Sleep is an elusive topic of discussion in our society. It has come to public life recently in the light of drowsy drivers meeting fateful accidents on highways and the persistent demand for a 70-hour work culture by the Infosys co-founder, N.R. Narayana Murthy, and other corporate entrepreneurs. The demand for longer work hours often does not touch upon their implications on sleep and overall work-life balance. An open discussion around sleep is much needed in an age marked increasingly by sleep deprivation. Various surveys around the world have confirmed how the present society is building on a sleep deficit.

We all regulate our sleep in some ways — to adjust to work, raise kids, deal with chronic illnesses, study for exams and so on. Leaving aside the biological limits of sleep, we decide when to sleep, how much to sleep, and when not to fall asleep. Doctors and sleep specialists prescribe that we sleep for at least seven to eight hours. But how much we sleep is not just determined by our whims and medical common sense. You may be free to regulate your sleep or awake status, but do you own your sleep? The ownership of sleep takes us beyond the issue of the micromanagement of sleep. It asks if any external force has the power to shape the patterns of sleep and decide the quality of sleep. Here, I exclude those who suffer from lack of sleep or
oversleep for health reasons, although external forces contribute to these phenomena.

I am not a health expert; I am a historian — particularly, a historian of labour and inequalities. Studying work cultures during colonialism has given me some valuable lessons on the sleeping patterns of the Indian people. The gist of it is that work has a significant impact on our sleep. You will not be surprised when I say that sleep gets decided by bosses. It is true that work cultures have been the biggest regulator of sleep in modern history. Yet, humans are fighting a fierce battle against modernity to take back their ownership of sleep. Whether it is ‘Lying Flat’ — an anti-work resistance movement in China — or demand for a shorter workweek, the issue of sleep, leisure and work are interconnected. Yet the bosses want more work.

Modern-period work culture structured around the clock, which can be loosely termed the capitalist production system, has significantly transformed not only the way humans work but also how they sleep. This twin effect of industrialisation on the human body and psyche distinguishes us from our pre-modern predecessors. Humans living before the industrial period and the introduction of electric bulbs worked more during the daytime and less during the night-time. And if they did work in the dark, as was the case for agrarian work, it was not usually for sustained nine or ten hours. Exceptions included the village watchmen, postal workers, a few elite and aristocratic household servants, night-time sex workers, and security personnel. Night and night work were not marked without caste discrimination in pre-modern times. Gopal Guru, writing about the mapping of caste hierarchies onto the social space, tells us that Dalits under the Peshwa rule in nineteenth-century Pune were allowed to enter the main streets only during the afternoon and the night-time as, otherwise, their presence (including their shadow) could defile upper castes. Guru uses B.R. Ambedkar’s writing to show that Dalits were treated like hyenas and nishachar, who were forced to live a humiliating, nocturnal life. Who knows what kind of sleep inequities caste had produced? We have not examined such questions either in our scholarship or in
our consciousness.

Historians of sleep have tried to understand how people have slept over centuries and if their patterns have changed over the period. While Indian historians lack these answers, the Western historian, Roger Ekirch, working on night-time history in the West, suggested that people’s sleeping habits changed with industrialisation since the nineteenth century. According to him, before industrial work ethics, Western people took biphasic sleep — that is people slept in two halves with a break around midnight. But with the growth of artificial lighting, industrial work culture, and socialisation at night, people shifted to a single-segment sleep — one consolidated long sleep. As the character of the night changed, sleep’s structure also changed.

India probably never underwent this clear-cut, single-phasic sleep shift as people continued to sleep differently in the summer and the winter and in villages and in big cities. As factory work got entrenched in India since the late nineteenth century and the professionalism of clock-based work culture intruded into the lives of the Indian people, siestas came under attack and people underwent sleep deprivation. A factory worker in the late nineteenth century, working for 10 to 13 hours, slept not more than seven hours a day. Women workers slept even less as they woke up early to burn wood for their earthen stoves, collect water from common taps, cook food for males, and prepared to go to work. It is not surprising that when Bombay workers rebelled against their Indian employers and the British colonial State in the 1880s, their first demand was to work from dawn to dusk, not from dark to dark. Working in the daylight meant some leisure time in the evenings. They learnt clock-reading to ensure overseers and jobbers did not make them work extra hours. Clocks — a tool used by employers to create a disciplined industrial workforce — were also used by those who worked to ensure they had a life beyond work. Later, in the twentieth century, these workers led the protests for an eight-hour workday on the streets of Bombay.

We may regulate our sleep, but we are not sovereigns of our sleep. Our society needs a healthy engagement with sleep to ensure we do not prosper at the risk of our sleep or the sleep of those who labour. Sleep inequality, where a large working population sleeps less than others, is a big concern that may derail our progress. Women generally sleep less than males because of child and family care in addition to their work culture. The dictum, ‘a nation which sleeps less also produces less’, can be supplemented with ‘a nation which sleeps less also produces more sick bodies’. As illumination, flexible work hours, and a 24x7 economy tighten their grip over us, the way forward is demanding sleep equity and the promotion of sleep hygiene.

Arun Kumar is an Assistant Professor in British Imperial, Colonial, and Post-Colonial History, University of Nottingham