//not against time, but about it - 2023
'not against time, but about it' is a mixed media project that consists of a hand-made calendar, a photomontage, a series of three images, and a text piece. This work examines the history of factory legislation and local uprisings in colonial Bombay and highlights conditions of social transformation of work and its impact on our understanding of time. The phrase by English historian EP Thompson, "as the new time-discipline is imposed, so the workers begin to fight, not against time but about it," is used in this work to comment explicitly on the effect of the transformation of time to the point where it co-opts its own resistance.
not against time, but about it, 9.5 x 11.2 x 4 inches
- The calendar piece comprises an expanse of fifteen years, from January 1st, 1906, to March 6th, 1921.As per German historian Vanessa Ogle, the period is known around the world for being the pinnacle in the history of time reform. The calendar is marked and bracketed by two contradictory events in the history of Bombay mills. Their contradiction illustrates a larger epistemic shift in the experience of time in colonial Bombay, where the workers pelting the mill's clock with stones during a strike in 1906 was preceded by an event where a group of women accumulated money to buy and maintain a clock for the mill. By showing the passage of fifteen years between the two events as an empty grid, this work highlights the nature of modern calendars as a flat and homogenous palimpsest of social events.
details of two calendar entries
- The photomontage depicts a cotton ball that hints at the empire of cotton in 19th century that led to the transformation of work and time.
58 x 30 inches (2 inches squares each)
- The images documents three clock structures that represents three time zones of colonial Bombay; the market (Crawford market), the railways (Reay road railway station) and the naval (Lions gate, naval clock tower). The market time in Bombay was the embodiment of the local resistance to the colonial drive to standardise or universalize time, while the railway and naval timings supported the colonial efforts. The work illustrates how colonialism altered temporal consciousness even within the mode of resistance.
Crawford market clock tower, Mumbai, 24 X 13.7 inches
Reay road railway station clock, 24 X 13.7 inches
Lions gate, naval clock tower, 24 X 13.7 inches
link: Time, work discipline, and factory legislation: social transformation of time in colonial Bombay
Text reading session at Jangpura open studio, Delhi
