Retelling time : alternative temporalities from premodern South Asia edited by Shonaleeka Kaul.

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Temporality and Its Discontents Or Why Time Needs to be Retold / Shonaleeka Kaul -- 2. The Moment in Which the River Rests: Time in Early Buddhism / Gergana Rumenova Ruseva -- 3. Proleptic Pasts and Involuted Causalities in Kūṭiyāṭṭam / David Dean Shulman -- 4. Taking, Making, and Leaving: The Many Times of the Āyāraṃga / Christoph Emmrich --. 5 The Guru and the Mantra: Transcending Time in the Philosophy and Practice of Yoga / Tarinee Awasthi -- 6. Time is Born of his Eyelashes: Purāṇic Measurement and Conceptions of Time / McComas Taylor -- 7. On Rasa and Recursivity: Ethics and Aesthetics of Time in Sanskrit Poetics (alaṃkāraśāstra) / Shonaleeka Kaul -- 8. Sun, Consciousness and Time: The Way of Time and the Timeless in Kashmir Śaivism / Bettina Sharada Baümer -- 9. Time is in the Moment (waqt) and also in Eternity (dahr): Reflections from Sufi Islam / Kashshaf Ghani -- 10. Concentric Worlds: Space and Time in the Pratyabhijñā school and the Abhinavabhāratī / Radhika Koul -- 11. Corporal Time to Cognitive Time: Kannada Wordscape in Transition 10th to 13th centuries / Manu V. Devadevan -- 12. (Un)doing Space and Time: 'Doing' the Rāmcaritmānas / Aditya Chaturvedi -- 13. The Ontology of Now: Reading Time through 16th and 17th century Nyāya philosophy / Samuel Wright -- 14. 'A Farrago of Legendary Nonsense': Myth, Time and History in the Keralolpatti / Dilip M. Menon -- 15. The Knots of Time: Reading Nostalgia in Bengali Literature from 13th to the 19th century / Anuparna Mukherjee.

"Retelling Time challenges the hegemony of colonial modernity over academic disciplines and over ways in which we think about something as fundamental as time. It reclaims a bouquet of alternative practices of time from premodern South Asia, which stem from multiple worldviews that have been marginalized. These practices relate to a range of classical and vernacular genres including alaṃkāra, theravāda, yoga, rāmakathā, tasawwuf, āyāraṃga, purāṇa, trikā-tantra, navya-nyāya, pratyabhijñā, carita, kūṭīyāṭṭam and maṅgala kāvya. These represent multiple languages such as Sanskrit, Persian, Pali, Prakrit, Awadhi, Malayalam, Kannada, and Bengali, as well as diverse streams, from Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Sufi Islam to logic, yoga, tantra, theatre, and poetics. Retelling Time questions the modern Eurocentric belief in an empty, homogenous, abbreviated, secular and irreversible time. It proposes instead that that premodern South Asia invested time with cultural function and value, which ranged from the contingent to the transcendent, the quotidian to the cosmic, the fleeting to the eternal, and the social to the spiritual. Accordingly, time was reworked-stretched, melded, collapsed, recursed, rolled over, and even extinguished. Sacred, social, aesthetic, scientific, fictional, historical, and performative South Asian traditions are seen here in conversation with one other, mediated by an ethical paradigm. Their collective challenge is to decolonize our ways of knowing and being. This book will be of interest to scholars of South Asian history, philosophy of history, anthropology, literature, Sanskrit, post colonial studies, cultural studies, studies of temporality and of the Global South"--