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Performance, Performativity, And Nomadism In Vikram Chandra's Red Earth And Pouring Rain

Within the world of contemporary letters, Vikram Chandra is known as a member of that already famous category called NRI (non-resident Indian) writers, who write about India while living outside it most of the time. This category represents an interesting case of transnational writing, which has the advantage of maximum freedom from any connections to particular places—be they motherlands or otherlands. Consequently, as this paper will attempt to show, a concept such as nomadism seems appropriate to describe this kind of writing both thematically and structurally, showing how it works in conjunction with the concepts of performance and performativity. Chandra came to the United States to study in the early 1980s, began to publish works, and never left. He has written primarily about India, yet his perceptions have been informed by his double perspective: his India is defined by a permanent contact with his country of origin, but also by his positioning at a distance, through the fact that he is now based in the United States. When he started teaching creative writing at george Washington University, then at Berkeley, Chandra engaged in a nomadic pattern of life between Mumbai (where his family lives and where he finds inspiration and material for his novels) and the United States. 1 This commuting life pattern is mirrored by his characters. Chandra's 1995 novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, portrays many "travelling selves." The novel relies on the Indian tradition of oral storytelling; therefore, the story develops along a cyclical rather than linear timeframe. The emphasis is not on individual stories, but on the continuity of the storytelling pro - cess, which is a condition for the narrator's survival. The novel follows the framed narrative pattern found in the Arabian Nights both structurally and