Temporality and its Discontents or why Time needs to be Retold
Shonaleeka Kaul
Abstract
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the question of time in multiple languages and dialects over some 2000 years. While in yoga one transcends time and moves through it thanks to the guru, in the Ramakatha it is thanks to the recital of the devotional story itself. Reams of scholarship have long concluded that time, like one’s shadow, may be that which most eludes the grasp of comprehension the more one tries to capture it. Emerging out of 18th-century Western Europe, the modern regime of temporality, also known as Hegelian or Newtonian time, was characterized by proclamations of the homeogeneity, discreteness, linearity, directionality, immanence and absoluteness of time. It was operationalized through techniques and mechanisms like Greenwich Mean Time, the Gregorian Calendar, and the Before Christ/Anno Domini mode of chronology-marking, to give but a few examples.