Voices Volume 13 62 Doing Nothing: Gender, Respectability and Playing with Time Sneha Krishnan, St. John’s College, Oxford (sneha.krishnan@sjc.ox.ac.uk) A lot of the time when I was doing fieldwork in the South Indian city of Chennai with college- going women, the answer I got to the question, ‘What are you doing?’ was ‘Nothing’. ‘Doing nothing’, as I learned in the months that I spent with these young women, referred to a wide range of things that they didn’t necessarily talk about doing: for instance, joking about sex, telling ghost stories, flirting with boys on Facebook, and raucously playing in the hostel. ‘Doing nothing’ was also sometimes glossed as ‘wasting time’. In ‘wasting time’, these young women saw themselves as living out a fantasy of youthfulness: a time away from family obligation, spent in the transitory site of the women’s hostels where most undergraduate students live, while they attend colleges in the city. In this paper, I draw on ethnography to show how young women designate the time of ‘doing nothing’ as a playful experience of youth that does not register in an anticipated future. It has been argued that modern time is located within a salvific or ‘millennial’ imaginary (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000; Roy 2012), which ‘is about a future thrown forward from a past, a past produced in and through the present, which excises other possible pasts, other possible histories.’ (Patel 2000, 49) Occlusions and secrecies are thus integral to the making of modern time, as a site where the future is always present, if spectrally, guiding the present’s narrative of the past, as a place that secures for the present, its livable futures. A growing feminist scholarship in history and anthropology asks how we might retell time in ways that interrupt such alignments of past, present and future (Arondekar 2010; Ramberg 2016). While much of the scholarship that has addressed these questions has asked how subjects seen as marginal to the national imaginary of development and progress inhabit time, the young women I address in my work are located at its heart. As middle-class college girls, these women are overinvested figures of