Introduction

The received wisdom of the past 200 years describes the traditional Indian concept of time as cyclic, excluding all other forms and incorporating an endless repetition of cycles. This was in contrast to what was perceived as the essentially linear time of European civilisation. Implicit in this statement is also an insistence that cyclic time precludes a sense of history, a view which contributed to the theory that Indian civilisation was ahistorical. Historical consciousness it was said, required time to be linear, and to move like an arrow linking the beginning to a final eschatological end. Concepts of time and a sense of history were thus interwoven.

Early European scholars working on India searched for histories of India from Sanskrit sources but were unable to discover what they recognised as histories. The exception was said to be Kalhana's Rajatarangini, a history of Kashmir written in the 12th century. It is indeed a most impressive pre-modern history of a region, but it is not an isolated example, since this genre finds expression in other regional chronicles, even if the others were not so impressive. These others were ignored, perhaps because they were less known to European scholarship; perhaps because if Indian civilisation were to be characterised by an absence of history it would become all the more necessary that Indian history be ‘discovered’ through the research of scholars who came to be labelled as Orientalists.

What is time? We are all too familiar with our inability to escape the inexorable passage of time, and yet we are hard-pressed to say what time is. St Augustine famously replied to this question by saying that he knew the answer as long as no one asked him for it, but that as soon as he tried to explain it he no longer knew. Are we now, more than a millennium and a half after St Augustine found himself in this unfortunate position, better equipped to shed some light on the nature of time?

St Augustine's problem stems at least in part from the fact that the question of the nature of time is multifaceted in a manner in which few other subjects are. Each questioner will emphasise a different aspect of the question ‘What is time?’. So, from different perspectives, we find ourselves asking whether time is linear or cyclic, whether it is endless, whether it is possible to travel in time, how the experience of the flow of time arises, how our own internal clocks are regulated and how our language captures the temporality of our existence.

The contributions to this volume reflect this multifacetedness. No attempt is made to devise a single conclusive answer to the question of the nature of time. Instead, eight eminent researchers explore how investigations in their respective fields impinge on questions about the nature of time.

The passing of time

One of the difficulties of talking sense about time travel is that it means different things to different people. For some it means the ineluctable passing of time, while for others it means the exotic activities of time travellers such as Dr Who. Yet, although these are different, they are not unrelated, and to talk sense about the latter I must first say something about the former.

The sense in which we all travel in time is the sense in which time passes, as it always has and always will. If that is time travel, there is no doubt that it occurs, and occurs automatically. In this sense we have no choice but to travel in time: it is not something we can choose to do, more or less easily. It just happens to us, as to everything else, whether we like it or not.

The main problem posed by time passing is how to make sense of it passing more or less quickly, as it often seems to do. The best way to see the problem is to compare the rate at which it passes with the rates at which other changes occur, as when space passes by a train taking an hour to cover the 60 miles from London to Cambridge. During that journey, space is passing at a mile a minute, a rate that is both objective and variable, since the train could go either faster or slower.

Introduction

When the heroes of Douglas Adams's The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy arrive at the location described in Part 2, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (pp. 79–80), the narrator pauses for a moment of quiet reflection about the difficulties involved in travelling through time: