We experience time as a regime. It imposes its discipline on us. A regime of time regiments time. It breaks time into past, present and the future. This regimentation of time also regiments or divides us. As we are at the threshold of a new year 2025 , it would be important to explore how we negotiate the borders between the present, past and the future. We as humans indeed have a special relation with time. We are beings in time. The way we fix the boundaries between the past ,present, and the future deeply influence the way we live our life. The regimentation of time becomes a regime that orientations and nurtures our relations with the other.
May be we have to ask: How we orient to the past and future shape our present? Answering this question takes us to human experience acroos the globe. We can notice that there are several dominant orientations to the past and future in different cultures. Traditional cultures manifest a dominant political, cultural and ethical orientation to the past while modern cultures seem to have a dominant future-orientation. Hence, there are different regimes of time that seems to have ruled over us over the past.
These different regimes of time are profoundly political. They not only periodize our past but offer us lens to envision a future and built a present. To our conception of time under these regimes, we introduce space to bring distance or break ups in time from the present. This geographization of time leads to the construction of a relative distances from our living present. Introduction of the distanciation in time enables us to break it as past, present and future.
The temporal distance brings space in time. we also think time co-temporally or simultaneously. At the same time the sense of simultaneity enables us to see the past as seamlessly linked to our present and the future. Again, there is a geography of this seamless continuity of time. What we mark as past and project as future has space laden within it. It is spaced time that marks it as past, present and the future. The way we inhabit the space within the past, present and future within an aesthetical, ethical, political modes of thinking and being shapes the regime of time. In other words, the space that breaks time into past, present and the future is ideological.
Maybe an example is apt at this juncture. James Mill divides, Indian history into three periods: The Hindu Period, The Muslim period and Christian Period. This periodization of the past is orientated by enfleshment of time as primarily religious. Thus, the Hindu past is not merely past it is spaced time. it has a geography. Same is true of the Muslim or Christian periods. This temporal geographies go on to inform Hindu Nationalism and the project of Hindu Rashtra that animates the politics of Hindutva.
The spaced time that looks at the past as Hindu sees what is described as Muslim and Christian periods as loss of Hindu ‘dominance’ and the present and the future then is projected as time of the recovery of this loss. Thus, we can see how the geopraphiziing as well as anthropologizing of time as Hindu, makes time political. It then becomes a regime that shapes the manner we temporalize and territorialize in our country.
Being under what we may call Hindutva regime of time, we seem blindly live a performatives of the regime of time. The operation of this regime of time makes us assume that India is merely a Hindu space that has to be brought under the sway of Hindu Raj by working for it in the living present while anticipating its fuller coming in the future. Time then become deeply personal and intimate. We are truly under the Hindutva regime of time.
Time to us is not empty. It is inundated with space, anthropology, political traces, religious orientations and values etc. Time, therefore, is profoundly political and performative. The sense of belief that makes us triumphantly feel that our time has come which several people belonging to the Hindu religion seem to feel also tells us that time is not neutral and apolitical. It is already politically laden and becomes a disciplinary regime.
The regime of time disciplines everything that inhabits it past, present and the future. It then, missionize us to clean the past , future and the present from everything that is strange to what is deemed as Hindu as we see in our country. The peformative temporalization that flows from it then becomes self-legitimating identity formation. Under such regimes of time, the past does not pass away. Past simply passes into the present and moves into the future. We then work to give a future to a past. The past that refuses to pass and remains unexpiated. It comes to haunt us and seeks it resolution through what is envisaged as resolution of the broken past in the future. In the case of our country, it is seen as redeemed with the coming of the Hindu Rashtra.
We, therefore, have the challenge to examine the regimes of time that are having their sway over us. There micro regimes and macro regimes of time. The coming of the new year or feast puts on a time regime for a day and we are pushed to enjoy the day with rituals that often belong to religion and the market. How we measure time depends on how we are located in space. Even in an ordinary sense, we think that we to fill something into our time. This ‘fill in’ into some empty time tells us there is a spatial dimension to time. Time is spaced time. There is a geography of time. Albert Einstein had already demonstrated spacetime through his special theory of relativity. We do not have empty time as well as empty space. All that we have spacetime. This is why what we fill into this spacetime makes time political . Hence, we have to carefully consider the geography, anthropology, economics, sociology etc., of time. Being aware of the nature of regime time that is at play in our life is the first step to freedom.
