Vikram Chandra on novel 'Sacred Games' being adapted into India’s first Netflix series

Although Netflix is set to adapt Vikram Chandra’s award-winning novel Sacred Games (2006) into its first original series in India, the author is not resting on any laurels. He’s launched a unique software startup Granthika, begun his next work of fiction, and held his role as a creative writing professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Ahead of his session at the Jaipur Literature Festival this month, Chandra talks to Bazaar about the enduring appeal of the crime genre, his “frustrating” creative process, and how he’s reinventing writing and reading in the digital age.

What makes Sacred Games relevant today?

As a writer, I had a lot of fun playing with the ability to move through vast cross-sections of a given society. This is something the crime and detective genre have always done—a dead body at the beginning, maybe of someone who has been marginalised, a prostitute, for instance; and by the end of the book, the detective will trace a chain of links that leads to the mayor of the city. The writer can move through the culture, and build a complex portrait of a time and place. I think this is why the detective story is so ubiquitous. Anywhere you go in the world, you’ll find local versions addressing local concerns.

In your last book, Mirrored Mind (2014), you looked at the intersection of art and technology. How does that affect your writing and work?

I supported myself when I was writing my first novel by working as a programmer and computer consultant, and I’ve kept dabbling ever since as a hobbyist. Obviously, computing has transformed our lives and the world; the speed at which change has happened is dazzling and often frightening.  Weirdly, though, writing on computers hasn’t changed since the 1970s, when writers first started using word processors. George RR Martin uses the WordStar 4.0, which released in 1987, because there’s nothing that the latest version of MS Word can do for him that he can’t achieve using software that’s 30 years old. So this year, a friend and I launched a software called Granthika.

We’re building an intelligent editor that will understand the meaning of the words you use to construct a narrative; it’ll understand what a person is, what a location is, what an event is. It will be able to reason over the facts of your narrative, help you avoid contradictions and mistakes, analyse text in insightful ways.

It’s been 10 years since your last work of fiction—anything in the works now?

I’m working on my next book, which is fiction. I’m reluctant to say more, not out of superstition or coyness, but only because I’m still figuring out what kind of an animal this is. This is simultaneously the most exhilarating and frustrating part of being a writer, at least for me—you can’t really plan ahead, and the process is as much discovery as it is construction. I began Sacred Games, for instance, with the image of a policeman talking over an intercom with a criminal who had barricaded himself inside an impregnable hideout. I didn’t know who the criminal was, what he wanted, or where he had come from. It took years of thinking, thrashing about, cursing, and research to figure out the answers to those questions. So that’s where I am now.

What is your writing process like?

My method is driven by curiosity, so I like to talk to the people who inhabit the milieus I write about, to ask them questions, to listen to their stories. And there is something very productive about physically being in the landscapes I’m exploring in my fiction; you absorb information and atmosphere through your pores. I think writers, like other artists, work with their whole bodies, not just their conscious awareness. So I like to wander. For Sacred Games, I went everywhere, from the hinterlands of Bihar to sleazy filmy parties in Mumbai. What does teaching give you that writing doesn’t? Teaching forces you to find clarity in your own ideas because you’re explaining them to a receptive but skeptical audience.

The students at Berkeley are frighteningly bright and they talk back, which I love. There’s a famous Sanskrit saying that essentially means: In continuous dialogue emerges knowing the essence. But we seemed to have misplaced this skepticism, and much of our debate has been reduced to talking heads shouting at one another on television, trying to score points.

(This piece first appeared in Harper's Bazaar.)

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