Chandra, Vikram

(Indian, 1961– )

Born in Bombay, Vikram Chandra was educated in California and studied film before turning to fiction. His debut novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995), was immediately acclaimed for its ambitious scale and inventive style. Set partly in nineteenth-century India among legendary poets and warriors, the larger-than-life Indian stories are interwoven with an account of a group of modern Indian characters driving across the American continent. Echoing the form of ‘stories within stories’ of traditional Hindu poetic dramas (like the Mahabharata), Red Earth and Pouring Rain is a vivid account of the ways in which the past shapes the present. Love and Longing in Bombay (1997) is made up of five intricately linked stories set in present-day Bombay, and offers a revealing portrait of a rapidly changing city.

Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy  WB