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This paper traces the establishment of standardized railway time in colonial India between 1854 and 1905, and explores how the colonized—as passengers and population—negotiated the temporal re-structuring introduced through railways. Millions were affected by the process through which the time of a single meridian was selected as an all-India railway time, and gradually deemed civil time, continuing even today as Indian Standard Time. The paper explores everyday responses to this dramatic change in ‘time-sense’ engendered through railways, both as speedy transport and as standardized time. This allows for a historical analysis of how individuals and societies deal in practice with abstract technological transformations, and of how colonized populations have navigated the modernizing intervention of imperialist states. It argues that the ways in which the population of colonial India accepted, contested, and appropriated the temporal standardization instituted through railways and railway time challenged imperial policies determined by reified presumptions of metropolitan versus colonial ‘time-sense’. Since these responses were often analogous to how people and societies across the globe were responding to temporal standardization, they disrupt imperial strategies that used time-sense to locate colonized populations outside of History, in effect excluding them from their own present. They thus serve to materially de-stabilize a narrative of colonial time-lag and to reclaim the historical present as a time in which the colonizer and colonized exist contemporaneously. Consequently, they reconfigure modernity as an experiential rather than as a normative historical present. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1914, the Indian Army was deployed against the enemies of the British Empire. This paper analyses the administrative mechanism as well as the imperial assumptions and attitudes which shaped the recruitment policy of the Indian Army during the First World War. From the late nineteenth century, the Martial Race theory (a bundle of contradictory ideas) shaped the recruitment policy. With certain modifications, this theory remained operational to the first decade of the twentieth century. The construction of the ‘martial races’ enabled the British to play-off different communities against each other to prevent the emergence of a unified anti-British sentiment among the colonized. During the Great War, faced with the rising demands of manpower, the army was forced to modify the Martial Race theory. However, a conscript army did not emerge in British-India. This was due to imperial policies, the inherent social divisions of Indian society, and because the demands for military manpower remained relatively low in comparison to India's demographic resources. Due to innovations in the theory and praxis of recruitment, the volume of recruitment showed a linear increase from 1914 to 1918, with maximum intensification of recruitment occurring during 1917 and 1918. But as the war ended in November 1918, despite the entry of several new communities, the bulk of the Indian Army still came from the traditional martial races. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]