When Alleppey and rest of the Nation Kept Time Without Wristwatches.
( A nostalgic journey from the 1950s to the 1970s and Beyond. )
It took me back to the Alleppey of the 1950s - to
the years when I was beginning to make some sense of the world around me.
Today, a wristwatch is almost taken for granted. In
fact, for the younger generation, the watch as a timepiece has almost
disappeared altogether. The mobile phone has taken over that job, and now the
smartwatch has entered the scene - part chronograph, part mobile phone, and
perhaps part personal assistant!
But there was a time when a wristwatch was a prized
possession, a symbol of status and, for many of us, very much a luxury.
Alleppey - sans wristwatches
In our locality and family in those days, the only
wristwatch I remember seeing regularly was my father's West End - a beautiful
rectangular, golden-cased Swiss watch with a matching chain and, proudly
displayed on its dial, the words “10 Jewels.” It was a manual-winding
mechanical watch.
Those few seconds of holding it in our hands gave
us an inexplicable sense of privilege - as though we had temporarily acquired a
piece of adulthood!
At home, fortunately, we had a large wall clock
with a long oscilating pendulum. It had to be wound manually every day. Its
most distinctive feature was its gong - a hammer striking a spring and
announcing every hour with a deep, resonant chime that could be heard
throughout the house, day and night.
For generations of Indians, that haunting melody
was the sound of a new day beginning - and, in the days before wristwatches
were commonplace, it was also the nation’s unofficial timekeeper.
In Alleppey, too, the first strains of 'Sivaranjini' (signature tune of All India Radio) drifting from homes, teashops and hotels meant that clocks were checked,
mornings began, and the town slowly stirred to life.
But that raises an interesting question:
How did people keep time when hardly anyone owned a
wristwatch?
The answer is fascinating. We had an entire network of clocks, bells, religious invocations, sirens, whistles, aircraft and even natural phenomena - none of them requiring batteries, chargers or Wi-Fi - which kept the whole town in rhythm.
Alleppey had its own timekeepers
To begin with, there were temple bells and the 'kathina' - those miniature cannon-like crackers with gunpowder, whose explosions announced
various temple rituals. There were church bells, and of course the 'baanku vili' (Aazan ) - the call to prayer at mosques - at its prescribed intervals.
These were not merely religious sounds. They were
part of Alleppey's informal public timekeeping system.
Alleppey was then a thriving centre of the coir
industry, with large British and German companies employing hundreds of people.
Names such as Pierce Leslie, William Goodacre, Darrah Smail, Aspinwall and
Madura Company were familiar landmarks of the town's commercial life.
Their factory sirens formed another part of our
informal timekeeping system. The sirens announced the beginning of work,
recess, shift changes and the end of the working day. Each factory had its own
rhythm, and the people of Alleppey knew the pattern almost as well as they knew
the temple bells, church bells or 'azan' from mosques.
The sun, the moon and the sundial
Long before watches became commonplace, people also
looked upwards. The position of the sun or that of your own shadow provided a
fairly reliable indication of the hour during the day. At night, the moon and
stars served as natural companions for those who understood their movements.
Even the rise and fall of the tides, transmitted through the backwaters into
the hinterland, provided useful clues to the passage of time.
I still remember the sundial at SDV High School -
reputedly one of its kind in South India.
To a child accustomed to clocks, a sundial seemed
almost magical: time itself being measured by a shadow cast by the sun.Today, a
sundial might appear quaint. To us then, it was a living lesson in how our
ancestors understood and measured time.
“What time is it?”
There was another little social custom that has
almost disappeared. If you were fortunate enough to own a wristwatch, people
passing by would frequently ask:
"Chetta samayam ethra aayi ? (“ What time is it?”)
Nobody seemed irritated by the question.
In fact, wearing a wristwatch and being asked the
time was almost an acknowledgement of one's modest affluence. The watch was not
merely a timepiece. It was something worth noticing.
I became the proud owner of my first wristwatch
when I went to college - 'Kingsley' a modest American pin-lever watch.
It was certainly not as sophisticated as Father's
West End and, if memory serves me right, had an irritating habit of developing
problems at precisely the wrong time.
But it was mine. And that made all the difference.!!
It was also quite in order to display one's watch
prominently, with the wrist resting casually on a friend's shoulder, in college
group photographs.
That was not accidental.! That was watchmanship!
From college to Olive Greens
When I joined the Army towards the end of the
1960s, the watch landscape had changed considerably. HMT watches were the
preferred choice for many of us.
I still remember an HMT watch kept in a glass-topped box at the Unit Quarter Guard. The Guard Commander handled it with almost ceremonial reverence. The inspecting officers religiously check its serviceability and upkeep.
The hourly chimes, of the Quarter Guard bell goaded by this watch carried through the barracks by the became part of the rhythm of military life.
A few HMT Jawan watches were issued to key
appointment holders and were treated almost as controlled items - not unlike
the regiment's rocket launchers and US wireless sets!
In the unit, watches were still not something
everybody possessed. Apart from officers and certain key appointments, most
soldiers did not have one. Yet the entire unit functioned with remarkable
punctuality.
The Quarter Guard gong, the bugles - Reveille and
Retreat - whistles and the calls of appointment holders were enough to keep
everyone moving. Time was not something we carried on our wrists. It was
something the whole unit lived by.
I also remember the Army Canteen in those days.
Watches were much in demand and often available
only after a long wait. On one occasion, I bought an HMT Sona ladies' watch for
my sister. It cost me ₹150. My monthly salary then was a princely ₹350!
Looking back, I am not sure whether I was being
generous to my sister or reckless with my finances. Perhaps both.
And then came Titan
And then came Titan made in India.
Suddenly, watches became more accessible, more
stylish and more aspirational. The watch was no longer merely an instrument for
measuring time. It became an expression of personality, taste and,
occasionally, one's ability to impress others.
Swiss watches continued to command enormous
prestige - and their prices reflected it.
But HMT and Titan brought something different: a
good watch within the reach of ordinary Indians. Eventually, quartz technology
transformed the watch itself.
The humble mechanical watch, which had demanded
winding and care, was gradually replaced by something that seemed almost
miraculous to us: A watch that kept time without being wound!
That was progress.
What we gained - and what we lost-
Looking back today, the journey from Father's
hand-wound West End to HMT, and from HMT to Titan and quartz watches, is much
more than the story of a gadget.
It is, in many ways, the story of changing India.
In the 1950s, we did not need a watch to tell us every five minutes what we were supposed to do.The town itself kept time.
Today, we have a clock on the wall - perhaps in
every room. A watch on the wrist. A clock in the car. A computer on the desk. A
mobile phone in the pocket. And, for good measure, a smartwatch on the wrist.
Yet we still receive reminders telling us when to
wake up, when to leave, when to attend a meeting, when to take a break and,
occasionally, when to go to bed.
Perhaps the greatest irony is that we have never
had so many ways of knowing the time - and yet seem to have less time than ever
before.
For those of us who grew up in the Alleppey of the
1950s, a wristwatch was not merely something that told us what time it was.
It told us something about who we were, where we had arrived in life, and how far the world had travelled. From a Dakota flying over the Arabian Sea to a smartwatch receiving messages from satellites, the journey has been extraordinary.
And yet, somewhere in that journey, something has
quietly disappeared.
We no longer listen for the factory siren.
We no longer wait for the Dakota.
We no longer calculate the hour by the position of
the sun.
We certainly don't ask the gentleman wearing a
watch, “What time is it?”
And perhaps that is why, even today, the memory of
Father's old West End remains more precious than any watch I have worn since.
It did not merely keep time.
It kept a piece of my childhood. 💖
