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.

Autorentext

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).

Klappentext

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 worldviews that have been marginalized. These practices relate to a range of classical and vernacular genres including aläk ra, therav da, yoga, r makath , tasawwuf, y räga, pur a, trik -tantra, navya-ny ya, pratyabhijñ , carita, k y am and mägala k vya. These 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 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 other, 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 of the Global South.

Inhalt
Preface 1. Temporality and Its Discontents Or Why Time Needs to be Retold 2. The Moment in Which the River Rests: Time in Early Buddhism 3. Proleptic Pasts and Involuted Causalities in Kiyam 4. Taking, Making, and Leaving: The Many Times of the yraga 5. The Guru and the Mantra: Transcending Time in the Philosophy and Practice of Yoga 6. Time is Born of his Eyelashes: Puric Measurement and Conceptions of Time 7. On Rasa and Recursivity: Ethics and Aesthetics of Time in Sanskrit Poetics (Alakrastra) 8. Sun, Consciousness and Time: The Way of Time and the Timeless in Kashmir Shaivism 9. Time is in the Moment (waqt) and also in Eternity (dahr): Reflections from Sufi Islam 10. Concentric Worlds: Space and Time in the Pratyabhijñ school and the Abhinavabhrat 11. Corporal Time to Cognitive Time: Kannada Wordscape in Transition 10th to 13th centuries 12. (Un)doing Space and Time: 'Doing' the Rmcaritmnas 13. The Ontology of Now: Reading Time through 16th and 17th century Nyya philosophy 14. 'A Farrago of Legendary Nonsense': Myth, Time and History in the Keralolpatti 15. The Knots of Time: Reading Nostalgia in Bengali Literature from 13th to the 19th century