Vikram Chandra, Red Earth and Pouring Rain

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Vikram Chandra’s debut novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain won the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Published Book. The novel is a Scheherazadian epic cascading through multiple levels of storytelling, Hindu gods, an American road trip, battles, magic realism, and series of intimate encounters and engagements with British colonialism, or as Sanjay, the novel’s protagonist, says, “The Big Indian Lie” (17). Split into five books and a before and after, the epic journeys through time weaving anecdotes and reoccurring British and Indian characters through a series of narrators that “forsake grim shortness and hustle” and instead “let us luxuriate …

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Citation: Doty, Robyn. "Red Earth and Pouring Rain". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 August 2018 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2436, accessed 28 March 2024.]

2436 Red Earth and Pouring Rain 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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