Vikram Chandra was born on July 23, 1961, in New Delhi, India, the son of Navin (a company president) and Kamna (a screenwriter, playwright, and author) Chandra. He received most of his secondary education at Mayo College, a boarding school in Ajmer, Rajasthan, where his work was published in the school's literary magazine. After attending St. Xavier's College in Bombay for a short period, Chandra came to the United States as an undergraduate student in the early 1980s. In 1984, he graduated from Pomona College in Claremont, near Los Angeles, with a Bachelor of Arts degree (magna cum laude) in English, with a concentration in creative writing.

Chandra then attended the Film School at Columbia University in New York, dropping out halfway through the program in order to begin work on a novel. He enrolled in a Master of Arts degree program at Johns Hopkins University, where he studied...