Retelling Time: Alternative Temporalities from Premodern South Asia

233 Pages·2021·2.452 MB·English

by  Shonaleeka Kaul

RETELLING TIME
Retelling Time challenges the hegemony of colonial modernity over academic
disciplines and over ways in which we think about something as fundamental as
time. It reclaims a bouquet of alternative practices of time from premodern South
Asia, which stem from multiple worldviews that have been marginalized.
These practices relate to a range of classical and vernacular genres, including
alaṃkāra, theravāda, yoga, rāmakathā, tasawwuf, āyāraṃga, purāṇa, trikā-tantra,
navya-nyāya, pratyabhijñā, carita, kūṭīyāṭṭam and maṅgala kāvya . They represent
multiple languages, such as Sanskrit, Persian, Pali, Prakrit, Awadhi, Malayalam,
Kannada and Bengali, as well as diverse streams, from Hinduism, Jainism,
Buddhism and Sufi Islam to logic, yoga, tantra, theatre and poetics. Retelling Time
questions the modern Eurocentric belief in an empty, homogenous, abbreviated,
secular and irreversible time. It proposes instead that premodern South Asia
invested time with cultural function and value, which ranged from the contingent
to the transcendent, the quotidian to the cosmic, the fleeting to the eternal and
the social to the spiritual. Accordingly, time was reworked – stretched, melded,
collapsed, recursed, rolled over and even extinguished. Sacred, social, aesthetic,
scientific, fictional, historical and performative South Asian traditions are seen
here in conversation with one another, mediated by an ethical paradigm. Their
collective challenge is to decolonize our ways of knowing and being.
This book will be of interest to scholars of South Asian history, philosophy of
history, anthropology, literature, Sanskrit, post-colonial studies, cultural studies,
studies of temporality and studies of the Global South.
Shonaleeka Kaul is a cultural and intellectual historian of early South Asia,
specializing in working with Sanskrit texts. She is Professor at the Centre for
Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. She has also
been the Malathy Singh Distinguished Lecturer in South Asian Studies at Yale
University, USA; the Jan Gonda Fellow in Indology at Leiden University, The
Netherlands; and the DAAD Professor of History at the South Asia Institute,
University of Heidelberg, Germany.
She is the author of Imagining the Urban: Sanskrit and the City in Early
India (2010) and The Making of Early Kashmir: Landscape and Identity in the
Rajatarangini (2018). She has edited four volumes, including Cultural History of
Early South Asia: A Reader (2014) and Eloquent Spaces: Meaning and Community
in Early Indian Architecture (2019).

RETELLING TIME
Alternative Temporalities from
Premodern South Asia
Edited by Shonaleeka Kaul
First published 2022
by Routledge
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© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Shonaleeka Kaul; individual chapters,
the contributors
The right of Shonaleeka Kaul to be identified as the author of the
editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
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explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-032-06193-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-06205-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-20278-3 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003202783
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Śrīkṛṣṇārpaṇamastu
For
Nachiketa

CONTENTS
List of contributors ix
Preface xi
1 Temporality and its discontents or why time needs to be retold 1
SHONALEEKA KAUL
2 The moment in which the river rests: time in early Buddhism 11
GERGANA RUMENOVA RUSEVA
3 Proleptic pasts and involuted causalities in Kūṭiyāṭṭam 24
DAVID DEAN SHULMAN
4 Taking, Making, and Leaving Time: the many times
of the Āyāraṃga 41
CHRISTOPH EMMRICH
5 The guru and the mantra: transcending time in the philosophy
and practice of yoga 62
TARINEE AWASTHI
6 Time is born of his eyelashes: Purāṇic measurement and
conceptions of time 75
McCOMAS TAYLOR
7 On rasa and recursivity: ethics and aesthetics of time in
Sanskrit poetics (alaṃkāraśāstra) 89
SHONALEEKA KAUL
vii
CONTENTS
8 Sun, consciousness and time: the way of time and
the timeless in Kashmir Śaivism 97
BETTINA SHARADA BÄUMER
9 Time is in the moment (w aqt ) and also in eternity
(dahr ): reflections from Sufi Islam 104
KASHSHAF GHANI
10 Concentric worlds: space and time in the Pratyabhijñā
school and the Abhinavabhāratī 122
RADHIKA KOUL
1 1 From corporal time to cognitive time: Kannada word-scape
in transition, 10th to 12th century 137
MANU V. DEVADEVAN
1 2 (Un)doing space and time: ‘doing’ the Rāmcaritmānas 157
ADITYA CHATURVEDI
1 3 The ontology of now: reading time through 16th- and
17th-century nyāya philosophy 172
SAMUEL WRIGHT
14 ‘A farrago of legendary nonsense’?: myth, time and history
in the Keralolpatti 185
DILIP M MENON
1 5 The knots of time: reading nostalgia in Bengali literature
from the 13th to the 19th centuries 200
ANUPARNA MUKHERJEE
viii
CONTRIBUTORS
Tarinee Awasthi is a PhD candidate in the department of Asian Studies at Cornell
University, Ithaca, USA.
Bettina Sharada Bäumer is Director, Abhinavagupta Research Library, Vara-
nasi, India.
Aditya Chaturvedi is a PhD candidate in the department of Religious Studies at
Emory University, Atlanta, USA.
Manu V. Devadevan is Assistant Professor, Humanities and Social Sciences, In-
dian Institute of Technology, Mandi, India.
Christoph Emmrich is Associate Professor for Buddhist Studies at the Univer-
sity of Toronto, Canada.
K ashshaf Ghani is Assistant Professor of History at Nalanda University, Rajgir,
India.
S honaleeka Kaul is Professor of Ancient Indian History, Centre for Historical
Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.
R adhika Koul is a PhD candidate in the department of Comparative Literature at
Stanford University, Palo Alto, USA.
D ilip M Menon is the Mellon Chair in Indian Studies at the University of Witwa-
tersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.
A nuparna Mukherjee is Assistant Professor, Humanities and Social Sciences,
Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, India.
G ergana Rumenova Ruseva is Associate Professor of Sanskrit, department of
the Classical East, Sofia University, Bulgaria.
D avid Dean Shulman is Professor Emeritus of South Asian Studies at the He-
brew University, Jerusalem, Israel.
ix