Introduction: time, temporalities, and social practices in South Asia

This article introduces a Special Issue that brings together interdisciplinary studies—historical, anthropological, sociological, and literary—to examine time and temporality in South Asia. It advances the argument that time, as a foundational dimension of human experience, and temporality, as its lived expression, are best understood as socially constituted, and embedded in everyday relationships and practices. Individually, the essays examine macro-orderings of time shaped by natural, economic, and political structures, while elucidating how individuals and collectives engage with and reconstitute these temporal regimes in socially situated ways. Not stopping at narrating the plurality of temporal experiences, the Issue offers critical insight into time’s relationship with power, value, affect, and the like. The Issue also departs from two dominant approaches to time in South Asian studies. First, it moves beyond an exclusive focus on canonical time-determining devices such as the clocks and the railways, and instead highlights how they and other material objects performed time-keeping functions in a socially contested manner. Second, it distinguishes temporality from an overemphasis on historicity that has characterised thinking around time in South Asian writing. This Issue recentres temporality through themes of work-time, ecology, governance, religiosity, and agrarian processes as lived practices of social life.