Politics of Time seeks to understand what it meant for a colonial modern subject to write and make history. It investigates how time, as a concept and as an experience, is deployed by history to produce political possibilities for the future. At one level, it analyses the making of the ‘historical’ —as discipline, practice, and imagination —in a colonial society. At another, it examines the making of a people into a ‘tribe’—i.e., into an allegedly sensuous, bodily, archetypal ‘primitive’. The author reconstructs different encounters between the so-called ‘primitive’ and the colonised historian in the space of the market, in travel, in historical and literary texts and other sites. She argues that, it is in these encounters that that the temporal experience of modernity was born. The defining parameters of this experience—colonial modern knowledge and its opposite, the domain of practice— were also produced simultaneously. Prathama Banerjee straddles the worlds of history, anthropology, sociology, and postcolonial studies with remarkable dexterity. Characterized by a rare poise and sophistication, she makes a theoretical intervention in the disciplinary parameters of history and postcolonial studies. For the diverse issues it raises, this book will be an outstanding read for scholars and students of subaltern and imperial history, colonial and postcolonial theory as well as anthropological perspectives on South Asia.
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