Vikram
Chandra
was born in New Delhi in 1961. He studied at the boarding school Mayo College
in Rajasthan, and then briefly attended St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai. He then
attended Pomona College, near LA in the US, and graduated with a magna cum
laude BA in English, although the main focus of his course was creative
writing. As he told me in an interview in 1998, he found it very difficult
imagining himself as a writer growing up in the India of the 60s and 70s.
Thinking that it would be easier to make a living in the film industry, he
attended the Film School at Columbia University, New York. Given that his
mother, Kamna Chandra, had written the scripts of several Hindi films, this was
perhaps not unreasonable. The screen trade runs in the family, as one sister
Tanuja Chandra, is a director and screenwriter, and the other sister, Anupama
Chopra, is a film critic. However, Vikram Chandra found a book in the Columbria
library that made him abandon film school. It was the autobiography of Colonel
James “Sikander” Skinner, a famous nineteenth century soldier, who had an
Indian mother and a British father. This was the inspiration for Vikram
Chandra’s epic novel, “Red Earth
and Pouring Rain”.
The novel took several years to write, during which Vikram Chandra attended creative courses at John Hopkins University (for which he was awarded an MA), and the University of Houston (where he was awarded an MFA). During this time, Vikram worked as a teacher of writing and literature, and as a computer consultant. “Red Earth and Pouring Rain” was published in 1995. The novel was critically acclaimed, winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book and the David Higham Prize for Fiction. Vikram followed this up with a collection of short stories in 1997, called “Love and Longing in Bombay”. One of the stories, “Dharma”, was awarded the Discovery Prize by the “Paris Review”. Another of the stories, “Kama”, featured a policeman called Sartaj Singh. When I interviewed Vikram Chandra in 1998, he was thinking about utilising Sartaj Singh in his next novel, saying “Where this continuing interaction will take him or me, I'm not sure yet.” Well, 7 years later, we have some more idea, as Vikram Chandra’s next novel, “Sacred Games”, was recently bought by HarperCollins for more than $1m, and that was for the North American rights alone. Admittedly, there was the slight interruption of Vikram Chandra co-writing the screenplay for the Indian film “Mission Kashmir” (released in 2000), but 7 years is a long time to wait. According to the “Mumbai Mirror”, the book deals with “an underworld don, a plot to assassinate a prominent political leader and a cop's battle with the system.” We are at Authortrek.com are sure that it will be a success. Vikram Chandra divides his time between California and Mumbai. He teaches creative at the University of California, Berkeley.
Vikram Chandra – our interview with the author
Million Dollar Baby – Vikram Chandra talks about his forthcoming novel
“No ustad can hand you the keys to the kingdom” – Tehmina Ahmed’s interview with Vikram Chandra from 2001
Rear View Mirror: India tugs at the heart of Indian American Writers – includes a contribution by Vikram Chandra
New Testament – this webpage contains the transcript of an interview with Vikram Chandra, although you have to scroll a long way down the page to find it
The Cult of Authenticity: India’s cultural commissars worship
“Indianness” instead of art – a brilliant Vikram Chandra essay published in
“The Boston Review”. Amongst many other things, it gives you a glimpse of the
research processes that Vikram Chandra has used for his next eagerly-awaited
novel
Bookslut – their
interview with Vikram Chandra
About.com
– Ginny Wiehardt’s interview with Vikram Chandra
Jabberwock:
A Conversation with Vikram Chandra
A moment with
Vikram Chandra, author – Vikram talks about “Sacred Games”
Sacred
Games – read Christopher Rollason’s review of Vikram Chandra’s latest novel
– pdf file
The Storyteller in the
Information Age: Vikram Chandra’s Entwining Narratives – Christopher
Rollason’s essay. Christopher Rollason has also written the paper (in pdf
format) Translating a
Transcultural Text – Problems and Strategies: on the Spanish Translation of
Vikram Chandra’s “Love and Longing in Bombay” and also ‘Don’t be afraid of what
you have to tell’: Review of Dora Sales Salvador’s “Bridges over the World:
Culture, translation, and literary form in the narratives of transculturation
of Jose Maria Arguedas and Vikram Chandra
Dora
Sales Salvador
is the author of a major study of Vikram Chandra in
Spanish:
Puentes
Sobre El Mundo: Cultura, Traduccion Y Forma Literaria En Las Narrativas De
Transculturacion De Jose Maria Arguedas Y Vikram Chandra,
which you can buy from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in these links respectively
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