With modernity time has acquired a shape of an arrow that runs irreversibly from past into the future. We think that this understanding of time is normal, natural and the way time is. This seems to indicate that time is objective and above human manipulation. It seems that it is the new method measuring things that gave time its emphatic quality. Modernity emptied society of tradition and brought in a new beginning. It was a disruption from the past and triumphant entry into the new empty time. Modernity delinked time from everything past and opened a new empty time that can then be filled with new things. Modernity thus, brought a new regime of time. Progress became the propelling engine of this new empty time.
The ideology of progress demanded the emptying of time of all traditions and fill it with novelty. But the ideology of progress required that nothing remains permanent ingredient of the empty time. like modern science grows by discontinuities, time also displaces the old to usher in the new. Progressive time , then led humanity to embrace progress as cultural as well as political practice. The temporal experience driven by progress produces a constant stream of repetitions of ruptures. Modern time regime, thus proceeds by producing a continuous rift between a space of experience ( past) and the horizon of expectations ( future). This is almost akin to modern science and technology that sees innovation as the engine of progress.
Reinhard Kosseleck teaches that history cannot be teacher of life under this regime . We have no lessons to be learnt from history. Time, therefore, is experienced as a transition period always awaiting the coming of the unexpected. Time is experienced as breaking and not connecting. Hence a sense of connectivity had to come from the progress of science and technology. This sense of time on being in transition also puts our morality in crisis. Premodern regimes of time did not require absolute beginning that could be identified in time. Beginnings were put in the mythical realms where the instances of the beginning cannot be identified.
Modern times require us to have instances of beginning. Modernity secularized time. The divine and the mythical orders of the premodern time regimes came to be replaced by the modern regimes of time that privileged the secular and humanly produced beginnings. Since they are humanly produced, they could be re-examined. This means beginnings are not really absolute, they too are in transition. While the mythical orders of time kept the origins or beginning outside human time, modern regimes of time , keep this origins or beginnings within human reach. It makes it possible for us to imagine that we can be architects of change. It gives us the belief that thinks that we can begin history again. The idea of revolution has been moving human action more with the coming of modernity.
Revolutions destroys existing structures and institutions. Time in transition gives us an impulse for change. We can see how capitalism is depending on continuous creative change. We can therefore, see how cars are remodeled and marketed. This is based on a progressive linear logic of replacement. Time in this sense seem to embody social Darwinism. We seem to become endless seekers with no past at our back always moving to the promised land forever eluding us. This kind of time seems to see humans merely as those that come in and play their role and go and time continues to flow.
We in India seem to have forgotten the cyclic time of our civilization and have blindly embraced the time regime of modernity. We appear to do lip service to the complex samsaric time and live with the linear progressive understanding of time. This is why among several other things, we may say that Hindutva is out of tune with the ethos of the time of our civilization and is attuned to modern time regimes. It envisions the past as out of date with the present and takes up a pragmatic approach to it. This is why some parts of the past are thought to be sacred while the other shades of the past are demonized.
Although Hindutva is a modern product and is married to the modern regimes of time. It does manifest premodern traits as it places a certain past into the mythical realm and considers it as sacred and wishes the present a field to bring that mythologized past into the real. Hindutva, therefore, have hybridized its regime of time. It has elements of premodernity as well as modernity. It has invented its own history that sees the past in the mythological realm as perfect while the past in the human realm is deemed as provisional or transitional and has to be moved toward a future that is greeted as Hindu Rashtra or Ram Raja by the adherents of Hindutva.
We can see how the impulse of modern regimes of time offers momentum to Hindutva movement. One might also find other things that swim like ducklings in streams of the modern regimes of time in our country. As we saw in the case of Hindutva, we seem to have hybridized by joining together premodern as well as modern dimensions of time. We have thus embraced the linear progressive time by following back on the cycle of the premodern mythological realm. The mythological realm is thought to be the source of the saturation of being Hindu, and the time of our experience then becomes a struggle to bring the Hindu Rashtra to fulfillment. Hence, the present as a transition to a fulfilled future may tolerate moral corruption as long as it serves the idealized future that is in the coming. It also fires the triumphant feeling, ‘ my time has come’ and stir hate and vandalism on the minoritized others of the Hindutva.
The ideology of Hindutva that we have chosen here is merely chosen for pedagogical. It is only an instance that will demonstrate how we are under the sway of hybridized regimes of time of modernity. The fact that we have an intense sense of time as running out due to the its acceleration, the moral accommodation can result into the embracing of the violence, vandalism and rioting in order to bring the desired future in to our present. We are indeed impelled by a shrinking present. Since time is felt as running away , we can feel an acceleration. Modernity has accelerated our society. We have a challenge to understand and creatively and responsibly respond to this acceleration.
