Rajorshi Chakraborti

INFO

Name	Rajorshi Chakraborti (he/him)
Born	1977
Country of Birth	India
Place of Residence	Pōneke Wellington
Ethnicities	Indian
Artform	Literature
Decades Active	2000s, 2010s, 2020s

ABOUT

Rajorshi Chakraborti is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist based in Pōneke. He was born in Kolkata and spent most of his childhood there, with a few years in between in Mumbai. His stories follow characters that traverse different cultures, and his books are set between several countries, including India, Aotearoa, and the UK, though he has stated that “Much of my work remains to do with India. Even though I left India 24 years ago [in 1994] I still write about India, present-day India.” The Nelson Mail wrote that “his writing continues to provide haunting narratives that ask pressing moral questions about how perception affects the human condition and how past events can change people.”

Chakraborti’s father was in industrial finance, and his mother was an English teacher, and both encouraged him to read and write from a young age. As a teenager, he wrote several short stories and novels that were not for public readership but allowed him to explore his craft. At the age of 16 in 1994, he received a scholarship to study at a United World College in Victoria, Canada. In 1996 he moved to the UK where he studied English literature at the University of Hull. He obtained his PhD in post-colonial literature from Edinburgh University, where he went on to lecture classes in creative writing and English literature between 2007 and 2010. He, along with his wife — who grew up in Pōneke — moved to Aotearoa in 2010.

Chakraborti is the author of six novels and one book of short stories. He published his first novel, Or The Day Seizes You, in 2006 while he was based in Edinburgh. He describes his fictional writing as a mix of realism and the dream-like, often incorporating elements of crime, mystery and thriller. The 2018 novel The Man Who Would Not See delves into a family split apart many decades ago in Kolkata. The two brothers from this household, Ashim and Abhay, remain apart after this fracture until Ashim visits his brother in his now home in Aotearoa with the potential to break apart his new life. The Man Who Would Not See was longlisted for the Acorn Prize at the Ockham Book Awards in 2019.

His 2019 novel Shakti is a supernatural thriller that responded to the landscape of Indian politics at the time, which was governed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) whose leader was, and remains, Narendra Modi. The BJP and Modi endorsed Hindu nationalism throughout the country, and Chakraborti’s novel explores the tactics these leaders employed to maintain their power and ideologies. The story follows three women whose lives become strained beneath this oppressive structure. Shakti was longlisted for the Best Novel category in the 2021 Ngaio Marsh Awards. Reviewing the novel for Landfall, Brannavan Gnanalingam noted:

It is all told with a light touch. Chakraborti maintains a sardonic humour throughout, even as the novel deals with heavy political themes. The narrative careers along, while Chakraborti also impressively manages to draw a detailed social environment. [. . .] The novel almost shifts from being magical realism (which a number of critics have already pointed out) to straight realism. However, in a global environment where religion and narratives of exceptionalism are being manipulated by fascist wannabes, it’s potent stuff.

In 2023 Chakraborti published his first book for children, The Bad Smell Hotel, co-written with his daughter Leela, who was 8 when they worked on it together during the first Covid lockdown. The story is set in 2050, in a society where people are exiled in ‘bad smell hotels’ away from their friends and family because of their terrible flatulence. It was published through The Cuba Press and was launched at the family’s home library in Karori.