Chandrasinh Hirjee Jewraj (Chandu) was born in 1924 at Bombay into a Calcutta based Kachchi Bhatia business family. He was the eldest of five sons of Hirjee Jewraj and Champabai Hirjee.

Chandu studied at St. Xavier's Collegiate School and was deeply influenced by the Jesuit priests at Xaviers. He would often recount instances of Jesuit discipline and compassion he experienced as a student to his nieces and nephews in later years.

Young Chandu excelled at sports - he was a keen football player and loved athletics: he soon had a collection of medals, cups and trophies to his credit. Though not particularly fond of cue sports, Chandu took up billiards and snooker at an early age on his father's insistence.

He joined the family business whilst in his teens and would attend office attired in the traditional Indian dress of dhoti-kurta, complete with the compulsory topi. After office Chandu would return home, change into western attire and accompany his father to Hindustan Club or go with friends to either the Chowringhee YMCA or the Great Eastern Hotel for a few frames of snooker and billiards. To maximize his time at the baize, Chandu began to wear a bush shirt with dhoti to office and would go directly to the clubs after work: evidently this deviation from acceptable dress code was overlooked by the family as well as the authorities at the Y, Hindustan Club and Great Eastern Hotel. Chandu was to go on to play all his tournaments, including the national and world championships in his trademark bush shirt and dhoti, save one.

Chandu was soon winning local and state level cue sport tournaments, beating many a white saheb in the process, and this, particularly in context of the ongoing Independence Movement in India, was something which made his relatives and members of the community particularly proud. He was encouraged to take time off from work to improve his game but his attitude towards cue sports at that time, and also later at the height of his sporting career, was to treat billiards and snooker as strictly amateur, social sports. The only real 'practice' Chandu would get was while playing against his opponents during the qualifying rounds leading up to the finals of various championships he was to win.

On August 11, 1942 Chandu was injured during a 'laathi charge' baton attack by British-Indian troops while attempting to shield an infant girl. The head injury he received was life threatening and took many weeks to recover, during which doctors restricted fluid intake for young Chandu (including the drinking of water, which was offered to him in strictly rationed quantity, in the form of ice cubes wrapped inside a handkerchief, for just a few moments twice or thrice a day) to contain infection from the injury, a course of treatment practiced before the advent of penicillin in India. Chandu recovered but was to suffer from lifelong, intermittent migraine like headaches, the discomfort of which be bore stoically and without the help of medication or painkillers.

He was married to Surya Udeshi and went on to win his first National Championship in 1946. On December 20, 1958 Chandra Hirjee beat Wilfred Axiak of Malta by seven frames to two in the best of thirteen final to win the unofficial world amateur snooker championship.