Emancipating Time: Temporal Consciousness Beyond the Models of European Historiography

Among the host of ways in which the European epistemic paradigms have constructed and dominated the rest of the world, the forced historiographical taxonomy of time is the most consequential in dictating how previously colonized societies see themselves historically. Often divided into neatly charted categories of classical, medieval, and modern periods, world histories have been theorised mostly in the self-image of Europe and its incessant need to imagine and, worse, impose time in linear terms. Traditionally, time is divided between the classical age, the medieval period, and then — following the great Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment — Europe’s modernity, which led to its holy mission of civilizing the world through imperial expansion and colonial takeover.

Scholars like me, who work in non-European traditions within Euro-American academia, constantly resist these set temporal divisions that have categorized much of textual production in the historiographical frames of the “great modernizer.” Even those well-meaning scholars who deeply acknowledge the damage done by colonial epistemic violence often find themselves trapped in viewing history from within a European historiographical sensibility. In their engagement with non-European literature, for example, they continue to force these terms of “death of a culture,” “ruptures,” and neat breaks in the idea of time, often at the expense of how time was imagined and organized by those who did not live history in terms of European linearities.  

Is it possible to emancipate time? How can we recover alternative modes of temporal consciousness? Can archives of past texts and diverse histories of their reception offer alternative opportunities to see time differently? 

French philosopher Michel Serres, in one of his brilliant expositions on the idea of time, insisted that we must think of time not as an arrow, but as an undulating snake or even a crumpled handkerchief [1]. By displacing the image of the arrow representing the passage through linear ages, and replacing it with the image of an undulating snake or a crumpled handkerchief, Serres’ work encourages us to see time no longer as a parameter adding something to a system from the outside; no longer a purely historical force, which he, as a European philosopher, contends has been the source of “inherently violent foundations of our [Europe’s] episteme” [2]. Serres’ inspiring displacement of Eurocentric metaphors opens a possibility of emancipating of the idea of time from its Eurocentric categories and invites us to consider premodern archives not for their conformity to the arrow-like linearity of European temporalities but for how they present themselves as what Spanish storyteller and bibliophile, Jorge Luis Borges, calls the “carriers of infinity” [3]. 

Having recently completed a doctoral dissertation on the North Indian reception of one of the most beloved Persian poets, Nizami of Ganjeh (d.1209), a project that made me travel through 700 years of multilingual and multicultural histories of the Indo-Islamic worlds, I am struck by how Indo-Persian poets conceptualized the order of time so differently from what was being imposed upon them from the outside. This is especially so during the second half of the long 19th century, when British colonial rule was at its peak with core structural changes aimed at erasing the multilingual and multi religious past of the Indian people well in place. It was a strange surprise in the Urdu poetic archives to witness that despite the overwhelming colonial pressure to “become modern” by giving up the premodern forms of thinking, feeling, and being in the world, Urdu poets such as Munshi Gobind Prasad Faza, writing in the long lyrical forms of storytelling (masnavī), used the reception of the classical Persian poet as an alternative ordering of time against the post-Enlightenment British historiography.

As Pasha M. Khan, Avril Powell, and Frances Pritchett have argued, the British had spent considerable effort in devaluing the premodern forms of poetic thinking and had invested a great deal of state resources to “modernize” these texts that informed the people’s ethical and moral worldview according to the European understanding of modernity [4]. By establishing state-sponsored colleges and printing presses, the British employed local munshis (local scribes) to translate (read: rewrite) classical stories in a way that would conform to the “modern Indian sensibility” rather than the “decadent and artificial Persian.” The popularity of these versions effectively transformed future generations of readers from the heirs of history into its orphans. Indeed, the “deathblow” to a whole way of being in the world was imminent, but it wasn’t passively absorbed, as those scholars imposing the European historiographical models from the outside have thus far assumed. 

Owning one’s stories with their unique logics of thinking, developing their aesthetic complexity in the face of adversarial valuations, and acknowledging their metaphorical uniqueness in ordering time is at the heart of the resistance that informs much of the late 19th century Urdu masnavī tradition. In retelling a classical Persian poem in a new vernacular (Urdu was mostly mobilized for local colonial governance in the pre-partitioned Punjab province), Faza confronts the European epistemic valuation of India’s premodern storytelling traditions by aggressively drawing on the longue durée of Persian imagery, stock metaphors that have been recurrent since the 11th century in India’s cultural and literary imaginary, and deep allusions that had a mnemonic purpose for the reader.  

Going against the grain of his Urdu contemporaries, who had completely stripped these classical stories of their cultural and historical complexity by rewriting them under the British patronage with a very specific mandate, Faza, in his response poem Gulzar-e Faza (Garden of Faza), reconceptualizes modernity as a sustained dialogue with one’s past rather than a break from it. Of course, Faza did not have to go far from home to offer an alternative; he drew on a much-established concept of modernity that had thrived for several centuries in India before the British came with their unique definition of modernity.

Even a cursory look at a literary history of Persianate India would tell us how innovation was understood as an intimate engagement with the past rather than a good riddance from it. The British idea of modernity advocated for cultural amnesia, distancing oneself from the literary memory and opting for what I call the “poetics of orphanness” in telling the stories of the new modern era. Faza’s retelling of a classical Persian poem in a colonial vernacular, on the other hand, espoused a poetics of heirship. He employed the memory of the dead poets, their sayings ad verbatim, and renewed their imagery, turning the imperial “manipulation of literary fame,” to borrow a term from translation theorist André Lefevere, into a tool for redemptive remembrance. 

Take a look at how Faza opens his retelling and states the necessity of his poetic intervention:  

I versify some story in such a way,
that might reveal the matters of Reality.
The poem would serve also as my memory
for my friends when I am no longer alive.
My heart anguished in my quest of that story, and
One day, a thought visited me from the great beyond
That once there was a king who ruled over the kingdom of Eloquent Speech
Niz̤āmī, the master of speech, the nurturer of poetry.
He was the ocean filled with the waves of eloquence
And rode over the chessboard of beautiful speech.
He wrote a masnavī fascinating and delightful
In which he told the story of Shīrīn and Ḳhusrau
It’s the colour of the pearl of [his] subject and narration
That makes all the jewellers of fine speech confounded
Hindi is so popular in Hind these days
That it is difficult to understand Persian.
Any work that’s intended with courage
Would turn even the thorns into a bouquet of flowers.
The art of poetry is so difficult
That one rarely reaches the shore of this ocean
Thousands would dive into it
And only one would come out with the desired pearl.

Gobind Prasad Faza, Gulzār-e-Faza (Lucknow, India: Naval Kishore Press, 1887), 4. A fuller version of this argument is forthcoming with the Journal of Urdu Studies, entitled: “Retelling as Resistance: Translating Nizami in Colonial India.” 

Written for the 19th century Urdu-reading audience, this poem is a defiant piece of literature, organizing time into a narrative form that invokes a medieval poet known for his confounding imagery and highly imaginative storytelling without any attempt to simplify. The Urdu original verses show that the poet retains a highly Persianized vocabulary, allusion to classical Persian poetry, deeply aestheticised performance of emotions, and entire verses written in Persian inserted in the ongoing Urdu narrative. The affect of these poetic choices throughout the poem is that the poem on the whole is evocative in a historical sense. By recovering classical poetics and names of the dead poets from the literary memory of Persianate tradition, Faza raised Urdu to the level of a classical language, addressing the gap that the outcasting of Persian left in North India and renewing Urdu with a distinct mode of poetic engagement. In other words, what registered as new and “modern” about Urdu masnavī writers like Faza is precisely his antiquity, an explicit mode of engaging the dead to revitalise the contemporary imagination; it is a modernity marked by the deep presence of the past.  

It is often argued in Eurocentric historiography that after the 1857 War of Independence in India, Persianate culture, with its deep investment in the multicultural past, “died.” But reception models that are invested in excavating the hermeneutic agency of the colonized from the ground up offer a widely different picture of resistance against a forced historiography. In the face of the proverbial death, such models allow us to hear a different understanding of the “death of a culture,” one that not so much terminates life, but, in the sense of intiqāl, an Urdu word for death, transfers it.