Red Earth and Pouring Rain , livre ebook

Vikram Chandra
Red Earth and Pouring Rain

PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
. . . before
The Book of War and Ancestors
. . . now . . .
The Strange Passion of Benoit De Boigne
. . . now . . .
A Thin Kind of Happiness
. . . now . . .
George Thomas Goes Overboard
. . . now . . .
What Really Happened
. . . now . . .
Ram Mohan Ties a Knot, and Sikander is Born
The Book of Learning and Desolation
. . . now . . .
What We Learnt At School
. . . now . . .
Janvi Defends Her Honour
The Book of Blood and Journeys
. . . now . . .
What Really Happened
. . . now . . .
Sanjay Eats His Words
The Book of Revenge and Madness
. . . now . . .
Sex and the Judge
. . . now . . .
Sikander Learns the Art of War
The Book of the Return
. . . now . . .
What Really Happened
. . . now . . .
In London, A Battle Between Immortals
. . . now . . .
The Game of Cricket
After. . .
Acknowledgements
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
RED EARTH AND POURING RAIN
Vikram Chandra was born in 1961. He is the author of Love and Longing in Bombay , which was awarded the Commonwealth Prize for Best Book (Eurasia region), and also the Paris Review Discovery Prize for the story Dharma . His stories have appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, He divides his time between Mumbai and Washington, DC, where he teaches at George Washington University. He can be reached by e-mail at vchandra@mindspring.com.
[An] ambitious and extraordinary first novel . . . Red Earth and Pouring Rain is above all a novel about the telling of stories. The effect is rich, heady, many-layered and deliberate . . . Though Chandra s stories are told, they are above all written-and written in an incandescent, evocative, breathtaking style that piles clause upon clause, adjective upon adjective, image upon poetic image until the reader is irresistibly swept along in the flow . . . Red Earth and Pouring Rain is rich in its use of metaphor, but Chandra is no more easily typecast than his protagonists. His prose employs fabulist imagery, magical realism, political satire and the conventions of the Kerouac road novel . . . And there is myth-making of rare beauty and power . . . The result is a magnificent tour de force, one of the finest Indian novels of the decade . . . As Sanjay tells his story, it is broadcast to a growing throng outside Abhay s house, and is soon retold and translated and resold, with extrapolations and additions. There are whole new stories in here, Abhay protests. It s not even our story anymore. But Sanjay points out, It ceased to be yours the minute you wrote it. This insight informs every page of Chandra s splendid novel. The stories he has so vividly brought to life have ceased to be his. They are ours now, and in the exhilaration of discovering them, all of his readers have cause to be profoundly grateful.
-Shashi Tharoor, Los Angeles Times
Red Earth and Pouring Rain [is a] dazzling first novel . . . Its huge cast includes witches and heroic soldiers of fortune, porn-stars and boys begotten miraculously by the consumption of sticky buns. It has passages of epic grandeur and desolation worthy of Thomas Malory. It has naive magic, mannered conceits and lush fantasies, and plenty of psychologically realistic accounts of family relationships and love, informed by kindly shrewdness. It has jokes and grotesqueries and flights of silliness and it has a handful of episodes in which Chandra is imagining and writing with such originality and intensity as to be not merely drawing on myth but making it. This exuberant diversity is not just a case of the novelist displaying his creative muscles. His form matches his polemical intention. His villains and madmen, who include Alexander of Macedon, Jack the Ripper and the 19th-century Christian missionaries to India, have in common a hectic desire for purity, simplicity, oneness-in other words, for domination. Red Earth and Pouring Rain takes its title from an ancient Tamil poem celebrating the dissolution of differences in the erotic act. The novel-for all its careful substructure of recurring themes and chiming incidents-honours confusion, and it is itself a triumphant demonstration of the creativity of a morass . . . [Vikram Chandra] belongs . . . in a tradition of storytellers stretching back in the east to Scheherazade, and in the west to the poets of the medieval romances, a tradition in which the mundane and the fabulous, the bawdy and the sublime are all allowed room. Chandra is a worthy addition to that venerable line. His prose is elegant and various. His imagination is visionary. Above all, his poetic apprehension of history allows him to write on a grand scale, even when telling a monkey s tale.
-Lucy Hughes-Hallett, London Times
If Vikram Chandra never again put pen to paper he would still be guaranteed a place in literature s hall of fame with his first novel. The incredible power of his writing and imagination ensures that Red Earth and Pouring Rain rolls like a tidal wave from page to page . . . it is a truly great novel.
-Gareth Crickmer, Shield s Gazette
Chandra s short stories published in the New Yorker and Paris Review revealed an easy fluency with language and a scriptwriter s ambition with plot, so it should likewise be no surprise if Chandra s debut reaches for formal complexity and poetic beauty in the same two-fisted grasp. But none of that advance expectation makes the actual impact of this tour de force any less powerful. There seems to be little point in tagging any book a masterpiece at this point in history-since that concept implies the book s influence on a successive generation that doesn t read-but at the very least Red Earth and Pouring Rain does the language, and the novel, proud . . . Red Earth and Pouring Rain is worth a second leisurely read, and probably a good many more before a reader encounters any signs of depletion in the multifaceted text. If there s a major genre of American, Indian or British literature of which Chandra is unaware, you wouldn t know it from the dazzling array of styles he adopts here. Everything from gumshoe detective to epic poetics to colonial propaganda is taken out for a spin in Chandra s graceful, looping tale . . . The magical conflicts of Chandra s alternative Indian history pull readers along of their own dramatic force, and episodes set in Victorian England and modern-day America are made vivid with detail and imaginative plotting. As the novel stretches out, clashes and parallels between two narratives, and two cultures, resonate with a low, insistent hum . . . Red Earth and Pouring Rain encompasses dozens of tragedies, jostling alongside more dozens of love stories, battles, rivalries, comedies, partings and reconciliations. That a patterned fabric eventually emerges from the tangled threads is no small achievement in its own right. That the pattern is at the same time so wondrously pleasing to the eye makes Chandra s debut one of the most accomplished and rewarding novels of recent memory.
-Brad Tyer, Houston Chronicle
[Vikram Chandra] embraces the history of two centuries, three continents and the struggles which lie at the heart of all cultural growth and definition: a people s relationship with place, religion, language, and other peoples . . . Chandra tells stories. His virtuosity is rare, sustained and dazzling.
-Tom Adair, Scotland on Sunday
[ Red Earth and Pouring Rain ] is one of the best works of literature to emerge from the subcontinent in years . . . It s a tale told with rare elegance and insight by an author who can make the reader feel a wide range of emotions. Most of all, this book is meant for adults who ve secretly wanted to go back to the days when they could say, Tell me a story, and then settle back, prepared to be baffled, outwitted, pleased and entertained.
-Nilanjana S. Roy, Business Standard
No more silence-that is the power of Chandra s extraordinary novel, that where there are people suffering, oppressed or full of joy and intelligence, there can only be the sound of stories and affirmation, the collective dream of many peoples who were one people.
-Chris Searle, Morning Star
Wonderfully told, with vividly atmospheric descriptions, appealing minor characters, and interesting insights into the history and culture of colonial India. Vikram Chandra s considerable gifts as a stylist shine here.
- Philadelphia Inquirer
Richly textured and engrossing.
- Kirkus Reviews
The violence of these [colonial] encounters certainly testifies to the devastation wrought by imperial narratives. Yet-and this is Chandra s genius as an entertainer-metaphors that verge on didactic are, in Red Earth , first and foremost elements of a good story-in this case gory, grandiloquent and glorious battles. The waning days of the Moghul Empire burst enough with warring princelings, foreign adventurers, and anarchic lancers for Parasher to develop a veritable art of blood (which continually stains the earth throughout the novel).
At the same time, Chandra s soaring prose frames the duel between homo and heterogeneity that is Red Earth s true holy war-as when the Chiria Fauj, the synchronized infantry brigades who revolutionize Hindustan s battlefields, endure the laughter and sneers of the proud wild cavalrymen who passed by, sniffing elegantly at roses. That the chaotic Rathor horsemen inevitably fall to the clockwork motion of European military strategy only underlines Chandra s lesson: Contamination is the font of resistance. Red Earth takes its title from a polluted transaction-between an Untouchable prostitute and her johns . . . Only the spawn of such unions- this new thing that nobody wants . . . chichi, halfandhalf, blackandwhite -holds the possibility of truly contravening the struggle between This and That, Us and Them . . . And that knowledge lays the final ring upon Chandra s circled narrative. Recorded on both passport and page, his vo