Teatime Revisited: An Interview with Shona Patel

Abstract: This article presents an interview with an emerging postcolonial author, Shona Patel, about her debut novel, Teatime for the Firefly , to understand her distinct perspective on the remote tea plantations of Assam. The interview addresses Patel's writing strategies for historical fiction, the imperial plantation history of India, and the sources of her novel. Through Patel's discourses on tea, this article demonstrates how the rhetoric of "tea time"—often linked with imperial aesthetics and leisure—has been challenged, redefined, or recontextualised in contemporary postcolonial narratives, highlighting ideological shifts in representing the plantation economy. This article enhances our understanding of how diasporic literature contributes to decolonising narratives of South Asian plantation history.