'I created a super hero world rooted in Indian mythology'

Having grown up in rural India, Gurd Chahal recalls hearing stories told by community elders while sat under the stars.

At the age of eight, he came to the UK and settled in Birmingham, holding on to the stories he had heard in his mud-house village.

He then became fascinated with western epic fantasy novels, inspiring the thought of his own fantasy saga with a world rooted in Indian spirituality and mythology.

Now 69, Chahal has published his debut novel Cha'nir and the Light of Nam, the first in a planned trilogy with a South Asian super heroine as its protagonist - in honour, he said, of the strong women in Indian communities who held together families after arriving in the UK.

But Chahal's path to authorship was not linear.

At the age of 11, he spent hours in libraries.

At 13, a paper round gave him access to newspapers and comics such as Fantastic Four and Spider‑Man, and by the time he was in his later teens in the 1970s, he said he was already writing about "the journey of the soul".

Rather than literature, however, he went on to study pharmacy at Aston University, later pioneering in‑store and drive‑through pharmacies in the UK.

But the story he wanted to tell kept growing quietly in the background.

"Why isn't there a great mythological story based on India and the East?" he recalled asking himself. "Why haven't we got something like that?"

He said the Birmingham he encountered in the 1960s was different from the home he had left behind, adding that "racism was open and constant".

The community, he said, relied heavily on the quiet strength of its women to hold families together - which later became the blueprint for protagonist Cha'nir.

"I wanted to create a South Asian superheroine," he said. "She's the greatest warrior of her generation.

"I wanted to show the power of the female, to represent all the Indian women and the struggles they go through."

The story follows Cha'nir, who survives a massacre in 1970s India before being rescued by a cosmic guardian and raised in a mystical realm between Earth and a heavenly world of Muktiland.

But Chahal insists the story's scale is not what sets it apart. "It's completely original, no mimicry," he said. "It expands the epic fantasy genre with another layer and a different perspective."

He draws a line between his work and the tradition of epic fantasy shaped by writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien, another Midlands figure. "Very much in the same vein as Tolkien," he said, "but rooted in Indian spirituality."

"I have spent 35 years building this universe to get it right."

With the manuscript for the second book finished, Chahal said he hoped the book's universe would expand into music, film and visual art.

After decades of preparation, he said he believed "the world has finally caught up with the story he has been carrying since childhood".

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