The Bollywords of Vikram Chandra

Born in India, but long-time U.S-residents, if there is someone qualified to speak about modern issues of identity, Vikram Chandra has it covered.

“My family is involved in the film industry in Mumbai, which has traditionally been the target of extortion by many of these guys, so I had friends and family who’d been the target of these extortion attempts,” he says.

“I wrote the book out of fear and anger," he continues. "It started out of this impulse to understand why the hell this was happening in my city and my family, to my friends.”

In the novel, gangster Ganesh Gaitonde is trapped in a bunker. As the police break in, he uses an intercom to narrate the events of his life to detective Sartaj Singh, explaining how he rose from a low-level thug to become involved in a sub continental sub-apocalypse.

Ratting on the Ganglands

To write accurately about gangsters, Chandra used contacts in the Mumbai police force, and his friendship with a prominent crime journalist, to arrange sit-downs with gang bosses.

Accessing the underworld was surprisingly straightforward.

“If there’s one thing that writing this book has taught me, it’s that the underworld is not really an underworld. It just lives right next to us, and it’s never really very far away.”

Apart from meeting a hit man who was visibly strung out on drugs, Chandra says he never felt like he was in danger.

“They’re not really concerned with being threatening or aggressive towards you in particular," he explains. "Because they thought I was coming from the media, especially the high level guys, they operate like corporate heads so they have their own PR line that they want to get out.”

• More on CNNGo: How a Martini led to the Shanghai International Literary Festival

Before writing the novel Chandra says he thought of the gangsters as monsters.

“The word that often gets used in Hindi is ‘rakshasa,' which means something like ‘demon.' What was interesting both about doing the research and then trying to write the book is to realize how fragile and human all these people are, and in some sense that’s more frightening than the alternative.”

Genre, length and language

You end up defending your own territory, but you end up trapping yourself in this constricting area which then gets narrower and narrower. Soon you find you can only write about your place and your class and your gender -- it’s endless— Vikram Chandra, author

The prospect of reading "Sacred Games" isn’t frightening exactly, but there are several reasons why readers might find it intimidating. The book is twice as long as an average novel, includes a mishmash of Indian slang and dialects, and is more highfalutin' than most cops and robbers stories, although Chandra downplays its literary qualities.

“When I started writing this, I was very aware that I wanted to speak to that tradition [of detective fiction] but not in a kind of patronizing literary way, because that often really annoys me,” he says. “It’s much, much harder to do the thing itself and then to try to stretch its boundaries or conventions.”

That said, "Sacred Games" isn’t pulp fiction either, despite publishers’ attempts to market it as ‘the thriller of the year."

“I was really afraid that some guy was going to buy it before he got on an airplane expecting thrills,” says Chandra. “And even as it participates in that language, it’s not a very thrilling book in that sense.”

At 900 pages, the novel has been described as being as hard to put down as it is to pick up.

Chandra attributes the sprawl of his and other South Asian novels to an ongoing tradition of epic narratives, such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.

“We all grow up watching Indian movies and they’re not satisfying unless they’re two and a half to three hours long,” he says.

• More on CNNGo: Beyond the Shanghai International Literary Festival

In Hindi gangster flicks, the progress of the narrative is slowed by comic and musical digressions.

“This goes a long way back to all kinds of classical Indian aesthetic traditions where the argument is made that if you put contrasting emotions next to each other you taste each one with more intensity.”

Likewise, Chandra says that "Sacred Games" has several musical numbers of its own in which the tone, rhythm and action all change.

The other reason he offers for India’s long novels is writers’ recent attempts to explore the full complexity of the culture.

The word that often gets used in Hindi is ‘rakshasa,' which means something like ‘demon.' What was interesting both about doing the research and then trying to write the book is to realize how fragile and human all these people are, and in some sense that’s more frightening than the alternative.— Vikram Chandra

“You have these broad panoramic narratives that are analogous in some way to Victorian fiction, so the big Dickensian novel or the Trollope novel. One of my favorite Trollope novels has the title 'The Way We Live Now.' If you set yourself up for that task, recording or exploring the way that we live now, you naturally begin to build a larger world.”

The real India

When Chandra comes to Shanghai, literary festival organizer Tina Kanagaratnam says that he’ll be “talking about an interesting topic for diaspora authors, which should resonate with an international audience: how ‘authentic’ can you be in writing about a country or culture, including your own, when you’re not living there?”

Chandra has been attacked for writing about India in English while spending much of his time in the United States.

He wrote a piece for the Boston Review back in 2000 that took on the tyranny of authenticity, but he says “the reductive edge of identity politics” hasn’t retreated much. In fact, he’s found that people all over the world attempt to police who can write about what, despite the hypocrisy of that way of thinking.

“If I argue that anybody who’s not Indian cannot speak with authority about Indian affairs, then exactly the same argument could be made in reference to me choosing to write a story set in Oakland, in California," he says.

"You end up defending your own territory, but you end up trapping yourself in this constricting area which then gets narrower and narrower. Soon you find you can only write about your place and your class and your gender -- it’s endless," he continues.

One thing that has ended, at least for now, is Chandra’s fixation with crime fiction. He’s already started working on something different.

“It’s still early days, so I don’t quite know what sort of creature it is, but I do know that it’s nothing to do with crime and gangsters and the underworld and so forth. No policemen.”