"To Tell a Story is to Affirm Life". Death and Storytelling in Vikram Chandra's "Red Earth and Pouring Rain"

In Vikram Chandra’s first published work, "Red Earth and Pouring Rain", characters and situations are defined by the stories told, and "All stories have in them the seed of all other stories; any story, if continued long enough, becomes other stories". In other words, the narration does not aspire to recounting the reality of things as they are but to constructing "a finely coloured dream, a thing of passion and joy, a huge lie that will entertain and instruct and enlighten [...] the Big Indian Lie". The orality of traditional narrative drawn upon by the author is recreated on paper through a series of imaginative licences that have more in common with South American magical realism than the classic models of the middle-class Anglo-Saxon novel. Starting from these assumptions, this essays aims ai demonstrating that, although the novel breaks with the space-time continuum and with normal narrative cause-and-effect mechanisms in a way shared with postmodern narrative, the way in which this conception of time, History, and stories is used leads to a reconstruction and redefinition of a reality observed from a new viewpoint, which has very little to do with the postmodern rhetoric of terminality. It recalls, rather, an openness towards the unknown, a readiness to accept change and the fantastic, and a community-based element that are characteristics of traditional narration.