Time After Time

Chirodeep Chaudhuri’s three-decade long series on Mumbai's public clocks is more than a collection of glorious vintage timepieces.

- Anindita Ghose

Time does not stand still in Chirodeep Chaudhuri’s long-running photo series on Mumbai's public clocks. The photographs present the illusion of moving back and forth in time, and serve as portals to study an ever-changing city.

The former editor of photography for international titles has documented over 110 public clocks in Mumbai over three decades. When he first exhibited the series at Mumbai’s David Sassoon Library as part of the Kala Ghoda Festival in 1999, there were 24. At the last outing of this documentation at Mumbai’s Project 88 in 2021, there were more than 80. Today, as Chaudhuri seeks to consolidate them into a gargantuan photo book, he’s browsing through an archive of 110. Each photo carries with it a story; the oldest clock Chaudhuri has documented is a 16th-century Portuguese-era sundial inside the naval dockyard in Colaba.