Ganga

The IDEA of TIME in INDIAN CULTURE

   The Ramayana is as present to the villagers here as if it had unfolded within their own lifetimes. I’ve often wondered: how come? For Tivari, it always seems that such and such event occurred literally yesterday, certainly within the lifetime of his grandfather, when we know it really took place (if at all) two or three thousand years ago! It is very real to him. But why?

     Tivari looks mystified when I ask him, but later in Delhi my friend Sharada Nayak says it’s simple. ‘In an oral culture, stories are repeated day after day till they become real. They may just as well have happened yesterday. Not that one always believes these stories actually occurred.’ The Ramayana or the Mahabharata therefore can unlock the door to understanding a very different sense of time. For someone raised in the Indian countryside (still the vast majority of Indians) what’s most important is the actual experience.

     As Sharada explains, ‘If you tell me that such and such a thing happened, and you tell it well, it is immediately vivid. I believe it. It isn’t important if it happened to you yesterday or it happened ten years ago. What’s important is the very fact that it happened to you and affected you so deeply and that your narration conveys this to me. It’s the event, the transformation, not when, that’s important.’

      Sharada continues: ‘If you identify with the Ramayana myth or the Mahabharata myth so strongly, actual time (the date or the year) becomes unimportant. The fact that it happened is what is important. If it happened, it has implications for the entirety of human experience.’ Whole centuries, even millennia, are collapsed through oral folklore into the span of a single lifetime.

     Great myths such as the Ramayana also help define a sense of the geography of India because, ‘Stories are the traditional ways of defining the shape and geography of the land. My great-grandmother was totally illiterate but she heard these stories so she knew all of India even though she’d never travelled beyond her village.’

     For most Indians, time is naturally circular, an idea so basic to Indians they probably never stop to even think about it. But it’s one that never seems to occur to non-Indians. Other non-Western civilisations (China, Islam) continue to function quite well with their own calendars. Amartya Sen has a very interesting analysis of the various calendars (Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, etc) in use in today’s India in his recent book The Argumentative Indian. Western culture, on the other hand, has a linear concept of Time, which is closely linked to a Western idea of Progress. The Present is better than the Past, and the Future will be by definition better than the Present. My friend Indu Agarwal thinks this is just plain stupid. Time for her is circular, so human beings are fated to repeat the same mistakes, warts and all.