Biography
About his place of birth Krishan Chander wrote: "Lahore is a place where I was born, where I was educated, where I started my literary career, where I achieved fame. For people of my generation it is difficult to forget Lahore. It shines in our heart like a jewel – like the fragrance of our soul". Apart from his love for Lahore actually he was born in Wazirabad,District Gujranwala British India (now in Pakistan). Krishan Chander spent his childhood in Poonch, in the state of Jammu & Kashmir, where his father worked as the physician of Maharaja Poonch. His novel Shakast (Defeat) is related to Kashmir's partition. Mitti Ke Sanam one of his most popular novel is about the childhood memories of a young boy who lived with his parents in Kashmir. His famous Afsanay (short stories) are the stories of Kashmiri villages, as well as those of displaced expatriates and rootless urban man. He used Pahari (dialect of people living in Poonch) words while writing in Urdu.
In the 1930s he studied at Forman Christian College and edited the English section of the college house magazine, and was at that time interested in English writings. As the then editor of the Urdu section of the magazine, Mehr Lal Soni Zia Fatehabadi was instrumental to his career in having got published, in the year 1932, Chander's first Urdu short story, "Sadhu".
Chander was against the Hindu-Muslim conflicts – and might actually have been an atheist, as he was a committed Communist & card-carrying Party Member – as many radical writers in India were in the decades immediately preceding the Partition of the country. The forcible division of Kashmir in 1948 after the creation of India and Pakistan left deep marks on his writings.
His literary masterpieces on the Bengal famine and the savagery and barbarism that took place at the time of the partition of India in 1947 are some of the finest specimens of modern Urdu literature, but at other times too he continued relentlessly to critique the abuse of power, poverty and the suffering of the wretched of the earth; but above all he never stopped protesting casteism, fanaticism, communal violence and terror. He was a humanist and a cosmopolitan.
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