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This interview with Vikram Chandra was conducted by Kevin Patrick Mahoney in the Summer of 1998. Vikram Chandra is the author of “Red Earth and Pouring Rain”, which won the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Novel, and of the short story collection, “Love and Longing in Bombay”.
KPM: How did you first become a writer? Were you one of
those people who have always wanted to be a writer for as long as they
remember?
VIKRAM CHANDRA: I've told stories for as long as I can
remember. I first published in a school magazine when I was eleven. But growing
up in India in the sixties and seventies, it was impossible to imagine oneself
as a "writer." So, even thought I kept writing through college, it
was still very hard to proclaim that I was a "writer." I'd always been
passionately interested in movies, and I thought it would be possible to make a
living in the film industry. So I went to film school at Columbia University in
New York. In the library there, I chanced upon the translated biography of
James "Sikander" Skinner, a half-Indian, half-British soldier from
the early nineteenth century. I grew obsessed with his life, and realized that
I had to write a novel, there was no running away from it any more. So then I
dropped out of film school, started work on the book, and supported myself by
going through a couple of American writing programs and working as a computer
programmer and consultant. It took six years to get the book done, and it
became "Red Earth and Pouring Rain."
KPM: I called this magazine GENRE so that it could be all-inclusive when
it comes to writing (we’ve now changed our name to Authortrek – ed). 'Love and
Longing' mixes a whole variety of genres, from a ghost story to love stories.
How important is genre to you?
VIKRAM CHANDRA: When I finished with "Red
Earth," I felt sort of exhausted from the long haul. I wanted to try a
shorter form, and try out new muscles. "Love and Longing" started
from my love of ghost stories, and from hearing ghost stories told about empty
mansions in Bombay. I thought I'd try and do a ghost story, to feel out the
contours of that very ancient and venerable form, and to push at its edges, and
interrogate it. When I finished, I asked myself what other kind of story I
liked. And so then, I decided I'd do a story of drawing-room warfare. The book
then became a sort of meditation on form; there is also a detective story, and
a love story, and a story about work and money. I hope each of the stories
works as an affectionate caressing of the contours of the received form, but I
hope none of them offer the expected and comforting solutions that have become
the conventions of the respective genres. In the detective story, for instance,
I very particularly didn't want to follow the seductive convention of a
solution, of the world put right by the detective, of complete knowledge of the
nature of the crime. At the end of my story, the detective has no solution,
maybe just a kind of new knowledge of his own ignorance. "'I understand,'
Sartaj said, understanding nothing." The different genres worked for me as
different darshanas, or visions of the world; and by allowing me to amplify
varying rasas, or emotions, they permitted me to move toward a various and
many-layered apprehension of the city of Bombay and--as the last three words of
the book put it--"only life itself."
KPM: There's an unwritten law in bookselling that the short story is dead,
mainly because it does not sell well. What are your reasons for writing in this
form?
VIKRAM CHANDRA: Oh, I wasn't thinking very much about
the commercial aspects of the form, one way or the other, when I started. I
just wanted to try out the form again, after a very long novel.
KPM: In my first novel, I employed a ghost as an
unreliable omniscient narrator. What were your reasons for including
Subramaniam as a linking character?
VIKRAM CHANDRA: "Red Earth" makes much of
narrators, and stories as told and heard objects. This comes from a very old
Indian story-telling tradition, in which there can be narrators within
narratives, down to many many levels. This is how the "Mahabharata"
and the "Ramayana," the central Indian epics, are constructed.
Subramaniam is a link to that old tradition, and allows me, as an author, to
find and construct a certain distance from the tales he tells.
KPM: In 'Love and Longing', oral story telling takes a
large role. Is there still a vibrant oral culture in India?
VIKRAM CHANDRA: Yes, there still is; a large part
of the population still doesn't read or write, and depends on oral transmission
of traditions and culture. But the oral tradition is being eroded, of course,
by new media, by television especially. Which is not to say that the new
electronic culture is not influenced by the old traditions; there is a sort of
conversation that happens between old and new.
KPM: You've lived much of your recent life in Washington DC, but still return
regularly to Bombay. Do you feel the need to keep some kind of distance from
your homeland?
VIKRAM CHANDRA: My most urgent reason for being in DC is
dollars. I make a living in the States by teaching at a university, which is a
setup that allows me a lot of time to write and read, and I enjoy the work and
my colleagues. But yes, the opportunity to go away from the familiar, to
subject oneself to newness, to travel, is irresistible to me, as it has been to
artists from all cultures. The distance is useful, yes; I think it makes it
easier to take the flood of physical and emotional stimuli that exist in the
landscape that I want to write about, and to subsume these into an imaginative
landscape. Again, I think artists of all sorts have done this, and will
continue to do so.
KPM: I was born and brought up in Slough, a place which
many people despise, even those who live here. Maybe I'm just a contrary
person, but I can't help loving it. What is it which brings you back to Bombay
time after time?
VIKRAM CHANDRA: Bombay is an amazing place. It's huge and
colourful and contradictory; it has an enormous energy, a vitality that is
peculiar to this city itself. It is a brutal place to live in, and yet it is
capable of tenderness and beauty. It is a microcosm of the country, and yet
apart from it. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Mumbaiite, and couldn't imagine being
away from it for very long.
KPM: The grittiness of your tales surprised me. I suppose
I was expecting magic realism in the vein of Rushdie. It often amuses me how
authors are marketed like cars, with 'The New Grisham!" immediately
applied to anyone who writes a legal thriller. Who do you see as your typical
reader, and who is your ideal reader?
VIKRAM CHANDRA: I really don't have any idea of who my
typical reader is. But, like Subramaniam, I have an audience that I tell my
stories to. This audiences consists of my sisters, my mother, and a couple of
friends; they read my pages soon after I write them, and I'm very interested in
their reactions. It's hard for me to imagine a larger audience, to hold that
anonymous mass in my head. In "Red Earth," the storytellers tell the
stories to a small family group inside a house; then the pages are read to the
larger audience that gathers on the maidan or ground outside the house. This
outside audience grows in size, and is unknowable. "[The story] ceased to
be yours the minute you wrote it," Sanjay the monkey-narrator tells another
storyteller. One doesn't have control of the story, once you let it loose in
the world.
KPM: My family has never really read anything that I've
written. I suppose I don't really want them to! But it would be nice if they
did. How did your family react to your becoming a writer?
VIKRAM CHANDRA: I come from a family of writers. My
mother is a screenwriter who has also written for radio and television. My
sister Tanuja is a screenwriter and director who has just released a Hindi
film, "Dushman," co-written and directed by her. My other sister,
Anupama, is a film critic and journalist who writes for "India
Today." My father is a businessman, for which the rest of us are eternally
grateful--he supported us during the lean years. They're all very happy, of course,
with my books.
KPM: Most short stories have one-off characters, but you
don't seem to dispense with all your characters when the story ends. I'm
thinking here mainly of Sartaj Singh who features in 'Kama' and maybe your new
novel.
What are your reasons for this use of continuity?
VIKRAM CHANDRA: Sartaj Singh was just hard for me to let
go of. I like him tremendously, and I felt like we had unfinished business, and
so, yes, he's coming back for another novel. Where this continuing interaction
will take him or me, I'm not sure yet.
KPM: It's very easy to do research on you via the
Internet. How do you, as a computer technician yourself, regard the development
of writing in the future, along information technology street?
VIKRAM CHANDRA: I think the reports of the death of the
novel are greatly exaggerated. And are propagated mainly by people who don't
seem to have considered very thoughtfully the recent history of displaced
technologies. When television came along, radio didn't die or disappear, it
just was moved aside from the central position accorded to it. That is, in the
drawing room, television now occupied that shrine-like centrality, but this
didn't mean that radio vanished. It still--half a century later--survives,
thrives, makes money for a lot of people. The novel is a technology that is
fairly new, of recent invention. Yes, in the age of television and the Net, the
novel will never again attain that central position of cultural authority and
importance that it had in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, when it taught
us to narrate our lives according to certain principles, to interpret the world
in a particular way. But this doesn't mean it's dead. It's still very much
alive, and will continue to remain so.
Vikram Chandra
vchandra@mindspring.com
|
Visit
our Vikram
Chandra page, for Vikram Chandra biography, Vikram Chandra bibliography, Vikram
Chandra essays, and other Vikram Chandra interviews |
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