50 R. D. Oldliam — Cn Time in India. [April, 



sun dial, as often as not constructed for a different latitude and inaccurately 

 adjusted to the meridian. Now that the •whole country has been opened 

 up by railways and telegraphs, and travel is not only easy but largely 

 indulged in, the system has become anomalous by which a traveller from 

 one town to another, who wishes to keep an appointment in the town he has 

 come to, must fii'st find out how many minutes the local time is fast or 

 slow of that which he has brought with him, and must then either work 

 out a srmi in arithmetic or alter his watch. 



To a certain extent a standard time has been adopted in India, for 

 the railways universally use Madras mean time. This is also adopted by 

 the Telegraph Department, but the effect is nullified by the printing, in 

 the Official Telegraph Gruide, of a table, covering 44 pages, which gives the 

 number of minvites that the local time is fast or slow of Madras time. 

 The result is a direct encouragement to the maintenance of the present 

 inconvenient and antiquated system, and a hindrance to the adoption of a 

 more rational one. 



8ome years ago an attempt was made to introduce Madras time as the 

 standard for ordinary use in Bombay, but it met with so much opposition 

 that it had to be abandoned. This opposition, though logically unjustifi- 

 able, was based on motives ingrained in human nature. The Bombay 

 office man, told to come to office at half-past nine, instead of ten, felt 

 himself defrauded of half an hour's leisure, just as the Calcutta office man 

 would feel it a gi'ievance if he was told to stop till half -past five, instead of 

 being allowed to depai-t at five, and this though each gained at one end what 

 he lost at the other. So too through all the arrangements of domestic life a 

 nominal change of time would at first produce a feeling of strangeness, which 

 would, however, soon wear off and the change would be recognised as 

 purely nominal, not real. 



A more potent cause of resistance to the general adoption of the 

 present standard time lies in the fact that it is Madras time. The citizen 

 of Bombay, proud of being ^ i^rimus in Indis ' and of Calcutta, equally 

 proud of his city being the Capital of India, and — for a part of the year — 

 the Seat of the Supreme Government, alike look down on Madras, and 

 refuse to change the time they are using for that of what they regai'd as a 

 benighted Presidency ; while Madras, having for long given the standard 

 time to the rest of India, would resist the adoption of any other Indian 

 standard in its place. 



All these local jealousies would disappear if the standard adopted was 

 that of Greenwich, which is not only the prime meridian for nearly the 

 whole of the civilised world, but gives the standard time to the greater part 

 of four continents. 



The adoption of a single standard for all India, whatever it might be, 



