Vikram Chandra is an acclaimed South Asian writer who divides his time
between Mumbai/Bombay and Berkeley, California, and is married to
writer Melanie Abrams with one child. Born in Delhi in 1961,
Chandra was educated at Mayo College, Rajasthan, and St. Xavier's College,
Mumbai, before moving to California for undergraduate studies in English and
creative writing. His mother is an author of Hindi films and plays, and both his
sisters are also involved in Indian cinema, one as a film director and writer, the other
as a critic. As such, while Chandra is best-known for his literary fiction, it comes
as no surprise that he has also followed in his artistic family's footsteps by
co-writing the script for the Bollywood film, Mission
Kashmir (2000).
Chandra's first novel, Red Earth and Pouring
Rain (1995), was awarded the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book and its epic, fantastical
structure owes a debt to Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), while the plot is grounded on historical research into the life of James "Sikander" Skinner,
a nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian soldier. His short story collection, Love and Longing in Bombay (1997), comprises five stories named after Hindu
philosophical concepts: a comedy of manners ("Shakti"), a ghost story ("Dharma"), a
story set in the world of computing ("Artha"), a piece of romantic fiction
("Shanti") and the detective story, "Kama." This last long short story, as I have
argued elsewhere (see Chambers), may be viewed as an example of postcolonial
crime fiction, specifically the hard-boiled or noir subgenre, in the light of its depiction of the "mean streets" of Bombay (see Chandler, 1968, 533) and its
spare, wisecracking style. As with other postcolonial writers of detective
fiction, in this story Chandra challenges good/evil binary assumptions and tacit complicity
with the (neo-) colonial law enforcement apparatus that exist in mainstream
exemplars of the genre, while at the same time suggesting shared philosophical
concerns with those of another subgenre, termed "metaphysical detective fiction"
(Merivale and Sweeney,1999, 1). "Kama's" protagonist, the marginalized Sikh
policeman, Inspector Sartaj Singh, is also a central character in
Chandra's latest novel, Sacred Games (2006), signalling Chandra's ongoing interest in what he has
termed the "gangster-and-policemen book" (Alexandru, 2005, 14). |
