Introduction

Time, like so many things, appears to be ‘natural’, but as many historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and geographers have demonstrated, is socially constructed. Like space, time is plastic and flexible: we find time, lose time, make time, invest time, kill time, borrow time, budget time, waste time, run out of time, and so forth.

Craig Jeffrey, who has long conducted ethnographic analyses of India, examines the use and meaning of time in the rapidly changing context of contemporary India, which has been in the thrall of neoliberal modernization and the social tensions that ensue among castes and ethnic groups. Particularly for young men marginalized by the emergence of a new social order and the gradual collapse of the old one, whose daily lives have been drastically reconfigured by globalization and liberalization, privatization, technological change, rural-to-urban migration, high and persistent unemployment, and endemic corruption, time has acquired a variety of new meanings.

His book centers on a deep exploration of North Indian farmers who belong to the Jat caste. Passing time for young, middle-class men reflects their differential strategies for coping with frustration, constructing a playful and entertaining alternative to unemployment, fomenting social ties and human capital, negotiating with the state, and challenging the rigid rhythms that dominated their parents’ generation. Jeffrey invokes theorists of everyday life, such as Bourdieu, to illuminate the intersections of the personal and the social. Seen in this light, the act of waiting is not simply a passive response to social changes, but an active agent in their response to broader social imperatives, a vehicle for producing new ways of being in the world, holding onto hope, and an unintentional mechanism for the reproduction of class, gender, and caste.

Jeffrey’s work is in many respects a portrait of youth culture that extends far beyond India, as young men the world over confront similar imperatives. The comments about this book often compare his work in India to similar situations such as in Germany or Mexico. As millions of youth are rendered redundant today, their perceptions, hopes, fears, and frustrations have important implications for social change and the making of new geographies, as the revolts in the Arab world and the Occupy movement in the USA amply demonstrate. In this respect, Jeffrey’s work is a valuable window into processes that affect not just India, but all of us.