Temporal ecologies

MITALIE TRIPATHI

‘Are you of the dreamtime or the world-time?’

– Ursula K. Le Guin

The Word for World is Forest.

THIS is an origin story. The origin of the factory, the classroom and the Universal Man.1

It began with the humans’ obsession with me and a declaration of my use in the factory.

At first, the image of the factory is hazy to me, a blur of assembly lines, work shifts and recess time. And then I am made aware of my abuse in modernity’s version of a learning space called a school. I, clock-time, was made the overlord of classroom and that’s how my reign began.

Celebrated as the paragon of efficient knowledge production, I was Taylorised.2 The flat assembly line made my linearity its power source. It produced straight lines and straight lives where I manifested as a whip, a gunda’s hockey stick or the chappal your mother might have hit you with. And that’s how I was used to control for deviations in the factory. I kept the children in line.

Things aren’t always so. Outside the classroom, the multiple ecologies of time unfolded in unstable coordination, while my time marches forward with the military precision of school children in a drill. The mutinous looks the children give me gives me hope of a countdown timer on my existence, a reversal of the brazen advancement of my ticking.

I remember an instance where I watched passively, almost bored to tears, as a little girl tried to pluck me off the wall while the teacher was out, scrambling to change my dials to make recess-time come sooner. I prayed that she might drop me by accident so I could lose consciousness. I long to lose time consciousness so I can dream. Dreams carry me away. They help me tolerate staying here by giving me somewhere else to go. I dream less now, as I am made more crucial to the existence of the classroom.

I come to terms with this through the fables I am told by travelling wristwatches. These wristwatches are opportunistic variants of me that have managed to latch themselves onto human wanderers. And now they get to witness worlds and lives unknown to me.

I have heard rumours in rushed whispers that there is a classroom in the wetlands, east of Calcutta that resurrected a forgotten timeline. Memory of a buruniyar desh3 endures in the edges of the city in the wetlands. The locals there remember their past well. Falconers and fisherman of time buried by others, left songs and couplets that sang of Calcutta’s watery origins, the origin myth of Kurma the Tortoise.
Far away from those who deem it superstition, the oceanic origins in the myths of Calcutta are more in sync with the science of modernity.

But this fluid timeline was soon encroached upon by those who wished to reconfigure the rhythm of temporal ecologies in my regimented image. A harmonization of regularity and predictability. Concrete arrived as the grey, looming omen of this. Remnants of a discarded time soaked up the fluidity in Calcutta’s temporal ecologies. The ocean bygone, left impressions of time circuits in the basin under the city. And so, ideas and knowledge continued to flow through the wetlands. Mud has memory but concrete erases. The concrete foundation on the wetlands never sediments, never layers and never morphs languidly like the shoreline of Calcutta. The residents in concrete may have collective amnesia but the ocean doesn’t. She threatens to flow as she pleases, ignoring the pieces of paper that deemed her land their property.

T he children in the wetlands classroom I am told of, are found unearthing the myth of Kurma, singing its songs. The knowledge escapes the words of these songs and re-enters the wetlands. The children dance in the wetlands when they hum these songs for whoever wants to listen.

A rather snooty wristwatch gave me a wide-eyed, alarmed account of a classroom belonging to one of the Naga tribes that rid itself of me. When posed with the idea of teaching economics using the short-run and the long-run, the education administrator was laughed out of the classroom in ridicule with the elders doubling over. The wristwatch had eyed the elders with suspicion, fiercely protective
of the administrator’s delicate sensibilities. It had watched in horror, as the elders announced the epistemic secession of the classroom and declared that there would no room for an economized time but only ecological time. There would be no extraction, no resources and no ‘catching up’ with the rest. Their context would form a unique episteme of reciprocity that would dispose with the idea of the forest being a static stage and backdrop for human activity.

A nd with this declaration, the forcefully sedated ‘provincial’ temporal ecologies awoke from their slumber. The classroom, as a microcosm of the temporal and spatial networks of the tribal community, became a playground for the multiplicities of time. The reciprocity created a sense of time dilation that played out with nature, within a generation and across generations to come. The demarcation between the short-run and the long-run faded when reciprocity across time unflattened4 the lives of children. While the clock in the classroom lies discarded, the children and elders cover the walls of the class with paintings of the tribal community with its intermingling life and beyond. When they create art together, there is a shift of time and place, an immersion in different timescales and worlds that are contained in them.

One wristwatch with tired eyes and a weak smile tells me of a classroom on the banks of the river Narmada, where once creation myths of the river didn’t commoditize it but made it sacred. But that is not all. The myth(s) across communities were boundless and could always resist my imposition. The recurring tempo of the rainfall with the unruly cadence of the biotic and abiotic assemblages brought the river ecologies to life.

Now, its song has ceased downstream of the Sardar Sarovar Dam on river Narmada. Children from these communities heard the calls of Development. The sirens of the factory calling and beckoning the young minds, tuning them to the harsh sound of the metal bell ringing. Now, wall-clocks elsewhere report discussion and dismissals in offices about the temporal decentering of these children and the necro economics of the homogenized march to modernity. The children now leave the classroom with a discordant acceptance of being collateral damage and the fate of being reduced to an externality. Their parents are told they need to ignore the cycles of natural replenishment in cultivation to survive. But if an ecology has no cycles – no returns, does it have a future?5

I watch lazily, ticking away into a light snooze in the silence when, suddenly, the little girl with the broken orange wristwatch is reprimanded for reading in class. The teacher asks her to repeat what was being taught in class. There was silence, and in that silence – when the world got quieter for Man was less noisy – there was potential for a bloom in biodiversity and there is palpable excitement. My otherwise sluggish tick becoming the frequency of a rapid heartbeat and then the little girl, with a cheeky grin, starts to tell a story instead. What was the story? It’s lost to history now, but I remember its rhythm, a rhythm that converged with the temporal patterns of Gaia.6 The story held no temporal presuppositions. It left the classroom transfixed. That moment set the stage for different temporalities to dance with one another – the enamoured children unwittingly expanding the moment, giving it life and an expanded timescale of its own while –

‘It’s break-time already?’, exclaims a little boy. Ah, I suppose my excitement must have sped up time as well. And so, it began. Time thereon gave birth to storytellers in the classroom. The storytellers in turn remade Time. The stories became beautiful ruptures to the assembly line. They resisted the violence of those that wielded me to erase the multiple time-senses and lives lived on them. But memory and imagina-tion persist, because they don’t hold a notion of clock-time and cannot have me imposed on them.

That’s how stories brought vanishing worlds back to life. And then storytellers made the classroom a playground for dissenting imaginations while keeping hope, compassion, and kindness alive. I was left unobserved, and boy, did I get up to no good. Time in the classroom became a mutt of different temporal ecologies.

And now I wait with baited breath for when my countdown would reach zero and my reign would end. And I would, finally, be discarded from the classroom of steel and concrete.

References

O. Sen, River of Stories. Blaft Publications, 2022.

E. Kire, Son of the Thundercloud. Speaking Tiger Publishing, 2018.

Andrew D. Cronin, ‘Anthropogenic Noise and Light Alter Temporal But Not Spatial Breeding Behaviour in a Wild Frog’, Behavioural Ecology 33(6), 2022, pp. 1115-1122.

D. Bhattacharya, Empire And Ecology In The Bengal Delta. Cambridge University Press, 2019.

H.E. Smith, ‘Governing Water: The Semi-commons of Fluid Property Rights’, Arizona Law Review, 2008.

M. Crang, ‘Temporal Ecologies: Multiple Times, Multiple Spaces and Complicating Space Times’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 44, 2012, pp. 2119-2123.

E. Gan, ‘The Time Travelers: Ambiguous Returns’, Engagement, 7 February 2019. Retrieved from Engagement: https://aesengagement.wordpress.com/2019/02/07/the-time-travelers-ambiguous-returns/

L. Barry, What It Is. Drawn & Quarterly, 2008.

N. Sousanis, Unflattening. Harvard University Press, 2015.

H.G. Wells, The Time Machine. William Heinemann,UK, 1895.

Footnotes:

1. The Universal Man refers to the human produced and ruled by standardised time – an economized being.

2. Frederick Taylor helped develop the ‘Techniques of Scientific Management’. He said, ‘Scientific Management means knowing exactly what you want men to do and seeing that they do it in the best and the cheapest way.’ Standardized time became the symptom of the widespread implementation (almost ubiquitous today) of these techniques. Workers became automatons or machines.

3. Meaning lowlands or tidal swamps

4. N. Sousanis, Unflattening. Harvard University Press, 2015.

5. H.G. Wells, The Time Machine. William Heinemann, UK, 1895.

6. I refer to the Gaia Hypothesis formulated by the chemist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s.