Paper short abstract:

Through ethnographically exploring a governmental project in rural India, the paper looks at the way the temporal logics of several projects do intersect, and subsequently create as well as recreate the social temporalities, and thereby hindering the projects' achievement towards their goals.

Paper long abstract:

The paper explores the temporal logic of several projects and its socio-political implications for the temporality of peasantry and vice versa in India. The paper examines a governmental project that intended to set up a car industry through acquiring agricultural lands at Singur in West Bengal, an Indian province in 2006, and withdrew eventually because of anti-land acquisition movement on part of the peasants. However, some other projects which include the activists', both social and political, and the researchers' did intervene by way of doing activism and research, and mediate in the ensuing conflict between the government and the peasants. This paper looks at the way the temporal logics of several projects intersect, and thereby complicate matters for the peasants. Drawing on the evidences from ethnographic exploration for about a half-decade (2006-11), the first part of the paper discusses how various projects, both the government and non-government or anti-government, as political technologies shape and reshape the aspirations and activities of the peasantry. The second part of the paper engages the way the multilayered peasantry deals with the temporal logic of governmental project as well as the counter-temporal logic of activists and researchers, and reproduces the temporalities of respective projects. Through exploring different perspectives, contexts, and temporal logics this paper reveals that the ethnographic present is intersected not only by multiple temporalities but also by contrast temporalities, and that the consequences of intersection of all these temporalities while creating and recreating the social temporalities hinder the projects' achievement towards their goals.