Vikram Chandra’s celebrated fiction, which explores the tumultuous overlaps between tradition and popular culture in both Indian and Western civilization, has been called “magnificent” by the Los Angeles Times and “absolutely incredible” by UC Berkeley News. Chandra’s approach owes much to the literature of his native India, in which every story contains the seeds of other stories. This multilayered method results in deeply satisfying books that pay homage not only to India’s rich literary tradition but also to the nineteenth-century novelists to whom Chandra has been compared: Dickens, Trollope, and Thackeray.
Chandra’s bestselling novel, Sacred Games, exploded onto the scene in 2006 following an intense bidding war between Indian, American, and British publishers. Sacred Games centers on Sartaj Singh, a divorced Sikh police inspector trudging into an unpromising middle age, and Ganesh Gaitonde, a flashy mobster whom Publishers Weekly called “the most compelling character in crime fiction since Don Corleone offered a deal that couldn’t be refused.” An impeccably researched 900-page epic, Sacred Games has been called “a gritty expose of Mumbai’s underworld and the police corruption and world events that keep it flourishing” by Publishers Weekly. Chandra spent seven years researching the novel, even going so far as to meet with a hit man in a Mumbai cafe. The result is a novel that Kirkus Reviews praised as “elegant and irresistible.” Netflix has announced plans to adapt the book into an original series, which will be shot on location in India.
Red Earth and Pouring Rain, Chandra’s 1995 debut novel, won the David Higham Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. Inspired by the memoirs of a legendary half-British, half-Indian cavalry officer of the nineteenth century, Red Earth and Pouring Rain exemplifies the story-within-a-story structure for which Chandra is so well-known. Red Earth and Pouring Rain has been called “incandescent, evocative, breathtaking” by the Los Angeles Times, “a dazzling first novel” by the London Times, “magnificent” by The Guardian, and “a truly great novel” by Shield’s Gazette.
In 1997, Chandra published a collection of interconnected short stories called Love and Longing in Bombay. The collection beat out front-runner The God of Small Things to win the Eurasia Region Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Chandra himself has called Love and Longing in Bombay “a meditation about form.” The collection contains a ghost story, a detective story, and a drawing-room war story, all composed with Chandra’s characteristic eloquence and apparent ease. Love and Longing in Bombay has been called “exceptional” by The Spectator, “vivid” by The Sunday Times, and “utterly alive” by The Guardian.
For Chandra, the shifting boundaries between stories, modes, and global contexts are familiar territory. Born in Mumbai, he was raised by a highly successful executive father and a screenwriter mother noted for her contributions to Indian cinema. Chandra graduated from Pomona College in California with a BA in English and a concentration in creative writing. He attended film school at Columbia University, but dropped out to write Red Earth and Pouring Rain. He later earned an MFA in creative writing at the University of Houston. In addition to his three works of fiction, Chandra co-wrote the screenplay for an Indian feature film, Mission Kashmir, released in 2000.
Chandra’s latest is the genre-defying Geek Sublime. A computer programmer for almost as long as he has been a novelist, Chandra searches for the connections between the worlds of art and technology in his eye-opening nonfiction debut. Programmers are obsessed with elegance and style, just as writers are, but do the words mean the same thing to both? Chandra’s idiosyncratic history of coding explores such varied topics as the male machismo of geeks, Silicon Valley’s creative “Indian Mafia,” and the algorithmic nature of Sanskrit. Part technology story and part memoir, Geek Sublime is a book of sweeping ideas. Chandra’s interest in programming has moved from the theoretical to the practical, as he recently cofounded a software startup called Granthika.
In keeping with his transnational storytelling, Chandra divides his time between California, where he teaches at UC Berkeley, and Mumbai. He is the recipient of the 2015 Guggenheim fellowship in fiction.
For more information on Vikram Chandra, please visit www.vikramchandra.com.
