Keeping time at home: Understanding the domestic space in late 19th-early 20th century Calcutta through the mechanical time device

Abstract

The impact of clocks and watches in colonial Calcutta in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been a topic of considerable research, with offices and educational institutions having being examined as sites where a new sense of time and temporal values like ‘punctuality’, driven by mechanical time devices, were most pronounced. This paper seeks to draw attention to a relatively uncharted site of time discipline in Calcutta of this period – the home. The domestic space had a daily interface with workplaces as well as schools, thereby offering an opportunity to unpack the influence that the routines of the latter had on domestic temporal rhythms. When the male members of the family had to report to their offices or schools on time, it was made possible by a host of actors within the home who had to be a part of this process, ranging from wives and mothers of such individuals to domestic servants. As this paper will show, the management of time by women became a prominent theme taken up by women’s journals and writers of home manuals in the Bengali language, with both of them being an important component of the booming print market in Calcutta at this juncture. A close study of such print materials will reveal the centrality of household organisation and disciplining of family members in the imagination of women’s temporal responsibilities.