Vikram Chandra is a writer from the subcontinent who is making waves in the field of publishing.  His first book, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for best first book and the David Higham prize for fiction. It was followed by  a collection of short stories, Love and Longing in Bombay, that was listed among the best books of the year by a number of prestigious publications.  It also won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for best book, Eurasia region.   He was a  co-writer for Mission Kashmir, the Indian feature film. 

            Chandra left Bombay for the United States as an undergraduate student. He has an MA from Johns Hopkins and an MFA from the university of Houston. Chandra currently commutes betwen Bombay and Washington DC, where he teaches a course in creative writing.

 

            Q:  You live abroad, but the stories in Love and Longing  are firmly rooted in India, almost as if you had never left home. You don’t comment on the immigrant experience.

            A:  In my first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, there is one major narrative thread that moves through the contemporary United States.  The other major narrative deals with the British in India.  So the whole book is about various kinds of journeys, and people in alien environments that somehow become their own.  But yes, Love and Longing in Bombay  is set in the city, mostly.  The novel I’m currently working on also moves mainly through the subcontinent, although questions of home and emigration do play a part.  I’m sure at some point in the future I’ll return to the landscapes of North America.

            Q:  How far can writing be taught in a structured course? How do you teach and how did you learn to write?

            A:  You can’t teach talent, but you can teach craft.  That is, through rigorous discussions of published literature and each other’s work, you can bring students towards an awareness of the elements that are at play in literature, how a piece of fiction might work, and how it may fail.  It’s quite wonderful to see young people acquire a critical vocabulary and hone their own tastes, and then apply these skills to their own writing.  What you do in a workshop is provide a hospitable ground for discussion and experimentation.  The students bring their work in, everyone takes it home, reads it, and then reacts.  So you get a very close reading from a group of discriminating readers. 

            This doesn’t mean, of course, that the committee is always right; as an artist you have to learn to sometimes protect your work, your voice, against all reactions and protests.  So this too is part of your education.  In the subcontinent, we’ve had versions of this workshop idea for a long time, for instance with the tradition of the ustad, shagirds, and the mushaira.  Through this kind of apprenticeship, you are introduced to the realm of your craft.  Of course, it’s a complicated process.  No ustad can hand you the keys to the kingdom.  To find your voice you have to go on a long journey into yourself.  But it’s good to have company on the trek.

            I’ve been writing since I was very young.  As with many other writers, my earliest and very fruitful education was in my obsessive reading as a child.  I read voraciously, and widely, because it gave me so much pleasure and because my internal world was so enriched and enraptured by various kinds of fiction.  I was first published when I was eleven, in a school magazine, and that gave me my first taste of sharing a story with an audience.  I kept writing through school and college, and as an undergraduate in the United States, was able to get a BA in English Literature with a concentration in creative writing – this meant that my honours thesis was a novella.  When I had the idea for my first novel worked out, I enrolled at the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University for an MA in creative writing.  This provided not only a workshop environment within which I could work on my novel, but also monetary support.  I worked as a teaching assistant at the university, and was thus able to support myself in a minimal way.  After Johns Hopkins, I got an MFA, again in creative writing, from the University of Houston, where I was again a teaching assistant.  Through my time at these two schools, I was able to finish my first novel.

            Q:  Did you have a problem getting your first book published?

            A:  I must admit that for me it was quite straightforward.  When I was halfway through my first novel, my teacher, the writer Donald Barthelme, introduced me to his literary agency.  Meanwhile, David Davidar at Penguin/India had agreed to look at the book when it was finished.  So I wrote away, and when it was done I mailed it off to David and my agent, Eric Simonoff.  Within a few months, David had accepted it for subcontinental publication, and Eric had found me publishers in Europe and the US.  I was very very lucky.  It’s been much more complicated for friends of mine with first novels.  And this doesn’t say anything necessarily about the quality of the novels – much depends on finding an editor who understands what you are trying to do, who hears your voice.

            Q:  Which writers do you enjoy reading the most?

            A:  That varies a lot.  I read quite eclectically, and am usually reading two or three books at a time.  I just finished a wonderful first novel by Chris Adrian, Gob’s Grief  – it deals with the aftermath of the Civil War, about the tremendous suffering and the profound grief of the survivors.  Walt Whitman is a central character in this meditation on loss.  My favourite Indian novel in the recent past was Manju Kapoor’s Difficult Daughters, which is a love story set against the horrors of Partition.

            Q:  You strike a wonderful balance between suspense and humour.  Is this intentional?

            A:  Oh, yes.  Especially in Bombay, I think, people deal with the rigours of their lives with an irrepressible humour.  You find them laughing through the darkest situations, making jokes.  It’s quite humbling and inspiring.  I hope I caught some of it.

            Q:  Do you enjoy teaching?

A:  Working with students is quite an education for the teacher, I think.  They keep me on my toes, and test me, and make it hard for me to settle comfortably into my own opinions.  Every semester I run across some students who are tremendously talented, and serious about their writing.  It’s very vitalising for me.

             Q:  Do you write poetry?

     A:  No, I don’t.  I read it, and listen to it, but I don’t write it.  I think it’s an extraordinarily demanding craft, for the economy of the line, for the precision of language and effect that you have to practise.

              Q:  Why do you write?

     A:  It’s a compulsion, really.  To say that one is possessed by the muses is perhaps to romanticise, although the muses aren’t particularly pleasant creatures.  One could think of it as an itch that one has to scratch.  There’s been lots of speculation about the origins of that itch, some of it quite interesting.  But for the writer, the theories are finally academic.  You work, and that’s what matters.

            Q:  To what do you attribute the sudden spurt in published fiction, written in English by writers from the subcontinent? Perhaps not so sudden, but making more of a splash.

            A:  I think a lot of good work had been produced over the years, and finally the media and the world at large grew aware of this.  The increasing activity of publishers like Penguin, and a growth in the readership also played a part.

            Q:  What is your new book about?

            A:  One of the characters from Love and Longing, Sartaj Singh, appears again in this new novel.  The book moves through the world of organised crime and policemen.  I’m somewhere in the middle of it, and am not sure when it’ll be done.