Real Time

Amit Chaudhuri was born in Kolkata, India, just 15 years after the country gained independence from Great Britain. His father was a CEO of an Indian food products company, and his mother was a singer. He grew up in Bombay, attending a prestigious English-language school, and traveled to England to attend university and pursue a PhD in English literature. From then on, he divided his time and intellectual efforts between England and India, teaching at universities in both countries and writing for English publications such as The London Review of Books. He published his first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address, in 1991 and went on to write seven more novels, several works of nonfiction, and a collection of short stories in which “Real Time” is included. His work has explored Indian history, tensions between the country’s Hindu and Muslim communities, and the experiences of Indians who live or travel abroad. He currently teaches at India’s Ashoka University.

Great Britain ruled the Indian subcontinent directly from 1857 to 1947. (Before that, private British businesses like the British East India Company exercised a great deal of control over the region.) While anti-colonial movements and periodic rebellions existed throughout the period of British control, independence advocates gained steam in the 1920s under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, ultimately compelling Britain to relinquish control over the subcontinent after WWII. Independence was accompanied by Partition, the division of the subcontinent into two countries, Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Sectarian violence broke out as millions of people migrated across the continent to the nation that matched their religion; ultimately, over a million people were killed during Partition. After independence, some middle- and upper-class Indians were able to rise to positions of wealth and power denied to them during the period of British rule. However, “Real Time” also shows how Indian society maintained many features introduced by the British, from the social clubs Mr. Mitra frequents to the intense class hierarchies that defined social interactions and personal relationships. 

Amit Chaudhuri is one of many contemporary Indian authors using scenes of daily life to address the rapid social, economic, and political changes the country experienced after gaining independence from Great Britain in 1947. In her short story collection Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri, a British-American author of Indian descent, writes about flawed, prosaic characters who experience major emotional revelations while going about their daily routines; her novel The Lowland chronicles political strife in Kolkata, Chaudhuri’s birthplace and a city that features in much of his work. Like Chaudhuri, writer and activist Arundhati Roy is concerned with questions of class in Indian society, exploring this issue most notably in her novel The God of Small Things, in which a young mother’s affair with a man from a lower caste throws her entire family into disarray. Chaudhuri shares some thematic concerns with writers from other former British colonies such as V.S. Naipaul, whose novel A House for Mr. Biswas details a Trinidadian man’s efforts to navigate a colonial society that continually disadvantages him. Chaudhuri has described himself as being influenced by works of modernism, a literary movement that responded to the upheavals of the early 20th century by breaking with traditional literary styles and prioritizing the representation of  consciousness and thought over plot. Chaudhuri wrote his dissertation on the British modernist writer D.H. Lawrence and has cited his novel Sons and Lovers as an influence on his personal writing.