Mumbai’s drama, violence feeds fiction: Vikram Chandra (Interview)

NEW DELHI - Mumbai, the land of the underworld and pyschedelic Bollywood dreams, is an incredibly fertile source of violence and drama for a fiction writer, says US-based Vikram Chandra, known for works like “Love and Longing in Mumbai” and “Red Earth and Pouring Rain”.

The 49-year-old writer, clad in casual shirt sleeves, appeared relaxed on the green lawns of Diggi Palace - the venue of the Jaipur Literature Festival - as he spoke about the inspirations that have driven him to write.

“Every person I meet in Mumbai - whether he is the paanwala (betel-leaf shop owner), friend, cop or a crime reporter - has at least four stories to tell. There are a million stories in this naked city, like disparities of incomes and resources, exploitation and suffering,” Chandra, who teaches creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley, told IANS in an interview.

“One can use the urban landscape and real geographies as a metaphor for the human condition today. The city pushes at you and therefore you want to respond to it - and I do it through my books,” Chandra said.

He also spoke about his novel “Sacred Games” - a 900-page racy account of the underworld and the streets of Mumbai through the life of inspector Sartaj Singh, who first appeared in Chandra’s second novel, “Love and Longing in Mumbai” - a collection of short stories about Mumbai published in 1997.

” ‘Sacred Games’ is about friendship, betrayal and terrible violence. It is inspired by the best of Victorian fiction, mystery novels, Bollywood movies and first-hand research,” Chandra said.

The writer is working on a new novel. “I can’t say what it will turn out to be, but my new book is set both in India and overseas. It is different from all my other books. While ‘Love and Longing…’ was a collection of short stories on individual characters in Mumbai, ‘Sacred Games’ is a conventional novel. I am not sure about the format of my new book,” Chandra said.

The writer says it will take him “at least two years to carry forward” the 250-odd pages that he has written.

The novelist hails from a family of Bollywood scriptwriters and filmmakers. His mother Kamna Chandra, a play and script writer, has written movies like “Prem Rog” and “1942: A Love Story”. His sister is filmmaker Tanuja Chandra.

Living on the periphery of Bollywood has layered Chandra’s works of fiction.

“Critics feel Bollywood is part of the texture of ‘Sacred Games’ giving it a popular mythological chimera. But the book was prompted by a crime on my street during the 1980s. My father and I were returning home one afternoon - when we heard guns being fired barely four blocks away. I realized later that gangster Mahindra aka Maya Dolas had been gunned down at the Lokhandwala Complex.

“It was 1991. I met a senior policeman - a friend - and started talking to a crime reporter friend of mine. I spoke to historians and sociologists and realised that crime was inseparable from politics. And if you talked of politics, you ended up talking about religion,” Chandra said.

Explaining his outlook on crime as a global phenomenon, Chandra said, “You can’t understand a policeman in Mumbai unless you meet one in Delhi. Events, which happen thousands of miles away, have an impact worldwide.

“The consequences of partition are still echoing - it can be used as a metaphor. The realisations were so profound that I soon found myself writing a book about the whole web - money, crime, religion and politics.”

Is there any other city that Chandra finds as “gut-wrenching” as Mumbai?

“It is hard to come up with another one. But, certainly, New York has a certain sense of drama and ferment of imagination. Everyone wants to go to the Big Apple, make it big and pay the price of being there, like in Bombay,” the novelist said.

Chandra, an avid reader, has just completed reading Kate Summerscale’s non-fiction murder story, “Suspicions of Mr Whichar” and Sanskrit scholar Sheldon Pollock’s “The Language of Gods in the World of Men”.

“And I am revisiting Orhan Pamuk’s ‘My Name is Red’ to understand at a deeper level how he engages with the traditional and supposedly modern,” Chandra said.

(Madhusree Chatterjee can be contacted at madhu.c@ians.in)