South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

ISSN: 0085-6401 (Print) 1479-0270 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csas20

Timepass

Craig Jeffrey

To cite this article: Craig Jeffrey (2017) Timepass, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies,
40:2, 407-409, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2017.1297028

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2017.1297028

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SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES, 2017
VOL. 40, NO. 2, 407–409
https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2017.1297028

SHORT ARTICLE 11) Check for updates

Timepass
Craig Jeffrey
Australia India Institute, University of Melbourne, Carlton, Vic., Australia

Oxford English Dictionary Online defines ‘timepass’ as ‘The action or fact of passing the
time, typically in an aimless or unproductive way’. In contemporary India, people com-
monly use the word ‘timepass’ to refer to a period of downtime between bouts of work,
and it is variously rendered as ‘timepass’, ‘time pass’, ‘time-pass’, and ‘TP’.
While timepass could theoretically refer to any activity that passes the time, it usually
denotes relatively meaningless, light, trivial activity, and it is counter-posed against ‘seri-
ous’ action in India. Timepass involves distraction, mild amusement, and is productive
only insofar as it staves off boredom, prevents negative introspection, and allows the
body, mind and soul some respite from ordinary life. ‘Bas main timepass kar raha hoon’
(‘I’m only doing timepass’) is the type of phrase one hears repeatedly at tea stalls and bus
stops in Hindi-speaking India. The implication is ‘There is no further need for conversa-
tion; I’m doing almost nothing at all’. Timepass, in this sense, is quite different from the
seemingly similar English word ‘pastime’ which connotes action undertaken for pleasure
or as a hobby. Indeed, ‘timepass’ is often equated quite straightforwardly with ‘nothing’.

‘What are you doing?’ one might ask.

‘Nothing’.
‘Nothing?’
‘Timepass’.

As Chris Fuller points out in his review of boredom in India, the word ‘timepass’ emerged
only recently in popular culture, films and books there. Fuller dates its emergence to
around the 1990s or possibly even the early 2000s, pointing out that major works on bore-
dom before that time do not employ the term—Shrilal Shukla’s Raag Darbari (1967) and
Upamanyu Chatterjee’s The Mammaries of the Welfare State (2000), for example.1 Cer-
tainly, the word was used by the magazine India Today in 1998, and was current in popu-
lar conversation in western Uttar Pradesh in the mid 1990s.
What is in no doubt is that the social conditions for timepass predate its everyday use.
Historians of nineteenth-century Europe have traced the rise of boredom to the spread of
ideas of clock time, the rise of the railways, the growth of industrial labour, and the associ-
ated incursion of the state into people’s social lives, for example via the growth of schools,

CONTACT Craig Jeffrey craig.jeffrey@unimelb.edu.au

1. Chris Fuller, ‘Timepass and Boredom in Modern India’, in Anthropology of This Century, Vol. 1 (May 2011) [http://aotc
press.com/articles/timepass-boredom/, accessed 16 Feb. 2017].
© 2017 South Asian Studies Association of Australia
 ®

408 C. JEFFREY
hospitals and prisons. In India, too, linear notions of clock time—physically represented
in the spread of calendars and timepieces—came to compete during the late colonial
period with older, cyclical experiences of time; the colonial government simultaneously
introduced new forms of time-consciousness, for example through the construction of
railways and other modern infrastructure and institutions. ‘Time’ itself became an object
of social comment, and multiple spaces emerged in which this time needed to be ‘passed’,
from traffic jams to railway waiting rooms, clinics to post office queues. In India, a small
industry has emerged around catering for people’s boredom, including magazines, cheap
fiction, snack vendors, street performers and, more recently, mobile phone apps. ‘Time-
pass, timepass, timepass’ is a common mantra for those hawking peanuts on train plat-
forms, just as it was the name selected in 2002 by Britannia Industries for a new line of
salty snacks.
So ubiquitous has the word ‘timepass’ become in modern India that it was chosen as
the title of a 2005 Bollywood film (directed by Chader Mishra) and a 2014 Marathi-
language film (directed by Ravi Jadhav), both love stories centred on Indian college life (a
college degree is ‘the ultimate three-year timepass’, according to many young people in
provincial North India). Timepass is also a popular name for blogs, and was chosen by
the Indian model, Protima Bedi, as the title of her autobiography.
Passing time and humour are closely linked, as Samuel Beckett recognised in his classic
play, Waiting for Godot. ‘That passed the time’, announces Vladimir at one point in the
play. ‘It would have passed anyway’, Estragon deadpans back in an exchange that reflects
in its mundaneness the very act of passing time. As timepass has proliferated in popular
culture in India, it has also become the subject of jokes, irony and farce. In many colleges
across India, youth make reference to their ‘serious’ and ‘timepass’ boyfriends and girl-
friends. Their serious partners are marriage candidates; the timepass ones are simply
being entertained for the time being. Parents often use timepass semi-humorously to
chide errant children: ‘What do you mean that you are just doing timepass, watermelons
do timepass in the fields?’ In such ways, timepass has become part of what the anthropol-
ogist Michael Herzfeld terms an ‘intimate culture’ in the sense that it offers insiders a
shared sense of identity, but is embarrassing when exposed to outsiders,2 even while there
is nothing distinctly Indian about popular colloquial expressions for passing time.
English words in India, where they do not refer to specific foreign practices or institu-
tions (as in ‘department’), are often used to express ambivalence. This is especially true of
the word timepass. On the one hand, for lower-middle-class youth in many parts of India,
timepass signals dissatisfaction with poor schooling, unemployment, blocked mobility and
financial stress. Hanging out at street corners or spending long periods simply ‘doing
nothing’ becomes a means of advertising disappointment. Timepass suggests detachment
from one’s situation and the sense of being entitled to a more exciting life elsewhere. It
also connotes an overabundance of time that needs to be killed, and of being left behind
relative to the small number of those people who do ‘make it’.
On the other hand, there is often something productive about the practice of timepass
among youth. Young people, especially young men, sometimes claim group membership
through reference to their timepass. The social act of timepass, for example standing
2. Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics and the Real Life of States, Societies, and Institutions (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1997).
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 409
®

about at bus stops or playing cards in tea stalls, may provide opportunities to hear news,
exchange ideas, and establish social institutions or political protests. It is also possible
that, as the experience of timepass has become more common among Indian youth and
people are forced to experience some of the same types of feelings of frustration and bore-
dom, it may serve as the setting for the emergence of novel alliances. People who would
otherwise regard each other with disdain may, through the shared experience of waiting
to realise their aspirations, come to strike up friendships and develop shared goals. ‘Time-
pass’ may also serve as a basis for claiming cultural or class distinction. In some areas of
India, young people distinguish their own ‘timepass’ from the ‘timewaste’ of lower classes
or castes. Likewise, timepass often has a gendered element, and it is self-evidently the case
that many women in large parts of India lack the effective freedom to hang out on street
corners passing time. Timepass emerges as a window on social change in India and a
space in which transformations may occur.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.