ABSTRACT
Our story of the temporal displacements caused by colonialism had to begin in the countryside not only because the conquest which started it all had been fought in a mango grove, but also because rural society was the first to be seriously affected by the East India Company’s mercantile time and its fiscal timetable. Yet, the signs of the resulting discrepancies were perhaps far less obvious to villagers than to those living closer to the urban and semi-urban seats of British power in the subcontinent. Here, that power was represented directly by the white employees of the regime and their families, as well as by the administrative and social institutions of the Raj. Consequently the time of civil society found itself flanked by a stranger, that is, the time of the so-called civil lines at every sadar station and mufassil town. In many respects, life in the bungalow and the canton ment kept itself scrupulously apart from that of the native settlement, both as a matter of official policy and cultural choice, a segregation documented well in Anglo-Indian literature. Inevitably, however, the schedule of parallel lives had to buckle under the imperatives of an alien regime’s dependence on local services, skills, and even goodwill for its survival. So, from the bustle of chota hazri
synchronising the attendance of cooks and servants at the elaborate ritual of English breakfast through the sound of hours beaten on bell-metal gongs announcing the beginning and end of the administrative day, to the cries of night-watch on its rounds, the new sarkari time would overlap native time as a matter of course in any small town.
