Time Railway India

Modern Asian Studies 47, 4 (2013) pp. 12521282. C Cambridge University Press 2012 doi:10.
1017/S0026749X11000527 First published online 13 November 2012
Time-Sense: Railways and Temporality in Colonial India

RITIKA PRASAD University of North Carolina at Charlotte Email: rprasad2@uncc.edu
Abstract
This paper traces the establishment of standardized railway time in colonial India between 1854 and 1905, and explores how the colonizedas passengers and populationnegotiated the temporal re-structuring introduced through railways. Millions were affected by the process through which the time of a single meridian was selected as an all-India railway time, and gradually deemed civil time, continuing even today as Indian Standard Time. The paper explores everyday responses to this dramatic change in time-sense engendered through railways, both as speedy transport and as standardized time. This allows for a historical analysis of how individuals and societies deal in practice with abstract technological transformations, and of how colonized populations have navigated the modernizing intervention of imperialist states. It argues that the ways in which the population of colonial India accepted, contested, and appropriated the temporal standardization instituted through railways and railway time challenged imperial policies determined by reied presumptions of metropolitan versus colonial time-sense. Since these responses were often analogous to how people and societies across the globe were responding to temporal standardization, they disrupt imperial strategies that used time-sense to locate colonized populations outside of History, in effect excluding them from their own present. They thus serve to materially de-stabilize a narrative of colonial time-lag and to reclaim the historical present as a time in which the colonizer and colonized exist contemporaneously. Consequently, they recongure modernity as an experiential rather than as a normative historical present.
I am grateful to my colleagues at UNC Charlotte and to the Modern Asian Studies reviewers for their careful reading of the draft; also to John David Smith and David Gilmartin for their generosity and advice.
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Introduction
All hours of the twenty-four are alike to Orientals, and their passenger trafc is regulated accordingly.1
In 1919, a shopkeeper from Gujranwala who had been accused of waging war against the British imperial state, defended himself with an alibi based on railway timetables. Under section 121 of the Indian Penal Code regulating offences against the state, Jagannath was charged with fomenting agitation in Gujranwala on 12 and 13 April 1919.2 Offering railway timetables as his alibi, Jagannath argued that it was physically impossible for him to have done so. He explained that he had left Gujranwala for Kathiawar on 12 April by the ve p.m. train; producing witnesses to corroborate his presence in Dhoraji on 16 April, he argued that since it took 44 hours to reach Dhoraji from Delhi by the fastest train, it was impossible for him to have been in Gujranwala after 6 p.m. on 13 April. The court permitted him to summon witnesses to prove his alibi, but actually pronounced judgment without waiting for them. Jagannaths Case became somewhat of an albatross around the imperial neck, particularly when Mohandas Gandhithe Indian nationalist himself trained as a lawyerspoke out against this miscarriage of justice, insisting that railway timetables completely established Jagannaths alibi.3 The use of railway timetables as a legal defence by Jagannatha man of humble position and statuspoints to how the introduction of railways as a popular mode of travel in the mid-nineteenth century affected everyday life in colonial India. The imperative of adapting to this dramatic technological change was certainly not specic to colonized populations. In the nineteenth century railways were viewed globally as heralding progression to the modern, both as transport
Rudyard Kipling, Kim (London: Penguin, 1989 [1901]), p. 74. The meetings were against the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act which allowed the imperial government to retain coercive powers assumed under the Defence of India Act (1915). The prosecution argued that the meetings of 12 and 13 April were central in Gujranwalas decision to replicate the violence exhibited earlier in the city of Amritsar. Government of India, Legislative Department, Indian Penal Code (Act XLV of 1860): modied to 1 May, 1896 (Calcutta: Superintendant of Government printing, 1896), p. 66. M. K. Gandhi, Jagannaths Case, Young India, 30 July 1919, 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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technology and historical stage.4 However, in colonial India (and colonial contexts more broadly), the imperial state perceived the intended effect of railway transport and travel rather specically: as a speedy mechanism to literally transport temporally backward societies into a normative historical modern. According to an imperial ofcial writing in 1846, railways were that mighty engine of improvement which would cause the slumbering spirit of India to awake from the sleep of ages, the sleep of apathy, superstition, and prejudice.5 The temporal emphasis of such anticipation was heightened in the process of developing a standardized railway time for scheduling and coordinating Indias railway network.6 In 1905a half century after the rst passenger train ran in India (1853) and 14 years before Jagannaths trial (1919)the imperial government completed the process of standardizing railway time in British India. Set ve hours and thirty minutes ahead of the time of the Greenwich meridian in England (0 0 0), this all-India railway timecontinuing even today as Indian Standard Time (IST)was intended as more than a technical mechanism for coordinating the safe movement of Indias railways. Instead, the imperial state expected it to provide a uniform time 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 railway travel affected practices, sensibilities, and relationships in colonial India. 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 of 36,616 miles, on which roughly 520 million passengers had travelled. Statistical Abstracts relating to British India: 191011 to 191920 (London: HMSO, 1922), p. 138. The initial commercial line from Bombay to Thana became operational in 1853. Railway construction was undertaken by private, London-based rms, with capital raised predominantly from British investors. The East Indian Railway Company (EIR) and the Great Indian Peninsular Railway Company (GIPR), both formed in 1845, were the early entrants. The British East India Company leased to them for 99 years all land required for railways without charge, and guaranteed a ve per cent return on stockholder investment. The enterprise was private, though the Government of India possessed extensive powers over railway planning, nances, 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 was about 250 million, remarkable numbers were affected by the ensuing changes.7 In addition to those regularly encountering train schedules and railway timetables, the eventual institution of railway time as civil and national time in colonial India further broadened the purview of everyday negotiations of standardization. Substantial scholarship on the relationship between railways and colonial India, particularly the seminal work of economist Daniel Thorner in the 1950s and historian Ian Kerr in the 1990s, has substantively focused on how the nancing and building of railways affected capital and labour relations, industrial production, and market integration in India.8 Though brief, the investigation of a developing colonial travelling public in work by Manu Goswami (2004) and Laura Bear (2007) is critical in two recent attempts to understand how the unprecedented circulation of people engendered by railways affected identity and community in India.9 Thus, chapter three of Goswamis study of the spatial production of India as a national entity
7 Increasing from 0.8 million in 1855, to 3.9 million in 1860, to 26.8 million in 1875, to 80.9 million in 1885, to 153 million in 1895. (The estimated population of India in 1901 was 294 million.) Statistical abstracts relating to British India: from 1840 to 1865 (London: HMSO, 1867), p. 58; from 1860 to 1869 (London: HMSO, 1870), p. 30; from 1867/8 to 1876/7 (London: HMSO, 1878), p. 90; from 1876/7 to 1885/6 (London: HMSO, 1887), p. 178; from 189495 to 190304 (London: HMSO, 1905), p. 138; from 190304 to 191213, p. 136. 8 Daniel Thorner, Investment in Empire: British Railway and Steam Shipping Enterprise in India 18251849 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950); idem, Capital Movement and Transportation: Great Britain and the Development of Indias Railways, Journal of Economic History 11: 4 (Autumn 1951): pp. 389402. Kerr, Building the Railways of the Raj. Also, W. J. Macpherson, Economic Development in India under the British Crown, 18581947, in Economic Development in the Long Run, ed. J. A. Youngson (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972); W. J. Macpherson, The Pattern of Railway Development in India, Far Eastern Quarterly XIV (1995); I. D. Derbyshire, Economic Change and the Railways in North India, Modern Asian Studies 21: 3 (1987); John M. Hurd, Railways, in Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2: circa1757circa 1970, ed., Dharma Kumar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Mukul Mukherjee, Railways and their Impact on Bengals Economy, 18701920, Indian Economic and Social History Review XVII: 2 (1980). An early essay by Dipesh Chakrabarty probed the Bengal Renaissance through the views held by Bengali intellectuals about the introduction of railways: The Colonial Context of the Bengal Renaissance: Early Railway Thinking in Bengal, Indian Economic Social History Review, January 1974, 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 Bear explores 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 extensively explored by Marian Aguiar (2010).10 The range of new departures is collated in a 2007 volume edited by Kerr, entitled 27 Down.11 This paper begins by examining how assumptions about time and time-reckoning informed both discussion and policy about standardizing railway time in colonial India, and traces the ofcial process between 1854 and 1905 through which this temporal restructuring was instituted. It then explores how, during the colonial period, Indians grappled in practice with railway temporality, both as speedy transport and as railway time. It argues that imperial policy structured the standardization of railway time around notions of colonial difference, articulated through reied ideas of colonial (and metropolitan) time-sense. However, the ways in which such changes were actually accepted, contested, and appropriated shows remarkable parallels across binaries of colonizer and colonized. The multiplicity of responses is not surprising in itself given the constantly increasing size of the colonial travelling public and the intimate relationship between railway and civil time. However, the breadth and heterogeneity of reactions and negotiations is materially indispensable in critiquing presumptions that decreed a civilizational hierarchy of responses to temporal standardization. Consequently, these responses are crucial in reclaiming the historical modern as a time occupied contemporaneously 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 Colonial and Post-Colonial South Asia, Modern Asian Studies, 37: 2 (May, 2003), pp. 287326. Marian Aguiars Tracking Modernity: India, Trains, and the Culture of Mobility (University of Minnesota, 2010) explores representation of railway spaces. 11 Ian J. Kerr, ed., 27 Down: New Departures in Indian Railway Studies (Orient Longman, 2007). This is in addition to his earlier anthology titled Railways in Modern India (Delhi: Oxford, University Press, 2005), which had brought together both primary sources and existing scholarship on railway history. 12 Peter Gallison, Einsteins Clocks: The Place of Time, Critical Enquiry: 26: 2 (winter 2000): pp. 355389, quote p. 361.
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In the nineteenth century, the question of railroad time generated extensive discussion globally. E. P. Thompsons classic work on the 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 effectively spurred the spread of standardized time.14 The half-century between 1854 and 1905 was rife with discussions about standardizing railway time in India. This involved (i) replacing local time with that of the 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 to that of an internationally accepted base meridian at Greenwich.15 Although generated by railway companies concerned with technical co-ordination and safety at junction points, these discussions also involved administrators at local and national levels, most notably civil servants in the public works department. They demonstrate not only a deep reliance on imperial imaginings of a reied and singular Indian temporality, even among technical men and administrators, but also and frequently despite conicting policy positionsthe remarkable stability of such reied understandings.
E. P. Thompson, Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism, Past and Present, vol. 38 (December 1967): 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; Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th 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 in 1748, nudged some towards recognizing the need for standardization, yet: It was not until the introduction of railway transportation, which affected a much wider population, that the need for introducing a uniform standard of time at a supralocal level became crucial (p. 6). The Standardization of Time: A Socio-historical Perspective, American Journal of Sociology 88:1 (July 1982): pp. 123. According to Ian Bartky, discussions about standardization of time in north America resulted from the scientic pursuits which in the 1870s required simultaneous observations from scattered points. However, he continues by saying that in response to pressures from scientists, railroad superintendents and managers implemented a standard time system on 18 November 1883. The Adoption of Standard Time, Technology and Culture 30:1 (January 1989): pp. 2556, quote on p. 25. 15 The difference calculable in complete hours. Later, for India, the half-hour was accepted.
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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 being temporally distant from the historical present. This distancing is effectively captured by Johannes Fabians notion of allochronism, which he describes as a conjuring trick that separates in historical time those who actually exist in shared time.16 His understanding of it as a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse is morphologically similar to how a teleological rendering of temporality was used to understand the historical role of railways in colonial Indiaand to underpin the process of standardizing time here. This temporal distancing of colonized populations was argued through dening a singular Indian sense of time, characterized as pre-modern, which was then juxtaposed against a normative idea of modern, which excluded the colonized from their own present.17 In the colony, modernity thus became a world of co-existent yet non-contemporary beings.18 This characterization of colonial temporality was not new to the midnineteenth century when discussions about standardized railway time began to take place. Romila Thapar has traced how eighteenth-century Indologists, who were unable to cross-reference Biblical and Classical information with Indian texts, deemed time-sense in India as cyclical and, consequently, incapable of comprehending historical change, arguing that cyclicality prevented any event from being unique.19 This cyclical and mythic pre-modern Indian time-sense was then juxtaposed against a reied 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 and Place, Explorations in Critical Anthropology (London: Duke, 1997); Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 174; and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 18 See Prathma Banerjees discussion of History-writing in Politics of Time: Primitives and 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 University Press, 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. Indological scholarship 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 immediate relevance here is not the palpable ahistoricity of such reication which misrepresented temporality in both colony and metropole21 but how deeply these inuenced ofcial discussion and policy decisions about standardizing time in colonial India. Synchronizing the colony Almost as soon as passenger trains began running in India, ofcial discussion about the time to be observed generally on Indian railways was initiated by Colonel Baker, the governments consulting engineer for railways. In 1854, when railway mileage in India stood at 35 miles in Bombay presidency (with 121 miles in Bengal presidency being added in 1855), he argued that Indias vastness necessitated that local mean time be kept at each station on Indian railways.22 Presidency ofcials in Madras and Bombay agreed with him, However, they argued the case not by emphasizing that rail mileage remained limited and in discrete pockets at this juncture but instead by juxtaposing timesense in India and England.23 Colonel Pears thus stated that while in
Fabian, Time and the Other, p. 30. Thapar points out that secularization of time in western Europe was a nineteenth-century phenomenon; furthermore, that cyclic and linear time were both used in India, depending on function. Thus, whilst cyclic time was part of the cosmology in early Indian texts such as the Mahabharata, the Dharma-shastra of Manu and the 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 linear conceptions of time. Thapar, Time as a Metaphor, pp. 46; idem, Early India: From the Origins 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 is analogous to the broader argument made by Ashis Nandy about imperialism involving internal colonization (of difference) in metropolitan contexts before it expanded outwards. 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 to 1865, p. 58. 23 J. J. Pears, Consulting Engineer for Railways (Fort St George), to Chief Secretary, Fort St George, 12 September 1854, in Home: Railway A, 15 September 1854, nos
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England the need for standardization derived weight from the number and inuence of men of businessfor whom it was very important that there should be no mistake about timeyet in India, it would be very long before the mass of people could be made to understand a railway time.24 Dissatised with governmental support for local mean time, the East India Railway argued for a standardized railway time by inverting the argument about Indias vastness: its trafc-manager believed that Indias size made it impossible to construc[t] an intelligible Time Bill, without the establishment of some universal.25 J. C. Batchelor went as far as to determine the time by which all Railway Station clocks may be regulated from the 15th October next.26 The Government of India declined this request, deciding that stations on the East India Railway would follow presidency timethat of its capital, Calcuttaup to the extreme limit of local Bengal supervision, continuing with Allahabad time from there to Delhi.27 However, this move from local to presidency time was instituted unwittingly. The Secretary of State for India in London belatedly informed the Indian administration that their decisioninstituting Calcutta time as railway time on East India Railway stations in Bengalcontravened their 1854 decision supporting local mean time.28 While admitting this error, the Government of India decided to stay with the 1864 decision: by now, the East India Railway had worked for nearly a year up to Allahabad with Calcutta time, and from Allahabad to Delhi with Allahabad time.29 However, Cecil Stephenson, the East India Railways deputy
8991, NAI; Captain Crawford, Superintending Engineer for Railways (Bombay) to H. E. Goldsmith, Chief Secretary, Government of Bombay, 21 August, 1854, in Home: Railway A, 15 September 1854, nos 6061, NAI. 24 Pears to Chief Secretary, 15 September 1854. In the 1840s, English railway companies standardized time, each on its own line, with no attempt to co-ordinate the efforts. However, ve years after the formation of the Railway Clearing House (1842), it was suggested in 1847 that Greenwich Mean Time be introduced as the standard time on all lines. Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, pp. 4344. 25 J. C. Batchelor, Trafc Manager, EIR to E. Palmer, Agent, EIR, 31 July 1862, in Public Works Department (PWD): Railway, 15 August 1862, nos 2628, NAI. He suggested Jubbulpoor time, midway between Calcutta and Bombay. 26 E. Palmer, Agent, EIR to Secretary, PWD, 4 August 1862, in PWD: Railway, 15 August 1862, nos 2628, NAI. 27 PWD: Railway, 15 August 1862, nos 2628, NAI; and PWD: Railway, April 1862, nos 7881, NAI. 28 Secretary of State for India to Government of India, 17 November 1864, in PWD: Railway, February 1865, nos 1415, NAI; also PWD: Railway, June 1864, no. 49, NAI. 29 Government of India to Secretary of State for India, 17 November 1865, in PWD: Railway, February 1865, nos 1415, NAI. The Government of India informed
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agent challenged the governments orders by insisting that an all-India railway time was necessary for guards and pointsmen to ensure passenger safety.30 The Bengal government disagreed with Stephenson and argued that an all-India railway time would militate against the interests of the public of the large centres of business, such as Calcutta and Bombay, entitled to the greatest consideration.31 The East India Railways chairman countered this argument by alleging that a failure to standardize an all-India railway time meant that the government was neglecting passenger safety.32 The request focused on standardization on the East India Railway, but between 1855 and 1867, railway mileage in Bengal had burgeoned and the East India Railway had also spread westwards out of the presidency.33 However, when Bengals Deputy Consulting Engineer chose to support the East India Railways request and suggested that the local time of Madras (Madras time) be accepted as the Railway standard in India as London time is in England,34 its Lieutenant-Governor disagreed: in his opinion, the institution of Madras time or that of any other foreign city would be unacceptable to the public.35 Though it had already instituted
the Secretary of State of their 1864 decision in a letter dated 13 June 1864; the latter expressed his objection in a letter dated 17 November 1864; and the Government of India responded in a letter dated 17 November 1865. 30 PWD Circular (no. 7): To Governments of Madras, Bombay, North West Provinces and Punjab; Chief Commissioners of Oudh and Central Provinces; Agent to Governor-General, Central India and Rajputana, 16 April 1864, in PWD: Railway, April 1864, nos 7881, NAI. Cecil Stephenson to Deputy Consulting Engineer, Government of Bengal (Railway), 19 May 1865, in PWD: Railway, July 1865, nos 2527, NAI. 31 J. Hovenden, Assistant Secretary, Government of Bengal (PWD: Railway), to Secretary, Government of India (PWD), 1 June 1865, in PWD: Railway, July 1865, nos 2527, NAI. C.H. Dickens, Secretary, Government of India (PWD), to Joint Secretary, Government of Bengal (PWD: Railway), 5 July 1865, in PWD: Railway, July 1865, nos 2527, 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, June 1867, nos 12831, NAI. 33 The 121 miles of 1855 stood at 1,311 miles (in Bengal and the Northwest Provinces) by 1867, an increase of over 900 per cent. Statistical abstracts from 1840 to 1865, p. 58; Statistical Abstracts from 1860 to 1869, pp. 3031. 34 Deputy Consulting Engineer, Government of Bengal (Railway), 22 April 1867, in PWD: Railway A, June 1867, nos 12831, NAI. 35 Assistant Secretary, Government of Bengal (PWD: Railway) to Secretary, Government of India (PWD), 23 April 1867, in PWD: Railway A, June 1867, nos 12831, NAI.
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Figure 1. Longitudes and Time Meridians
Madras time as an all-India telegraph time, the government rejected it as an all-India railway time in 1867.36 Across the globe, spatially specic local time was the only valid standard till about the mid-nineteenth century.37 Any form of temporal standardizationbe it railway, national, or Greenwich timerequired that local time be substituted with supra-local time, capable of being divided into commensurable units. In contrast to local time, supra-local time thus broke the link between time and place, a process that Wolfgang Schivelbusch describes as a loss of temporal identity for regions whose local time was replaced.38 Furthermore, whilst supra-local time was theoretically inter-subjective, it actually privileged a specic location whose local time was selected as the standard.39 Thus, temporal standardization was challenged in various contexts 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, nos 12831, 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 Dening modernity as a particular Western project seeking to universalize itself: (Consequences of Modernity, pp. 1720), Giddens follows Jrgen Habermas argument that modernization dissociates modernity from its modern European origins 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 in 1847, railroad time was not accepted as anything but schedule time until much later in the [nineteenth] century. There was also considerable psychological and social resistance in Scotland, Ireland and the west of England to standardization by those anxious to preserve the hour of their locality.41 Given Indias breadth, challenges to temporal standardization by those whose local time varied substantially from the standard would have been expected and congruent with reactions across the globe. However, possible equivocation about this new temporal ordering in the colony was read normatively. The imperial presumption of a singular Indian time-sense engendered the conclusion that a colonized population would be unequivocally hostile to temporal standardization. This perhaps explains the responses that imperial functionaries anticipated of the colonial population. While Colonel Pears had argued in 1854 that the need for standardization in England derived weight from the number and inuence of the men of business, in India it was the public of the large centres of business such as Calcutta and Bombay who were presumed to be unwilling to accept any but local time.42 The governments invocation in 1867 of native prejudice sounded fundamentally similar to Colonel Pears 1854 suggestion that in India it would be very long before people could be made to understand railway time. The fact that annual passenger trafc had increased almost 2,500 per centfrom 0.5 to 13.8 millionbetween 1854 and 1867 did not substantially affect the argument of the colony as a site of difference.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 of Bombay in his piece Bombay Time, in Meera Kosambi, ed., Intersections: Socio-Cultural Trends in Maharashtra (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2000), pp. 161186. 43 Statistical Abstracts: from 1840 to 1865, p. 58; from 1860 to 1869, pp. 3031. The post-1857/8 governments reluctance to interfere in aspects deemed as customary to Indian society can be read through Partha Chatterjees discussion of inner domains (though he himself does not focus on time) in The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 613.
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the former being dominantly an ofcial instrument arguably posed less 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 standard railway time, rst to be adopted on the Great Indian Peninsular Railway.45 It was also advocated as civil time. However, when the change was made, Calcutta, Bombay and Karachiperhaps because they remained commercially, nancially, and administratively critical to a post-Rebellion imperial state obsessed with stabilitywere to be permitted 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 step was to link this mathematically with a meridian accepted as an international base. This impetus became part of wider discussions about selecting a prime meridian and a single, universal time for the whole world.47 The India Ofce in London forwarded to the Government of India suggestions made by Sanford Fleming, a Canadian railway engineer who was advocatingas had the 1884 Washington Conferencea prime meridian corresponding with the time of the Greenwich meridian in England.48 However, this choice of zero longitude was far from uncontested. France held out against Greenwich, and even the establishment in 1911 of Paris Mean Time described by David Landes as nothing other than Greenwich Mean Time, without the word Greenwichwas seen as instrumental to salving national susceptibilities.49 Similarly, the General Time Convention in north America hotly debated the choice of Greenwich in the selection of a national meridian for time purposes. Many emphasized that there was no reason to base a time system for rail
Mentioned in PWD: Railway, April 1870, nos 136137, NAI. Note from Colonel Kennedy (Bombay) to Major Williams (Madras), 28 March 1870, and Resolution by the Government of India PWD, 28 March 1870, both in PWD: Railway, April 1870, nos 136137, NAI. 46 Ofce Note, 1 November 1890, in PWD: Railway Trafc, February 1891, nos. 3943, NAI. Masselos Bombay Time depicts some of the effects of different railway and civil time in the city of Bombay. Burma kept Rangoon time. 47 Sanford Fleming, Memorandum on Reckoning Time on a Scientic Basis, 20 November 1889 (Ottawa), in PWD: Railway Trafc, February 1891, nos 3943, 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 a particularly pithy riposte from the scientist Simon Newcombe: See no more 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 the idea of displacing Madras time but did not fundamentally question the choice of Greenwich as base meridian. Instead, it emphasized that there seemed no advantage in exchanging our present standard of Madras time, especially if it was to be replaced by time-zones regulated by meridians which pass through no important places. Instead, there would be time enough to effect these changes, when Indias neighbours and the chief countries of Europe do so.51 However, the Committee of the Royal Society insisted that in view of the doubt which attends all statements of time in the great majority of cases in India, it was imperative to change railway time in India from Madras time to that of a longitude exactly ve hours and thirty minutes east of Greenwich. The subtraction of ve hours, twenty-one minutes and ten seconds required to translate events from Madras to 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 hope that all British stations will adopt the nearest hour to Greenwich time as their standard,53 an ofcial in the Government of India wrote that when 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 nally circulated to railway companies their proposal for the colony to fall
50 In the report by William F. Allen, Permanent Secretary of the Railroads General Time Convention (187285). Bartky, Adoption of Standard Time, pp. 42 47, footnote 65. 51 Ofce Note, 22 December 1890, in PWD: Railway Trafc, February 1891, nos 3943, NAI. 52 On a Proposal for an Indian Standard Time, Enclosure to letter from J. Wilson, Secretary, Government of India (Revenue and Agriculture), Circular 7 48-2 (Meteorology), 13 July 1904, in PWD: Railway Trafc A, India Proceedings, IOR/P/6846, British Library, London (BL). 53 Royal Scottish Geographical Society, Note on Standard Time, 10 November 1898, in PWD: Railway Trafc 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 Trafc A, India Proceedings, IOR/ P/5682, BL.
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into line with the rest of the civilized world.55 Some, like the Great Indian Peninsular Railway, objectedits agent in Bombay stressing the considerable inconvenience that would result from upsetting the present standard adopted in India to which our business men of all nationalities are wedded by long usage.56 However, most other railway companies viewed this change as desirable, resulting in a favourable consensus of opinion.57 The Government of India consequently declared that it had decided to adopt on railways a standard time which in India will be exactly 51/2 hours in advance of Greenwich and 9 minutes in advance of Madras time, the change to be introduced at midnight between the 30th June and the 1st July 1905.58 This new all-India railway timeof a meridian roughly two degrees east of Madrascontinues 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 between 1854 and 1905from local mean time to presidency time, the institution of Madras time as railway time, and the 1905 establishment of a standard railway time linked rationally with Greenwichwas a gradual process. Furthermore, the adoption of railway time as civil time was an even more vexed issue. Three decades after Madras time had been decreed railway and civil time in British Indiawith only Bombay, Calcutta,
55 Quote in reply of Manager and Engineer, Bengal Provincial Railway, to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Railway Department, 5 September 1904, in PWD: Railway Trafc A, January 1905, nos 3246, India Proceedings, IOR/P/7086, BL. 56 Agent, GIPR to Consulting Engineer (Railways), 7 October 1904, in PWD: Railway Trafc A, January 1905, nos 3246, India Proceedings, IOR/P/7086, BL. 57 Government of India Circular 771-22 from J. Wilson, Ofciating Secretary to the Government of India, 27 May 1905, in Home: Public A, July 1905, nos 200201, NAI; PWD: Railway Trafc A, January 1905, nos 3246, IOR/P/7086, BL. 58 Government of India Circular 771-22 from J. Wilson, Ofciating Secretary to the Government of India, 27 May 1905; Statement Exhibiting Moral and Material Progress of India during 190405 (London, HMSO, 1906), p. 132. Excluded were small local [railway] lines where the change would be inconvenient. Burmas standard time was 61/2 hours ahead of Greenwich and 5 minutes and 23 seconds earlier than Rangoon time. This new all-India railway time was also meant for telegraphs. 59 Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, tr. by Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (New York: Continuum, 2004 [1985]), p. 76.
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and Karachi being allowed to continue with their local time for civil purposesthe General Manager of the Darjeeling Railway could be found complaining of the confusion caused by there being railway time and telegraph ofce time, cutchery [court] time, bazar time and also church time in a small town like Darjeeling.60 However, given the continually increasing numbers of railway passengers in India, millions had to gradually negotiate not only train schedules and railway timetables on a regular basis, but also the larger structure of temporal re-organization that underpinned railway time. This section explores the discrepant and multiple ways in which a colonized population grappled 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 Jagannaths alibi, how they appropriated and deployed it.
Time as narrative The coming of the railway itself performed a temporal function by demarcating historical time. There is brief yet explicit intimation of this in Indira (1873), a novel penned by a leading gure of the Bengal intelligentsia, Bankimchandra Chattopadhya. The story opens with the narrator-protagonist Indira lamenting that she could not take up her position as wife: her wealthy father believed that his son-in-law had not earned enough money to support his daughter. To rectify this, Indiras mortied husband resolved to travel to the west. There was then no railway, states Indira, and the way to the west was very difcult.61 Her husband travelled on foot and was long on the way till he nally reached the Punjab. He who could do this, she concludes emphatically, could also make money.62 This opening reference is startling in a novel in which railway travel does not really gure. Even Calcutta, linked in a functioning railway network, is approached
60 General Manager and Chief Engineer, Darjeeling-Himalayan Railway to Secretary, Government of Bengal (Railway), 24 August 1904, PWD: Railway Trafc A, January 1905, nos 3246, 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 temporal orientationborn 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 conrms that this orientation is not merely descriptive: Indira contends that if her husband could travel on foot, he would not be daunted by the task of making money. Bankim seems to have both understood and endorsed the temporal acceleration generated by railways. In the monthly 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. . . . Your father, who lives in Benaras, has this morning fallen fatally ill. . .and by night you sit at his feet and care for him.64
Bankim is unequivocally enthusiastic about temporal shrinkage, or the dramatic compression of travel time engendered by railways.65 He exhibits no apprehension, such as is visible, for instance, in the German poet Heinrich Heines characterization of railway travel from Paris to Germany as a terrible idea.66 The increased tempo of movement suffocated 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 of the third strand of the nineteenth-century novel in India, one that attempted to render contemporary Indian society realistically in ction, Bankims enthusiasm records at least one sense of the response and possibility engendered by the speed of railways.68 Crucial here is Partha Chatterjees identication 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 to Calcutta is bracketed by two journeys on a palanquin: rst when she travels from her parental home to her in-laws house (pp. 261264); and then at the conclusion, when she 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 and Marian 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 John Ruskin 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 of its culture, exemplied by its science, technology and love of progress and that [t]rue modernity for the non-European nations would lie in combining the superior material qualities of Western cultures with the spiritual greatness of the East.69 When juxtaposed against Heines anxieties, the reaction of this colonial elitesmall but politically inuential in the late nineteenth centurythus inverts the imperial structure of colonial time-lag, the rst in Europe and then elsewhere rendering of temporality as described by Dipesh Chakrabarty.70 Multiple narratives were generated amongst the colonized when faced with the compression of time engendered by railways. In Intizar Husains Kataa Huaa Dabba (A Stranded Railroad Car, 1954), the elderly Mirza Sahib expresses his preference for travel prior to railways. For him, the speed of railways had robbed travel of enjoyment. On a train, he stated:
You blink your eye and youve arrived at your destination. But there was a time when kingdoms fell and governments toppled by the time you reached where you were going; and the toddlers youd left crawling on all foursyou returned to nd them fathers worrying their heads over a suitable match for their marriageable daughters. 71
Whereas Indira had invoked the rigours of pre-railway travel, Mirza Sahib invoked a romantic idea of it. For him, real journeys were those before railways, when it took ages to pass a single night of travel. One travelled hundreds and hundreds of miles, back and forth, with the end nowhere in sight and all traces of the starting point irretrievably obscured. He thought back with excitement at the fear of tigers, of snake-bites, of highwaymen and yes, of ghosts too. One travelled by the dim star-lit sky overhead and the burning torches below.72 The speed of railways had destroyed this rich sensory tableau: now that the train is in fashion, concluded Mirza Sahib, I just dont feel like travelling anymore.73 Bankim had been exhilarated by the speed of railways and the possibilities created by compression of travel time; Mirza Sahibs
Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, p. 50. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, p. 8; idem, Postcoloniality and the Artice of History: Who Speaks for Indian Pasts? Representations no. 37 (winter 1992): pp. 126. 71 Intizar Husain, Kataa Hua Dabba (1954), tr. Muhammad Umar Menon, A Stranded Railroad Car, in idem, 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 depth was effaced by the speed of the new technology, a sentiment strikingly homologous to the nineteenth-century English naturalist John Ruskins lament about all travelling becoming dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.74 Schivelbuschs argument about the aesthetic freedom of the pre-industrial subject being discovered at the very moment when pre-industrial methods of production and transportation seemed threatened by mechanization, is certainly relevant here.75 However, even if romanticized, Mirza Sahibs reaction demonstrates the heterogeneous responses to temporal shrinkage amongst the colonized. While annihilating space by shrinking transport time, railways simultaneously expanded space by incorporating newpreviously remoteareas into the transport network. From 35 miles open for passenger trafc in 1854, railway mileage jumped to 2,581 miles by 1864, was 19,466 miles by 1895 and stood at 32,090 miles in 1910.76 Thus, railway travel both diminished and increased travelling time. Railways allowed one to reach a destination faster, but as rail mileage expanded, so did the time spent travelling. A potent example of the expansion of travel time, even as railways compressed distance, is found in the prodigious writings of the nationalist leader Mohandas Gandhi during many hours of train travel. Gandhis substantial Collected 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 fteen nights were spent on trains.77 In fact, stringing together the pieces written by Gandhi as he travelled exhaustively by train is tantamount to tracing a textual itinerary of nationalist politics in India.78 Gandhis actual use
74 In a tone remarkably similar to Mirza Sahib, John Ruskin had written: The whole system 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 help it. 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; from 190304 to 191213, pp. 136139. 77 M. K. Gandhi, What to do When One Loses Temper, Navjivan, 20 February1921, 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 an anecdote it is worth mentioning that when the Kohat disturbances threatened to
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of travel timeespecially when juxtaposed against his unequivocal critique of railway technology in Hind Swaraj (1909)lends itself to the idea of consumption as a series of creative and transgressive acts that dispute and fragment the authorized text, and create in it something un-known to the producer.79 The political valence of such transgressive consumption is only heightened if one reads his travels against 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 visibly manifested in timetables: train schedules directly oriented everyday life towards the changes instituted. Early railway timetables were based on the 12-hour diurnal system, using ante-meridian (a.m.) and post-meridian (p.m.) notations.81 By the time the Canadian engineer Sanford Fleming penned his 1889 memorandum suggesting that the twenty-four-hour notation be adopted on railway timetables globally, the practice seems to have been in use on railways in India and Burma.82 In Flemings view, counting the hours from midnight to
become a conagration, Gandhi suggested to Shaukat Ali that they travel together to Delhi since [t]he train seems to be the best place for such a discussion. Letter to Shaukat Ali, 23 February 23, 1925, CWMG, vol. xxvi: January-April 1925, (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 of the text/action from that authorized by the producer. 80 The Trafc of the Bombay Railway, Friend of India, 9 February 1854. 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 rst passenger train in India had been inaugurated on 16 April 1853, shows: trains leave Bombay for Thana at 6.30 a.m. and 4.0 p.m., whilst those returning to Bombay, left Thana at 8.45 a.m. and 6.5 p.m. The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce, 29 April 1853. 82 Except for the Madras railway, scheduled to change from 1 October 1890. Fleming, Memorandum on Reckoning Time, 20 November 1889. The system was being used for telegraphs from the 1860s: see Lieutenant Colonel C. Douglas, Director General of Telegraphs in India, to E. C. Bayly, Secretary, Government of India, 3 September 1862, in PWD: Railway, 15 August 1862, nos 2628, NAI; and Ofce Note, 4 December 1890, in PWD: Railway Trafc, February 1891, nos. 3943, NAI. The change had almost certainly taken effect before the Washington Conference assembled. Rule I (a) of the proceedings of the Railway Conference of September 1882 in Home: Public B, October 1882, nos 14344, 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 to cause inconvenience, loss of time, probably loss of property, or loss of life.83
Though railways were introduced in England about two decades before they were in India, the twenty-four-hour notation for railways seems to have been in use in India rstin 1889, Fleming was urging English railway managers to adopt this system.84 The subject had been under discussion for decades: as early as March 1861, the periodical Once a Week had commented on the imprecision of Englands Bradshaw timetables and guides, asking: who can say at once whether ve minutes past twelve at night is a.m. or p.m..85 Their support for the alternative notation was bolstered by a belief that it was no great strain on the intellect, for those who could read and write would understand that a train arriving at 15.45 by the table, arrives at 3.45 p.m. by the clock.86 This discussion in Once a Week not only threw into question the implicit connection between specic ideas of intellect deemed, in imperial discourse, as necessary for adapting to technological progress, but alsoagaindisrupted an imperial logic of colonial time-lag. However, it was not merely imperial discourse that was insensitive to historical praxis. An 1866 petition to the Viceroy by the British Indian Association requested shelter and accommodation at railway stations for native third-class passengers who could not be expected to arrive at the station only at the proper time.87 Most of them, stated the petition, had an indenite idea of time, knowing little beyond pruhurs of three hours each. Also, a large number came from surrounding villages and rural districts where no time is kept.88 Obviously large segments of the Indian population were confronted by timetables that, at least till the 1870s, were in English and used
Fleming, Memorandum on Reckoning Time, 20 November 1889. Ibid., Memorandum, 20 November 1889. 85 Once a Week, March 1861, p. 273, Appendix C in PWD: Railway, 15 August 1862, nos 2628, NAI. Several of the early timetables using 12 noon have been reproduced in Charles E. Lee, The Centenary of Bradshaw (London: Railway Gazette, 1940), pp. 1823. 86 Once a Week, March 1861, 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 the British Indian Association, its internalization of imperial views about temporal sense (or lack of it) in the colony might not seem surprising. Yet, attacking the predominantly English management, the petition simultaneously complained of trains arriving so very irregularly and behind the time, thus faulting the imperial state on the very grounds on which it had sought dominance.90 Interestingly, this internalization of imperial critiques of the colony, as well as the edgling notion of paternalism towards a mass public that informs the 1866 petition, can be juxtaposed against a very different moment, embodied in a 1924 piece by Mohandas Gandhi entitled Time Sense.91 Excoriating the educated for being late for everything, he argued that the masses waiting patiently for their leaders embodied forbearance. Whereas the British Indian Association had painted a picture of the poor, the ignorant and the helpless masses, incapable of punctuality because they could not grasp the structure of temporality within which timetables existed, Gandhi even as he stressed the need for time-disciplinedissociated punctuality from education. However, the question of punctuality was neither stable, nor simple. Discussing the common charge that Indians have no sense of time [and] we are as a rule behind timean explicit reference to an allochronistic rendering of the colonyGandhi argued:
One who is too late is admittedly behind time. But it is equally true to say that one who is four hours before time is also behind time. He has neglected a hundred things. . . . He may succeed in catching his train, but he will be behind time for many other things probably more important.92
Re-inserting everyday life into empty time Even as time-sense functioned as a discursive battleground, railway passengers had to negotiate the everyday logistics of railway travel.
89 It is not every person who can say at once whether ve minutes past twelve at night is A.M. or P.M.; and no wonder, for rst of all these expressions are Latin abbreviations, Once a Week, March 1861, p. 273. 90 Petition by the British Indian Association, 16 October 1866. 91 M. K. Gandhi, Time Sense, Young India, 6 November 1924, CWMG, vol. xxv: August 1924-January 1925, (Ahmedabad: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1967) pp. 28586. 92 Gandhi, Time Sense, emphasis added.
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Early demands by the travelling public were for railway timetables to be translated into pertinent local language(s). The Panjb-i-Akhbr of Lahore had demanded in April 1871 that that the Sindh, Punjab and Delhi Railway publish Urdu and Hindi translations of railway timetables for the benet of the Native public. Unlike many of the reforms demanded by the third-class travelling public, this was implemented quickly. In August 1871, the newspaper commended the fact that monthly timetables were now being published in English, Urdu, and Hindi.93 The demand gained momentum with the Railway Act of 1879 requiring by law that railways exhibit at each station a timetable in one or more vernacular languages.94 Delegates at the 1882 Railway Conference in Simla emphasized their compliance with this requirement.95 Few could match the zeal of the Sindh, Punjab and Delhi Railway which displayed timetables in English, Urdu, and Hindi, on the platforms, waiting sheds, outside verandahs, goods sheds and supplied them to police thanas [stations], court-houses, dak bungalows [rest-houses], hotels, &c., as also to the principal traders within a radius of 30 miles of each station.96 However, others did provide them in waiting-sheds and at railway stations.97 Public demands continued to stress the need for timetables in local vernaculars where this demand had not been complied with.98 This preliminary demand was accompanied by the more vocal asking for train timings to be tailored to their convenience. As early as 1857, repeated applications led the agent of the East India Railway to authorize the 9.20 a.m. up and 10.12. a.m. down trains to stop at C[i]nnag[h/l]ure and Bidabatty stations.99 The demands only increased in the next few decades. The Koh-i-Nr of August 1872 complained at length about the trouble suffered by passengers owing
93 Panjb-i-Akhbr (Lahore), 5 August 1871, Selections from Vernacular Newspapers in Punjab, North-Western Provinces, Oudh and Central Provinces (NNR: NWP). 94 Railway Conference, September 1882, Home: Public B, October 1882, nos 143 44, NAI. 95 In particular, representatives of the SPD, Eastern Bengal, Oudh and Rohilkhand, Madras, South India and Great Indian Peninsular railways. 96 Note by Trafc 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 the Madras Presidency (NNR: Madras). 99 Letters to the Home Government, no. 52 of 30 October 1857, Railway General Letters, 185261, NAI.
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to train timings between Delhi and Ghaziabad. Since the only uptrain from Delhi started at 2.45 a.m., and left Ghaziabad for Meerut at 7.35 a.m., passengers had to begin the journey from Delhi late at night and wait at Ghaziabad for four or ve hours for the Meerut train. Similarly, since the mail-train started from Lahore at 2.45 a.m. and the passenger-train, which started at 12 a.m., only reached the Phillour Pass at 8 p.m., passengers had to spend the entire night there before crossing the Pass.100 Calcuttas Sulabha Samachar complained that trains on the Tirhut State Railway were not timed to run in harmony with those on the East Indian Railway, the Burdwan Sanjivani suggested that the 7.20 up-chord could make time to halt at Mankpur if it omitted unimportant station[s], the Kerala Patrika asked for train timings in Malabar to be changed to afford greater convenience to the public, and the Swadeshamitran demanded that the Madras Railway Company re-schedule the 9 p.m. Olavakode train to meet the special train connecting Tirur to Calicut.101 Train timings were also relevant to emerging time-structures of work and leisure. In certain urban areas, railways allowed specic groups to live at some distance from where they workedto spend the weekdays in the city and to return home on the weekends. In a letter to the Englishman (Calcutta) dated 21 August 1857 A Regular Passenger complained that Monday morning trains between Pundooah and Howrah were inconvenient for those who worked in Howrah and visited their families on weekends.102 He stated that since Monday morning passengers usually had to join their ofces at nine, at least before ten, it was desirable that the Pundooah trains start at six instead of seven as present: the changed timing
Koh-i-Nr (Lahore), 17 August 1872, NNR: NWP. Sulabha Samachar (Calcutta), 15 January 1881, 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 May 1890 (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 bank of 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 in disparate locations: whether employees at Jamalpur workshops who commuted to nearby village using special workers trains, or those living in the northern part of Bombay island who had to commute regularly to work owing to a housing shortage in the middle and lower part of Bombay Island. See L. S. S. OMalley, Bengal and Orissa District Gazetteers: Monghyr (New Delhi: Logos: (2007[1926]), p. 132 and S. 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 The Englishman itself was an elite newspaper, catering to the English community in Bengal as well as to a limited circle of bilingual Bengalis working in the context of a bureaucratic-capitalist time-discipline or chakri.104 Nevertheless, among a limited set of people at least, the dual demands of work and family seem to have been split fairly discretely 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 remarkable how quickly this urbansuburban organization of the week emerged, drawing on emerging bureaucratization, an urban-industrial order including clerical and mercantile rms, and the temporal shrinkage provided by the railways.105 Demands for convenient daily and weekly train timings continued to come in, whether it was merchants and ofcials living at Saidapet and St Thomas Mount petitioning the South Indian Railway to run trains starting at 8 p.m. from these stations, or employees at merchant ofces in Calcutta complaining that there were only two trains after 6 p.m. to allow them to return to Hooghly, 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 the demands of passengers for the alteration of train timings, one sees not only the spread of bureaucratic-capitalist structures, but equally a tempering of the theoretical abstractness of these with individual
103 A Suggestion to the Trafc Manager of the Railway Company by A Regular Passenger, The Englishman and Military Chronicle, 21 August 1857. 104 Apropos Sumit Sarkars analysis of chakri and the time-discipline of the ofce in his Writing Social History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), especially pp. 186 215 and pp. 282357. 105 G. Huddlestone, History of the East Indian Railway (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co., 1906), p. 14. In the context of England, Dionysius Lardner relates the epoch of suburbs with the compression of travel time generated by the railroads: in all direction round the metropolis in which railways are extended, habitations are multiplied. Railway Economy (London, 1851) p. 36. 106 Bhaskara Gnanodayam (Negapatam), 10 March 1893 (NNR: Madras); Hitavadi (Calcutta), 8 April 1904 (NNR: Bengal). 107 Well into the twentieth century, there is evidence of time-tabulated in the 24hour as well as the a.m./p.m. format, including by the same railway company. Notices for changes in the East Indian Railway trains timings within a week of each other show both formats in use in the same timetable. See notices indicating changes in the East Indian Railway trains in Searchlight (Patna), 23 September 1927 and 30 September 1927.
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and local concernsinserting the minutiae of daily life back into the theoretically 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 (of a Judaeo-Christian God). In the 1850s, East India Railway ofcials in Calcutta were isolated in their endeavour to generate prots through the running of excursion trains on Sundays: the Government of India and the companys directors in London insisted on limiting Sabbath Trains to the absolute necessities of the public.108 The government conceded that the East India Railway would eventually be able to run trains on Sunday but declined to encourage Sunday excursion trains.109 A railway ofcial in Calcutta who petitioned for a passenger train from Howrah to Ranigung on Sunday had to assure the Companys Board that this [was] not to be an Excursion train. To enforce the important principle of limiting Sabbath Trains, no reductions in fares could be made on Sundays; furthermore, arrivals and departures of even regular trains had to afford the Employees of the Company the opportunity of attending Divine Worship.110 The issue was aggravated with the Christian inhabitants of Calcutta insisting that government curtail this new practice of Sabbath trains. The potency of the complaint was heightened because Sabbathbreaking was included in the list of un-Christian behaviour supposed to have elicited Gods wrath in the form of the 1857 Rebellion. Preaching on a Fast-Day in October 1857, Reverend Charles Forbes Septimus Money of the Church of St Johns, Deptford in London had castigated the Government of India for patronizing that Sabbath breaking which was sure to bring. . .swift and terrible destruction.111 Thus, when the East India Railways London Board discovered an announcement in the Calcutta papers advertising an excursion train on the occasion of a 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 May 1858. 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 and Macintosh), BL. Don Randall, Autumn 1857: 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 excursion trains on Sunday were forbidden.112 The discussion about excursion trains on the Sabbath actually mirrored one taking place in England, where the Lords Day Observance Society and the Anti-Sunday Travel Union were complaining of attempts by railway companies to ll their excess capacity on Sunday with excursion trains.113 In India, however, the issue had a different valence, given the limited purview of JudaeoChristian temporality in the colony.114 Forbidding Sabbath excursion trains can certainly be read as part of the homogenizing impulse of imperialism. However, the very issue on which it was premised Sabbathalso points to the multiple, contradictory, pulls through which the local sought to grapple with a attened, homogenized, and empty idea of inter-subjective temporality.115 A similar lling-in of empty time is visible in discussions about the public issue of timetables during 19121913. In March 1912, the General Trafc Manger of the East India Railway had suggested that public timetables be issued on the rst day of March, June, September, and December (instead of on the rst of January, April, July and October).116 He believed his suggestions accorded with the seasons: March, April and May were the hottest months over the larger portion of India; June, July and August comprise most of the rainy 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 despatch 123, 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. The Sabbatarian extremists even viewed the Tay Bridge disaster of 28 December 1879 (no survivors) as a stern judgment on Sunday train travel. R. C. Richardson, The Broad Gauge and the Narrow Gauge: Railways and Religion in Victorian England, in Evans and Gough, Impact of the Railway. 114 The 1872 census estimates indicate that Christians, along with Buddhists and Jains, Jews, Parsees, Brahmoes, and Hill men. . . comprised less than ve per cent of the population in India. Henry Watereld, Memorandum on the Census of British India 187172 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1875), p. 16. 115 Resonating with Dipesh Chakrabartys discussion in Provincializing Europe of how a Universalizing History 1 is intersected by the local (History 2). 116 General Trafc Manger, EIR, to Agent, EIR, 15 March 1912, in Railway Board: Trafc A, January 1913, nos 12628, India Proceedings, IOR/P/9245, BL.
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weather of India. However, his suggestion represented not simply the insertion of the dictates of local seasonality but rather of seasonality as it affected the specic needs of Europeans in India. Thus, 1 March was when the exodus to Europe and Hills takes place; the beginning of September marked the exodus from the Hills; and timetables issued on 1 December could include all the Christmas concessions. The new schedulepassed at a meeting of the Indian Railway Conference Association in 1912thus exemplied two forms of local specicity, both cyclical and repetitive: the seasonality of colonial India and the migration patterns of an English population struggling to cope with an alien climate.117
Conclusion How did the colonized, as passengers and population, negotiate the temporal re-structuring introduced through railways, both as speedy transport and as standardized time? How does the demand by a Lahore paper for railway timetables in Hindi and Urdu, correspond with another for railway schedules to be altered to t the urban-suburban week of passengers living in Pundooah and working in Howrah? Can one correlate Jagannaths deployment of railway timetables to defend himself against charges of treason with Gandhis use of railway time for scripting much of his oppositional politics, despite his trenchant critique of the technology? What results from juxtaposing Bankims excitement about railway speed with Mirza Sahibs lament about how this very speed had destroyed real journeys? Most obviously, these responses delineate the complex ways in which people in colonial India negotiated an abstract administrative and technological change in their everyday life. They appear in fragments, but it is precisely this structure that perhaps captures the polyvalence of actual responses.118 Hence, one can read these negotiations as representing the complexity of everyday responses
117 Agenda for Indian Railway Conference Association (IRCA) meeting, Simla, 23 September 1912; letter from R.L. Bliss, Acting Secretary, IRCA to Secretary, Railway Board, 1011 October 1912, in Railway Trafc A, January 1913, nos 12628, India Proceedings, IOR/P/9245, BL. 118 And thus making visible potentially richer denitions of experience. Gyanendra Pandey, In Defence of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in 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, when compared with the equally heterogeneous reactions to standardization of railway and civil time in other parts of the worldparticularly the imperial metropolethese fragments of experience materially destabilize the imperial narrative of colonial time-lag and reclaim the historical present as a time in which the colonizer and colonized exist contemporaneously. From a normative world of co-existent yet noncontemporary beings,120 modernity is reclaimed as an experiential historical present. Some of these negotiations also representto borrow from Walter Benjamininstances of now-time, moments in which protagonists critically evaluate the present, even as they remain implicated in it.121 The population of colonial India could hardly escape a world in which the speed of railways decreased and increased travel time, in which an order of timetables and schedules marked the transition to standardized railway time, in which calendars were becoming alien, disenchanted, and homogenous. However, as they navigated these changes, some of their responses, albeit tenuous, seem to interrogate that which they were grappling with, providing in effect a modern critique of modernity.122 Moments that evaluate the relationship between time, speed, and railways can be found in three well-known works of ction: Khushwant Singhs Train to Pakistan (1956), Saadat Hasan Mantos Kali Shalvar (The Black Trousers, circa. 1940) and Intizar Husains Kataa Hua Dabba (A Stranded Railroad Car, 1954). All were written after the temporal re-structuring that marked the period between 1854 and 1905, and by authors who were in fact born after 1905. However, the struggles of some of the characters with the changing temporality of speed and standardization offer instances that interruptto critique from withinthat historical moment in which they are enmeshed. Mano Majra, the frontier village in Train to Pakistan, has become emblematic of competing narratives about South Asias past, present, and future.123 In her reading, Marian Aguiar aptly highlights the extent to which the life of the village is emplotted through its
As described by Walter Benjamin in The Life of Students (1915). 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:
120 119
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relationship with railway trains passing through it.124 The village is indeed very conscious of trains: it is introduced through its railway station; its denizens awake and fall asleep to the sounds of passing trains; the shopkeepers and hawkers supplying these trains provide an appearance of constant activity.125 At rst glance, having welded the natural circularity of everyday life with the linear impetus on which railways had been premised, Mano Majra seems to exist in a harmonious conjunction of time-scales, a natural/technological symbiosis as Aguiar terms it.126 However, Mano Majras relationship with railways is perhaps more unstable than appears at rst glance. Even though the presence of modernity through railways is indeed a fait accompli, as Aguiar suggests,127 yet Mano Majra also distances itself from this authorized teleology by reneging on its relationship with railways. Just before he explains how railway timetables grid the life of the village, Singh states:
Not many trains stop at Mano Majra. Express trains do not stop at all. Of the many slow passenger trains. . .only two are scheduled to stop for a few minutes. 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 composed of bona de passengers oriented around railway timetables but of hangers-on, wasting time in endless arguments about how late the train was on a given day and when it had last been on time.129 Mano Majras ambiguity becomes claustrophobia and fear in the relationship that Sultanathe protagonist of Mantos Kali Shalvar has with railways. The night-train had delivered Sultana from the provincial 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 (November 1998): pp. 1069 1095; 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., 27 Down, pp. 39 67. 125 Singh, Train to Pakistan, pp. 35. 126 Aguiar, Railway Space in Partition Literature, p. 48. 127 Ibid. 128 Singh, Train to Pakistan, pp. 34 129 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 begged her 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. A despondent Sultana began spending her days watching the railway yard visible from her balcony: railway engines and carriages going by constantly, in one direction or the other. The one that she empathized with, however, was that lone carriage [that] had been propelled on the tracks of life and then abandoned. Though surrounded by movementby other people. . .changing tracksSultana feared she had no idea [w]here she was headed for. Fearfully, she thought: And then, 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 in Intizar Husains Kataa Hua Dabaa. When Shujaat Ali describes his fathers rst 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: as if the car he was riding in had come unhitched and stood in the middle of nowhere 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 Lonely Voice: The Life and Works of Saadat Hassan Manto (Vanguard: Lahore, 1985), pp. 206 219. 131 Manto, The Black Shalwar, pp. 206219. 132 Husain, Kataa Hua Dabba, pp. 2930.

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Modern Asian Studies 47, 4 (2013) pp. 12521282. C Cambridge University Press 2012 doi:10.

1017/S0026749X11000527 First published online 13 November 2012

Time-Sense: Railways and Temporality in Colonial India

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18541905: standardizing time in colonial India

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Figure 1. Longitudes and Time Meridians

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Negotiating with time

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

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