Recursive Temporality: Eternal Recurrence through Planetary Crisis, and Sacred Time in Intezar Hussain’s Basti

Abstract

This paper explores the temporal imagination of Intizar Hussain’s Basti through an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s planetary history, and Mircea Eliade’s mythic time. It argues that Basti resists linear historicism by staging a cyclical temporality that merges political trauma, ecological collapse, and sacred ritual. This repeating, cyclical structure across philosophy, ecology, and sacred myth is coined as recursive temporality. Guided by three research questions, the study examines how recurrence functions as an ethical and metaphysical structure; how planetary time extends the novel’s scope beyond nation and history; and how mythic time sacralizes repetition. The findings reveal that Basti not only narrates national fragmentation but also offers a metaphysical ecology of time; it binds memory, ritual, and environment into a recursive continuum. This analysis situates Basti within emerging postcolonial ecocritical debates and proposes a model for reading South Asian literature through nonlinear, sacred, and planetary chronotypes.