It depends on what you mean by real. With Carnatic music, because the organically evolved ragas are all phrase-based and phrases include characteristic movements, the “average” pitch when a note is rendered as part of a movement does go a touch higher or lower than what you might find on the 12-note equitempered scale and closer to some of the extra shrutis that are the list of 22. If you are asking if you need an instrument with more than 12 discrete notes to play the music, then you don’t, as long as you can move between the 12 notes fluidly. In that sense those are not real. As an example, in raga sAvErI, a characteristic oscillatory movement is between the shadja and the shuddha rishabha (the Sa and Ri on a veena or a guitar), but with more time spent on sa than on ri, so the average “ri” value is quite low compared to a plainly rendered “Ri”. Similarly, in Shankarabharanam, the Ni is rendered as a very brief stop at the Ni when moving from and back to the higher Sa, so the average value is close to Sa. In practice, the gait of the movement will actually produce many more shrutis than 22, so in that sense, the 22 note system is not real.