THREE LEVELS OF TIME

This book is a collection of four lectures delivered at the University of Rajasthan in 1972 in the newly, instituted lecture chair named after Dr. A.G. Stock. The first three lectures were originally deli¬vered in English, and the fourth in Hindi. A very brief fifth chapter, ‘Times Hunt’, a translated section from the Hindi book Samvatsara ap¬pears at the end to exemplify and wind up the issue discus¬sed. Throughout the lectures Vatsyayan maintains the stance of a creative writer and, like most critics and writers, considers literature to be an imprint of subjective experi¬ence. Hence his subject, ‘a sense of time’. In Chapter I—’Cosmic Time and the Time Order of History’—Vatsyayan looks at both the subjective psychologi¬cal time and the objective scientific time. By citing anecdotes he makes it amply clear that he is interested in the ‘sense of time’ rather than in the concept of time in general. He argues that the perception of an event for a I villager is different from that of a cityman or, to take an¬other example, that children perceive the world in ways different from those of the adults.