200 chapter
time pressure people say they experience in Kerala, and the role of allopathic
medicine as well as idioms of “tension” and “stress” in accommodating this,
also support E. P. Th ompson and David Harvey’s insights about time and
the pace of work and everyday life, but I have some hesitancy in celebrating
an overly neat fi t. While there have been cultural and economic transforma-
tions in India associated with industrialization and globalization, it would be
inappropriate simply to apply Th ompson and Harvey’s analyses from Europe
and North America to the context of India. Moreover, an association of time
pressure with the advent of modern worklives in India would posit a past when
people in India did not experience time pressure. Critiques of Th ompson’s
depiction of clock time point to historical inaccuracies, claiming clock time
long predates the work disciplines of the Industrial Revolution (Glennie and
Th rift 2005), and demonstrate that other methods of measuring time created
clock-time style work discipline in the medieval period (Birth 2009). In other
words, a past that was lacking in time pressure seems somewhat idealized,
and while the worklife and workplace temporalities research has little to say
about changes in time disciplines in India,^3 I doubt that premodern, precolo-
nial work and lifestyle regimens were lacking in time pressures. One does not
need a clock or a “modern” job to feel such pressure. Th is can develop through
multiple, overlapping tasks and constantly emerging work, family and life obli-
gations (the latter of which are more acute in “traditional” extended families
[Rudolph, Rudolph and Kanota 2000]). Th e situation may actually be that
people have long felt time pressure from work and other obligations, but when
ayurveda is the primary treatment option, it is simply accepted that one must
take weeks off to treat a signifi cant illness. Once allopathy becomes available
as a faster option for treatment (probably after the pharmaceutical turn in the
mid-twentieth century), people are able to choose this option and return to
their obligations sooner. Th is may then lead to more normative pressures and
expectations to return to work quickly, which then may be reinforced by mod-
ern and developmentalist ideologies of productivity and speed.
Whether contemporary lifestyles involve greater time pressure, which
makes allopathy more appealing, or the availability of allopathy creates greater
expectations of speed and productivity, the use of allopathy to quickly return
to obligations raises the issue of how “health” is perceived, engaged and lived
out. Recalling Ajit’s lament—“Get a cold, get changed in order to go to school
the next day. Th is is the level at which we maintain our health”—completing
therapy to the extent that one can return to one’s obligations and productivity,
shapes an orientation to health as functionality. Concerns about this approach
to health, rather than engaging health as positive transformation, recall the
insights of early social critics of medicine including Rudolf Virchow (1958)