Timescapes, subjectivity and emotions after the India–Tibet earthquake, 1950

Abstract

Abstract Scholarship on historical temporality has explored what time meant to people in the past. Going further, how did historical actors’ perception of time shape their experience of events? Jean and Francis Kingdon-Ward, two British travellers, lived through a major earthquake on India and Tibet’s mountainous frontier in 1950. Their numerous published and unpublished narrative accounts showed that the earthquake severely disrupted their physical environment, inducing powerful emotions and changing their sense of the passage of time. Comparisons with other accounts by British and some Indian survivors of mid twentieth-century earthquakes in South Asia showed that others, too, felt that earthquakes disrupted their sense of linear, well-ordered time. This article develops Barbara Adam’s concept of timescapes to emphasize how a temporal subject-position is made up of feelings and thoughts. It draws on psychological research on the relationship between emotion and time-perception to reveal a temporal subjectivity that extended through and beyond a moment of extreme stress, and was closely connected to place. New insights are offered for scholarship on the histories of emotions, subjectivity and the environment, putting emotions more firmly into our understanding of historical time.