VIKRAM CHANDRA

Born: July 23, 1961

Birthplace: New Delhi, India

Other literary forms

Vikram Chandra (VEE-krahm CHAHN-drah) is probably best known for his novels, though the short-story collection Love and Longing in Bombay gained him similar critical praise. Chandra is also a screenwriter, having penned the series City of Gold, which was produced in Mumbai, India, in 1996. His work also has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, The Village Voice, Time, and Boston Review, among others.

Achievements

After he was awarded several prizes for creative writing while an undergraduate in India, Vikram Chandra had his story “Shakti” published in The New Yorker in 1994, followed by the publication of “Dharma” in The Paris Review later that year; “Dharma” also was awarded a Discovery Prize. Chandra’s first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995), was awarded both the David Higham Prize in 1995 and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book in 1996. Chandra was awarded the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book of the Year (South Asia and Europe Region) for Love and Longing in Bombay in 1997. Chandra’s 2006 novel, Sacred Games, was awarded the Vodafone Crossword Book Award in India and was nominated for a National Book Award the same year in the United States.

Biography

Vikram Chandra was born to Kamna Kavshik Chandra, a prolific screenwriter, playwright, and author, and Navin Chandra, a businessman, in New Delhi, India, on July 23, 1961. After attending St. Xavier’s College in Bombay, Vikram Chandra moved to the United States to attend Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in English in 1984. Then Chandra moved to Baltimore, Maryland, to pursue an M.A. in creative writing at The Johns Hopkins University, which he completed in 1987. Early in his college career, Chandra supported himself by working in technology, founding the consulting firm Letters and Light, and teaching literature and writing. Chandra entered film school at Columbia University in New York, where he was influenced by the autobiography of Colonel James “Sikander” Skinner, a nineteenth century Anglo-Indian soldier, which led him to drop out of film school and pursue writing a novel that would eventually become Red Earth and Pouring Rain. Chandra believed he could finish his novel in a relatively short time and benefit from the environment of a university writing program, so he moved to Texas, enrolled in the University of Houston’s M.F.A. program, and worked as an adjunct professor. While in Houston, Chandra was awarded a writing grant from the Cultural Arts Council of Houston, and he had the good fortune to work with the respected writer Donald Barthelme. Although Red Earth and Pouring Rain was not yet complete when Chandra finished his M.F.A. in 1992, two of his short stories produced during that time, “Dharma” and “Shakti,” were both published. Chandra then moved to Washington, D.C., and worked as a visiting writer at George Washington University. Red Earth and Pouring Rain was published shortly thereafter in 1995, and the book was a critical and popular success. Chandra continued to maintain residences in both the United States and India, dividing his time between the two. In the years following publication of Red Earth and Pouring Rain, Chandra published stories and integrated them into the acclaimed collection Love and Longing in Bombay in 1997. Chandra secured a large advance for his next novel, Sacred Games. Chandra and his wife, novelist Melanie Abrams, divide their time between Berkeley, California, where Chandra has taught creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley, and Mumbai, India, where his family still lives. He has two younger sisters, Tanuja Chandra, a successful director and screenwriter, and Anupama Chopra, a noted author and film critic who works for India’s NDTV and the newsmagazine India Today.

Analysis

Vikram Chandra’s fiction is often categorized by critics and scholars as both postmodern and postcolonial, terms that often go hand-in-hand. The features of Chandra’s text that could easily be labeled postmodern include his many intertextual references, the exploration of binary oppositions through his characters, and his preference for metafiction, or, as it is often utilized in Chandra’s work, simply stories within stories. Metafiction is central in Chandra’s first novel and in Love and Longing in Bombay. Red Earth and Pouring Rain is narrated by a monkey with a typewriter, who is the reincarnation of a fictional eighteenth century poet named Sanjay, which provides several layers of storytelling. In Love and Longing in Bombay, the narrator is an unnamed young Indian man who hears the other five stories from an old man, named Subramaniam, the narrator meets in a bar; in some of those stories are other stories within stories as well. Another hallmark of postmodern fiction that Chandra frequently employs is intertextuality, the references limited not only to text but also to the Bollywood sensibilities of Indian cinema, which some critics argue is a major influence in Sacred Games (2006) and which play a part in Love and Longing in Bombay, especially the genres of ghost story, mystery, and detective story. In addition to the different genres present in Love and Longing in Bombay, the yarns Subramaniam spins to the bar patrons—essentially fables, though with modern lessons—are reminiscent of the stories Scheherazade tells in Alf layla wa-layla (fifteenth century; The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, 1706-1708), the famous collection of ancient East Indian folktales. These postmodern features in Chandra’s fiction flow from an impulse to marry old storytelling traditions to new, specifically, an impulse to reconcile traditional stories, values, and meanings with the stories of a newer culture, one imposed upon or superseding the existing culture. This attempt at making meaning is a central feature of what critics refer to as postcolonial fiction. Chandra is interested in characters who exist in two worlds, between opposing points on a continuum. Often, the characters have difficulty knowing who they are, between the Eastern influences of India and the Western influences of their British colonizers. Chandra is interested in the conflict characters feel between the Old India, the spiritual, mystical India of previous centuries, and the New India, built on commerce, entertainment, and loose morals. Chandra’s characters are often of the New India and come to value the memory and wisdom of the Old India. Other binary oppositions are explored as well, which grow naturally from the Old/New India conflict: The New India values material wealth, has only perfunctory use for religion, relies heavily on logic and reason, is the playground of the young, changes and adapts quickly, and is vital and growing. Conversely, the Old India is poor and sees no use for material riches, still holds tradition sacred, puts value in faith, is deeply religious, is slow to change, and is ultimately becoming extinct. In spite of the rather complex structure and aims of his novels and short stories, and in spite of the densely woven references and cultural allusions, Chandra creates work that is humorous, warm, and accessible, attributes that critics and general readers alike have praised. At his core, Chandra is a storyteller, and he does not let literary conceits supersede a good story or his characters’ searches for elusive human truths.

Love and Longing in Bombay

The collection Love and Longing in Bombay collects five stories, “Dharma,” “Shakti,” “Kama,” “Artha,” and “Shanti,” into one volume. Three of the four stories are named for Hindu purusarthas, which in traditional Hinduism are the goals or aims of human existence. “Dharma” means righteousness, “Kama” means pleasure, and “Artha” means wealth. The fourth purusartha, which Chandra omits, is “Moksa,” which translates to freedom. Chandra replaces freedom with “Shakti” and “Shanti,” which represent “strength” and “peace,” respectively. These are perhaps appropriate substitutions, given Chandra’s stories; according to Chandra, in these stories there is no true freedom, although that fact can be mitigated by inner strength and peace. The reference to classical Hinduism is an important one. India is a predominantly Hindu country, and modern Hinduism is as open to interpretation as any ancient religion in the world and as ripe with competing interpretations. Each of the stories in Love and Longing in Bombay corresponds to its namesake, seeking to answer the question of how Indian men and women can live in modern Bombay and reconcile the oppositions of the Old India and the New India in terms of seeking righteousness, pleasure, wealth, strength, and peace. Embodying these challenging questions is the first-person narrator of Love and Longing in Bombay, a lonely young man, who is very much enmeshed in the New India as a software designer in a large office. The narrator meets an old retiree at a bar, an ex-Ministry of Defense joint secretary named Subramaniam, who spins the long tales that make up Love and Longing in Bombay. Each chapter begins with a brief scene at the bar, during which the narrator and the other men talk about some local issue, and Subramaniam questions their “modern” views before showing them, through his fables, the wisdom of older, traditional values. Thus, Love and Longing in Bombay is a frame tale, like Chandra’s novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain and The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.

“Kama”

The third and longest story in Love and Longing in Bombay is the novella “Kama,” the style, scope, and themes of which are broadly representative of the others in the collection. “Kama” opens with a short introduction, in which the young narrator socializes with Subramaniam and the other men in a bar. The narrator in this case describes himself as “heartbroken,” after a happy relationship unexpectedly ends. As he silently drinks, he overhears the locals talking about a recent unsolved murder and wants to hear more. One of the men posits that the murder was probably over something “simple and stupid,” such as property, money, or politics, and Subramaniam disagrees, suggesting that it was perhaps instead about “the most complicated thing of all.” This piques the narrator’s curiosity, and he listens as Subramaniam spins another tale.

“Kama” is a detective story, and its protagonist is detective Sartaj Singh, a Sikh living and working in Bombay, himself heartbroken over the recent divorce filed against him by his wife, Megha. Sartaj thinks often of Megha and has been procrastinating about filing the divorce papers. Sartaj is working to solve the murder of Chetanbhai Ghanhyam Patel, whose body has been found in a ditch in the city. Sartaj has a lead in the case based on Patel’s Rolex, found on a transient named Shanker Ghorpade. He is a reasonable suspect, but it soon becomes clear that there is much more to the case than simple robbery and murder. Sartaj visits Patel’s house, where his teenage son, Kshitij, and the son’s mother, Asha, live. Kshitij accompanies Sartaj to the morgue, where he identifies his father’s body. Ghorpade’s conviction should proceed without a great deal of fuss, but, in spite of this, Sartaj uncovers several clues that dissuade him from an open-and-shut case. The clues lead Sartaj to suspect the involvement of Kshitij or Asha in Patel’s murder, though Sartaj’s suspicions are never spoken explicitly. Sartaj discovers that Chetanbhai and his wife habitually have extramarital encounters together in a hotel outside the city, though the exact nature of these encounters and who is involved (men, women, or both) are unclear. Sartaj eventually learns from Asha that this arrangement is consensual to everyone involved, knowledge that confounds his assumptions. Sartaj additionally discovers that Kshitij is involved in a conservative youth movement and belongs to a gang called the Rakshaks, whose value system abhors such an antitraditional view of marriage, a view which Kshitij seems to share. Under questioning and even minor torture, however, Kshitij will not reveal any personal involvement in the murder. During Sartaj’s investigation, Ghorpade dies while being held in prison, and thus Sartaj decides to close the case, leaving it essentially unsolved.

“Kama” refers to pleasure or desire, specifically romantic or sexual, and the novella contains many explorations of the subject, which is a central one to Love and Longing in Bombay as a whole, as the title would suggest. Sartaj himself struggles with desire for his estranged wife, and late in the story he even gives in to a final tryst with her, though on some level he knows it will only make the separation more painful. In spite of that, their final sexual act enables him finally to sign the divorce papers and move on at the end of the story. The idea of Kama and its place within a marriage is also put into question when the Patels’ extramarital sex life is revealed. Such sexual behavior is controversial in the modern culture of Bombay, much as it is in modern America. Sartaj exemplifies Chandra’s typical characters in that he is caught between the opposing poles of a binary opposition: in this case the promiscuity and relative sexual freedom of Westernized India versus the traditional Indian ideal that sexual relations are sacred and should take place only in marriage. Though Sartaj is scandalized by the Patels’ actions, he is curious and intrigued to know more and not entirely for professional reasons. His in-between state is further illustrated when he thinks back to his adolescence, when he would nervously fantasize about sex but be afraid to “go all the way” with his girlfriend, in contrast to his former brother-in-law, Rahul, who as a young man had so much sex with so many different girls that he is already bored with it. Based on Sartaj’s generally more traditional views of sex, he at first believes Asha could only have been coerced into the extramarital acts she and her husband take part in, but he later discovers she was complicit. The Patels’ expression of desire and the fact that they allowed such a taboo practice into their lives together have profound effects on Sartaj: that their lives could look so normal on the outside yet conceal a vastly different private life casts a light on his defunct relationship and gives him strength. Through his investigation into these other lives, and through searching for explanations and finding none, he moves toward becoming comfortable in his own uncertainty and accepts some of the inexplicable events in his own life.

Bibliography

Agarwal, Ramlal. “Review of Love and Longing in Bombay by Vikram Chandra.” World Literature Today 72, no. 1 (Winter, 1998): 206-207. This mixed review discusses the function of the narrator and views the titles as “ironic,” ultimately concluding that the convoluted plots detract from the overall experience of the stories.

Oindrila, Mukherjee. “‘Ruthless Patience’: A Conversation with Vikram Chandra.” Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts (Summer/Fall, 2008): 271-277. Chandra discusses his biography, themes, and creative process in this informative interview.

Shukla, Sheobhusan, et al., eds. Entwining Narratives: Critical Explorations into Vikram Chandra’s Fiction. New Delhi: Sarup, 2010. This volume contains ten highly theoretical, scholarly essays on Chandra’s work as well as a detailed introduction and a bibliography.

Alan C. Haslam