How our ancients knew more about time, its measurement, and its significance

The earth’s northern hemisphere slants dopily towards the sun during the hot months, drinking in more of its light and hence days are longer than nights. Our 24-hour day is how long it takes the earth to pirouette once on her axis.

There is nothing special about the number 24. Ancient Indians measured time using a system called “muhurta”, which divided day and night into 30 units each, taking into account that the duration of day and night varied continuously with the seasons. The length of a “muhurta” was therefore not fixed.

Man was always aware of the fact that a lunar month, measured as the time between two successive new moons is nearly 29½ days and the solar year, the time taken by the earth to make a complete revolution around the sun is around 365¼ days. The ratio of these numbers is 12.38 and it is no wonder then, that different civilisations across the world adopted a 12-month calendar to mark time.

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If to this heavenly mapping one adds the variables of latitude and longitude, more amazing facts unravel. Longitude indicates that sunrise and sunset do not occur simultaneously in all places, while latitude shows that the lengths of day and night are not the same everywhere and at all times. The sun rises early in Jorhat and sets late in Rajkot. Day and night are of equal length in Singapore throughout the year, but they can be quite unequal in Stavanger depending on whether it is summer or winter.

Earlier, most people probably did not realise that the sun rises and sets at different times in different places, as they stayed put in their place of habitation, and as long distance travel was relatively slow. Time zones therefore, were proposed, as a means to standardise timekeeping across vast distances, only because the expansion of railroads and telegraph lines required synchronised schedules.

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Before the advent of time zones, each locality typically set its own time based on the position of the sun, leading to a confusing melange of local times. With the beginnings of fast train travel in 19th century Europe, America and India, it must have become apparent that the days and nights followed each other faster or slower depending on whether one travelled east or west, in other words against the sun or with the sun.

The 24 time zones with each zone synchronised with local times and representing one hour of the day were proposed in 1878 by Sandford Fleming, a Canadian railway planner and engineer. This proposal was officially adopted at the International Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C. in 1884, where Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was established as the prime meridian from which all time zones would be calculated. Greenwich is a suburb of London and with the British Empire at its zenith, not only did the sun literally not set on the British Empire but time itself was indeed reckoned from London’s local time.

A little thought will allow the reader to appreciate the inevitability of the International Date Line, a crazy zig zag through uninhabited regions of the Pacific Ocean, without which time has no beginning and no end. While AI will undoubtedly get us there; Jules Verne, a French novelist ahead of his time, fictionalised “time travel” around intrepid adventurer Phileas Fogg. In his voyage extraordinaire, Fogg crosses the Date Line in order to circumnavigate the globe in 80 days, failing to realise that by travelling eastwards, he has gained a day and come home sooner than his wager demands.

This contraction and expansion of time became strikingly dramatic in the 20th century with intercontinental air travel. One departs from India at 2 am to land in Germany at 7 am, although the actual flying time is closer to 9 hours. This happens because time zones in India and Germany vary with longitude. By contrast, comes the collateral damage of jet lag, red eye flights and melatonin tablets. Another idiosyncratic effect of widely different time zones is the reality of Indian software professionals in India, working at odd times online to suit their masters in America?

We in India are used to a single time zone that corresponds to the local time in Mirzapur and is ahead of GMT by +5½ hours. When it is 12 noon in London, it is 5.30 pm in New Delhi. In Analog times, we were told to hold our wrist watches upside down, to figure out GMT! Until very recently, the Indian budget was presented in Parliament at 5 pm because this corresponded with a ‘sensible’ time of 11.30 am in London. Dregs of colonisation?

We do not reset our clocks and watches in summers and winters like people in the northern latitudes because the length of days and nights are not that different in different seasons in India, our country being quite close to the equator. This means that Indian Standard Time is 5½ hours ahead of London time but only during the winter months. During the summer months, when the days are long and the nights short in Europe, they advance their clocks by an hour and so we are only 4½ hours ahead of London and 3½ hours ahead of much of Western Europe. The half hour in the calculation of IST genuinely puzzles foreigners and the confusion is compounded in countries like Canada and Australia where the time zones are set both on the hour and on the half hour. All this gives rise to silly timing issues during travel and when people across different time zones participate in a Zoom or Teams call, and miscalculate. Confusing isn’t it?

At the time of Partition, Pakistan and Bangladesh set their clocks 30 minutes behind and ahead of IST, a practical idea as their time zones would then more accurately correspond to their local times. But what of Nepal where the clocks are set 15 minutes ahead of India? Aren’t the Nepalese being difficult when they do this?

Some countries that have tremendous longitudinal expanse have many time zones, with Russia leading the pack with eleven and the US with four. Other nations with a similar longitudinal expanse like India and China have a single time zone. In India, this corresponds to the local time in a place of middle longitude, nearly 82.5⁰ E. However, in China the single time zone corresponds to the local time in Beijing, which is to the far east of the country. Surely this creates odd situations for people in western China who need to set off to work and school in pitch darkness.

Discussions on whether India should have more than one time zone crop up now and then and are not taken really seriously. The main idea in having a time zone is that people leave home for school or work and return home largely within daylight hours. With just one time zone, those in the West leave home when it is dark while those in the east return when it is dark. In a lighter vein, it is commented that with India already being a highly inefficient country, this inefficiency would only increase if the country had two time zones! Daylight savings time in the northern latitudes was supposed to save electricity costs in the evening hours. With the increased availability of cheap electricity in the medium term, one wonders if daylight savings itself will become an anachronism. It appears to be largely a nuisance now.

Ujjain, an ancient city located in present-day Madhya Pradesh, India, holds significant importance in ancient Indian calendars due to its association with astronomy and timekeeping. It was considered one of the prime meridian points in Indian astronomy. Its prominence is largely attributed to the observatory established there, known as the Ujjain Observatory or the Vedh Shala. This observatory, believed to have been constructed during the reign of the Indian astronomer-king Maharaja Jai Singh II in the 18th century, was built upon the foundations of earlier observatories dating back to ancient times.

Located on the Tropic of Cancer, Ujjain was a crucial location for astronomical observations, influencing ancient Indian mathematicians like Aryabhata, Varahamihira, and Brahmagupta. It is located at the spot where the sun travels to its northernmost extent on the summer solstice—22 June. It served as a reference point for astronomical events, as calendar systems like the Hindu lunar calendar were developed, and ancient Indian thought and scholarship in timekeeping and astronomy progressed. Of no less importance is the fact that two jyotirlingas Mahakaleswar and Mamaleswar are located in or close to Ujjain, the name of the former even giving a hint as to the importance of the place in all matters concerning time and its measurement.

Lord Shiva is closely associated with measures of longitude. Several important Shiva shrines are situated nearly on 79⁰E longitude, particularly along the ancient pilgrimage route known as the Pancha Bhoota Sthalas, dedicated to the five elements of nature. Other significant Shiva shrines located along this longitude are Kedarnath, Kaleswaram and Rameswaram. The fact that these ancient temples were constructed on this terrestrial signature of longitude indicates that our ancients knew much more about time, its measurement, and its significance than we might tend to ascribe to them.

Truly then, we are insignificant in the grand kalachakra of the world.

The author is an Emeritus Professor in the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, and is the author of ‘Bharat: India 2.0’, published in 2021. He has an H-index of 104. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.