, that foretells the future by going back into the past or the Buddhist thought that one moment in time has nothing to do with another moment in time prove that.

Dr. Banerjee then goes on to reiterate her point about how history, not just documents events in time, it also actively participates in the production of time. She uses the example of how history is divided into periods of ‘ancient’, ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ She points out that this chronological approach has two major flaws

1. It gives a sense of progress through time, which might not be true.
2. The ancient and medieval always remain the same, while the modern keeps expanding. This leads to an image of utopian modernism that we are yet to achieve.

Hence, in conclusion, I would like to ponder on the above discussion and think about its consequences. We live in an age of uniform time, that time, it’s calibration and also its reference points are same for all people across the world. So does this mean that we are losing out a way of thinking and imagining life because our imagination of time has become unvarying and monotonous? Also, how can we separate time from events, and approach it through the context of discourse?

By Pratiti, Undergraduate Class of 2020