Negotiating community

So far, I have argued that Gaitonde’s mythic resonance as a figure of liberal entrepreneurial subjectivity is derived from the prototype of the classical Hollywood gangster genre. His break from state ideology, identified with a coercive apparatus and a meek pre-liberalization subjectivity, is also a break from religious identity and filial community. I will now look at his relationship with the crime community that is so important to the mythology of the Indian gangster film. Reading the gang as a potential alternate community or a surrogate family is common across paradigms. But in the classical gangster film, the gang does not represent any alternate set of community claims; it exists primarily to testify to the gangster’s self-assertion and power,[9] [open endnotes in new window] with one exception that I will discuss later.

As scholars have pointed out, community figures very prominently in the Indian gangster film. Sugata Nandi identifies how in the Bombay gangster film the disintegration of the filial family leads the gangster hero to find “its surrogate in the gang” (154), which Corey Creekmur calls a “‘perverse’ model of the ‘family’” (32). Ranjani Mazumdar sees it as “a new community of men” (157).[10] Once Gaitonde becomes the leader of his own gang, both texts negotiate this possibility of the reaffirmation of the communitarian paradigm, where the community is understood as distinct from filial identity. The series seems to embrace this possibility to begin with, while the novel has Gaitonde more clearly grappling with the troublingly nebulous distinction between the gang as simply an instrument or evidence of the gangster’s success, and the gang as a real community with claims on him that he is prepared to acknowledge. But in both novel and series, Gaitonde’s subjectivity remains impossible to integrate into the community, ultimately because the community remains identitarian but also because the liberal subjectivity that Gaitonde represents can never entirely give priority to communitarian claims. Community for him finally remains a sphere of personal interest and power. This section will therefore identify the difference of Gaitonde from the typical Indian screen gangster in his relationship with the alternate community after his break with the filial one. I will first outline how the novel handles the reemergence of the claims of community before turning to its treatment in the series.

Let us look at the act that gives Gaitonde his big break in the novel. As soon as he learns about the need to raise “capital” to “go independent”—that is, to transition from a professional/hitman-for-hire to an entrepreneurial gangster—Gaitonde murders his mentor, Salim Kaka (36). In context, no significant Hindi film gangster hero rises to prominence with a cold-blooded murder of a mentor, an act not underwritten by even vague circumstantial justification. But killing or displacing the mentor is the standard path to the rise of the 1930s U.S. gangster hero in films such as Scarface and Little Caesar. Like the classical gangster’s, therefore, Gaitonde’s subjectivity is not primed for integration into an alternative community.

Gaitonde’s first need after “raising capital” is to find someone who can launder it and so put it in circulation. This figure is Paritosh Shah, who represents a communitarian, hereditary entrepreneurial model at odds with the theoretical promise of liberalization which, in Warshow’s words, is available to those “without background or advantages.” Shah is a figure from the hinterland like Gaitonde. When he arrives at Shah’s house for the first time, from where the latter conducts his business, we are told, “Paritosh Shah was a family man… The second floor was full of male Shahs… and they called each other Chachu and Mamu [both meaning “uncle”] and Bhai [brother]” (59). The entrepreneurial community that Shah represents is therefore built around the family and the priority of its claims, exactly the thing that Gaitonde as the liberal subject has turned his back on. Since Shah becomes an indispensable ally and a close friend, this is an alliance at once opportunistic and affective, marking an inner contradiction in the emergent liberal subjectivity from the very beginning. Gaitonde, therefore, has trouble reading the Shah figure in the right terms.

It is Shah who introduces Gaitonde to Bipin Bhonsle, a politician from a party called the Rakshaks (Protectors) modeled on the regionalist and Hindu-identitarian party the Shiv Sena (242). Bhonsle approaches Gaitonde to help win an election by preventing the opposition voters, especially the Muslim voters, from voting against his party. When Shah remarks that Bhonsle is a “little mad, like all those Rakshaks,” Gaitonde understands this to mean that since Shah “believed fiercely in profit, and gain was his god, so anyone who let religion interfere in money-making was quite obviously crazy to him” (244). Gaitonde very soon has an opportunity to see how deeply rooted Shah is in given social identities.

The very evening of his first meeting with Bhonsle, Gaitonde attends a pre-wedding celebration of Shah’s eldest daughter. Looking at the elaborate gathering of the extended family, Gaitonde observes that “for all his business innovation, Paritosh Shah was a firm traditionalist” (247). At one of these celebrations, another of Shah’s daughters, Dipika, seeks his intervention in convincing her parents to let her marry her Dalit boyfriend from an economically poor background. At first, when Dipika frames her request as just an objection to her parents’ plans to get her married to a groom of their choice, Gaitonde’s patriarchal imagination reads Dipika as “some modern girl” with “some idea of a job and career… got from some silly magazine” and therefore illegitimately liberal because of her gender (250). However, when he learns of the boyfriend’s caste and class, he not only realizes that Shah and his family could never countenance this challenge to their identity, but also that Dipika had turned to Gaitonde for help because she recognizes in him an instance of a break from identitarian bonds. She tells him, “I know you do not think in any old-fashioned way” (251).

Paritosh Shah, the legitimate businessman indispensable to the liberal aspirations of Gaitonde. Gaitonde has trouble reading Shah’s investment in the filial community correctly.

Gaitonde deeply resents Dipika because of her challenge to him to live up to his self-understanding since this could not be dismissed as from a “silly magazine”:

“What she meant was that in my company there were Brahmins and Marathas and Muslims and Dalits and OBCs, all working together, without difference or suspicion” (251).[11]

Yet, if this indifference to identity is shared by all members in the alternate community of the gang who “were bound to each other…, desperate men, and therefore free” (251), it is not because of some commitment to a non-identitarian community. We know this because Gaitonde is unable to confide in them about Dipika’s approach. He knows that an ideological dilemma of this kind would test their understanding of freedom on which his power with them rests, a freedom not to commit to an alternate community but to ultimately resist any communitarian claims. The gang’s alternate community is indifferent to identity only because it is bound by the “desperation” of individual strivings. Given that Shah is more important to their strivings than Dipika, his gang members would be puzzled by Gaitonde’s dilemma. Gaitonde too concedes to himself that if only Shah had approached him first about Dipika’s situation, he “would have had her tattered Dalit boyfriend picked up and dropped off a cliff” (252).

The incident with Dipika marks the beginning of Gaitonde’s realization of his re-embedding in communitarian-identitarian claims: “None of [my gang] could [help me]. It made me angry, this sudden slide down and back into the slithering mess of family,” but not just family in any narrow sense but family as identity and identity as transcendental (253). This becomes absolutely clear when he arrives to talk to Shah about Dipika. He sees Shah talking on the phone with a gold-framed painting of the deity Krishna behind him. He imagines Krishna smiling at him. As Gaitonde begins to speak, “[He] realized what Krishna was smiling at. [Gaitonde] realized the limits of [his own] power” (259). He delivers Dipika’s secret to Shah and eventually advises him to marry her to someone else the same day. Dipika kills herself on her honeymoon.

The series treats the origins of Gaitonde’s communitarian dilemma somewhat differently. Unlike in the novel, there are no initial glimpses of the rootedness of community in given identities. In contrast, the series seems to play by the romance of an alternate community to begin with and identifies its fracturing with the sectarianism emerging from the electoral arena. But we can see how this narrative does not hold by looking at a stock character from the classical gangster paradigm introduced by the series, Kukoo. Kukoo is the totemic figure, generally a woman, who is meant to testify to or represent a formal seal on the gangster’s success. The primacy of liberal individual subjectivity in the classical gangster, for whom the gang exists only as an instrument of his power, generally has one relationship that remains exempt from the exercise of this power. These include a mother (The Public Enemy, White Heat), a sister (Scarface), a friend (Little Caesar, Angels with Dirty Faces [Michael Curtiz, 1939]), an impossible lover (Quick Millions [Rowland Brown, 1931], The Roaring Twenties [Raoul Walsh, 1939]). But these relationships are symbolically sterile and sometimes played as pathological (Scarface and White Heat). The relationship-in-reserve seems the one relationship that could confirm the gangster’s success without the resort to violence. When it’s a heterosexual lover, this relationship also often represents the possibility of official society’s recognition of his success, but not really any communitarian claims.[12] The classical gangster rarely has a wife and never children, who are so important for the communitarian paradigm and for corporate melodramas from Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956) to the television series Succession (Jesse Armstrong, 2018-2023). The inability or unwillingness of the relationship-in-reserve to confirm his success presages his undoing.

Kukoo in the series is a trans character who is the companion of Suleiman Isa, the preeminent don when Gaitonde arrives in Mumbai. She is what Arthur Sacks calls “the Big Fellow’s girl” in the classical gangster film (9). The ascendance of Gaitonde over Isa is signaled by his acquisition of the same model of Rolls Royce that Isa rides, and by the shifting of Kukoo’s allegiance to Gaitonde. Unlike the car, it is not money but an open act of defiance of Isa by Gaitonde that gains him Kukoo’s companionship. She is, therefore, signaled as supposedly exempt from the logic of exchange value, but her shift signals her status as a totemic figure (S1E3 -25:18). Moreover, Gaitonde’s narration repeatedly emphasizes her talismanic role in the expansion of that value to explain his successes. Her object character in his imagination, however privileged, in keeping with the role assigned to female lovers in the classical gangster film, cannot be in doubt. Shah, the representative of legitimate entrepreneurship, cites her inability to have kids as a bar to Gaitonde’s reentry into the social order which Gaitonde characteristically abjures (S1E4 -13:12).

If Kukoo is the closest relationship that Gaitonde has, Shah’s repudiation of her marks her presence as at odds with the alternate community of the gang that remains beholden to the norms of conventional community. She remains important primarily as a totem and talisman for Gaitonde. Gaitonde’s prioritization of Kukoo over Shah for a brief period before her death serves as an extension of Gaitonde’s protest against the official model of the family that has continued to inform the community of his gang. Kukoo’s death, and so the withdrawal of her talismanic presence, not only signals the beginnings of Gaitonde’s fall, but it also leaves him once again open to the claims of the social order. Thus, he agrees to get married following Shah’s exhortations. And it is his wife Subhadra who brings back religion and community and their claims into his life, encouraging him to adopt the identity of a Hindu community leader in the underworld (S1E5 -27:50; S1E7 -24:27). Family therefore turns out to be the nucleus of the communitarian imagination in the underworld of the series, and community remains identitarian.

In the series, as in the novel, Gaitonde continues to seek a gap between his subjectivity and the claims of community, family, and religion despite his re-embedding in them. His re-embedding is real, but it is not a simple return since his task becomes the reconciliation of his autonomy with these claims. For example, an important turning point in Gaitonde’s re-embedding in identitarian claims across both versions is his participation in the 1993 riots against Muslims after the demolition of the Babri mosque had sparked communal riots in large parts of the country. Gaitonde justifies his participation in the riots against Muslims on other than identitarian grounds, either business (in the novel, 390-93) or consumerist and personal (in the series),[13] and so claims an ideological distance from the uses that the community finds for him. But increasingly these claims become more pressing. The really significant differences between the two versions of the text are in how this gap between Gaitonde’s subjectivity and identitarian claims, or its absence, is finally understood. It is also here that the two texts need to strain the resources of the gangster genre since their protagonist’s discovery that he is, as it were, starring in the wrong kind of gangster film forces the genre into unfamiliar territory. The next two sections will engage with the overall and divergent allegorical explanation that the two versions give for the failure of the emergence of the subject of liberalization, while the conclusion will return to how we may read their respective understandings in relation to the question of genre.

Paranoid historiography

Chandra’s novel has Gaitonde dealing with a range of agents—family, community, state, and religion—that do not all collapse into their final and insuperable identity. Instead, Gaitonde experiences the challenge of negotiating their multiple claims while trying to preserve the primacy of his own subjectivity. In the series, all these agents are revealed to be participants in a single conspiracy and finally hostage to an apocalyptic religious imagination. Very briefly, in the novel, after Gaitonde’s reluctant acceptance of the identity of a Hindu gangster, he is recruited first by a spiritual guru Sridhar Shukla to run arms for the guru’s organization in the name of protecting the Hindu population from Islamist conspiracies (407-08). He is then recruited separately by the Indian intelligence service, appealing to his “patriotism,” helping him run an overseas economy of crime to counter that of the Isa, whose role in the 1993 riots has cast him as a Muslim don working for Pakistani intelligence (503-05). Gaitonde’s intelligence handler, a Mr. Kumar, frowns upon Gaitonde’s dealings with Shukla, marking a gap between the state and the emergent Hindutva forces. The discrete character of Gaitonde’s relationships with Shukla and Indian intelligence will be important when we assess his susceptibility to Shukla’s discourse in the two versions. Shukla’s identitarian discourse turns out to be also a millenarian death cult, beholden to a philosophy of the necessary annihilation of the world to bring in a new “golden age.” To this end, in the novel Shukla deceives Gaitonde into smuggling nuclear weapons into Mumbai, but without any explicit collusion from the other agents, not even from the identitarian politicians in power such as Bhonsle.

In the series, Gaitonde’s recruitment by Shukla is revealed in the final episode to have been a deep conspiracy in which state bureaucrats, politicians, law enforcement officials, figures from the entertainment industry, and some of his own close associates colluded over more than two decades. As in the novel, Gaitonde has to come to terms with the fact that from 1993 he is forced to re-engage with the forces upon whose rejection his liberal self-identity was predicated. Where in the novel Gaitonde can reassure himself that his dealings with them are primarily mercenary and serve his own interest, in the series he experiences this as humiliation. His repeated failures to free himself from the oversight of Indian intelligence grounds most of his operations, after which he seeks refuge in Shukla’s cult and knowingly participates in the smuggling of nuclear weapons to annihilate Mumbai. The justification for Gaitonde’s acceptance of his other scene of primordial rebellion, religion, may be understood as follows. Whereas his biological father’s faith would have condemned Gaitonde to meekness, Shukla’s faith still provides Gaitonde a perverse avenue for self-assertion whereby his final act of such assertion will be to annihilate the world that has been the scene of his failure (S2E4 -22:00). Therefore, he must be a willing participant in the trafficking and deployment of the weapons.

The conspiracy that eventually undoes Gaitonde in the series is not the one concerning nuclear weapons but the one concerning his own recruitment to it by a series of staged episodes. The revelation of the conspiracy underlining that no choice was ever really his own allegorically casts the experience of liberalization as an illusion. But this still does not get at the series’ totalizing, conspiratorial characterization of history, since not only was no choice his own but that each was ultimately dictated by a single agent, the identitarian imperative. This leads Gaitonde to frame the narration at the outset as one of betrayal of sons by fathers. He therefore calls the bureaucrat who helps both Indian Intelligence and Shukla to recruit him as his “sarkari baap” or the state-appointed father. Shukla is the “third father” (S1E1 -13:33). They represent the paternal, identitarian claims that seemed to give way to the autonomizing, expansionist subjectivity of the liberal subject, but then turn out to have simply moved into the shadows to better manipulate this subject. The liberal subject was always imbricated in the identitarian project through an externally engineered conspiracy.

The beginning of the conspiracy that links everyone tightly, pushing them to contribute to the realization of what becomes inevitable has a beginning that coincides with the state of Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi in 1975. Gaitonde’s narration from his rural childhood also begins during the Emergency. Shukla, who was a child prodigy in the recital of scriptures, is deprived of his own father when the latter never returns from his arrest by Indira Gandhi’s government during this time (S2E7 -31:24). The upshot is that the motor of the narrative becomes the historical resentment of the Hindutva forces against a state and polity that they claim had marginalized them. Gaitonde had thought that the motor of the narrative was an epochal drive to be rid of the oversight of the same state through the means of capital. So, in this retrospective account of Indian liberalization, the tussle between the apparently contradictory forces of economic liberalism and reactionary faith has been won through a deep conspiracy by the latter.

The conspiratorial character of the narrative deprives every force other than that represented by Hindutva forces of any effective agency. The depth of the conspiratorial integration can be gauged by the difference in the narrative strategies of the two versions. In the novel Gaitonde’s narrative is in the first person, even if the formal conceit is that of a voice from beyond the grave, while the narrative following Sartaj Singh is in the third person and is autonomous from Gaitonde’s, to the extent that Sartaj only episodically follows up on the unresolved parts of Gaitonde’s narrative. The series only apparently has a dual-track narrative. The voice of Gaitonde accompanies and addresses Sartaj even after the former’s death, and Sartaj appears to register that address. That address frames the significance of Sartaj’s progressive discovery of the conspiracy, effectively making Gaitonde the narrator of both the strands. The impression that Sartaj’s narrative strand is effectively subordinate to Gaitonde’s in the series is finally confirmed by the revelation that Sartaj’s father was a member of Shukla’s death cult. Sartaj’s betrayal by his father only repeats Gaitonde’s betrayals by the paternal figures in the latter’s life.

The conspiratorial character of the narration in the series, I would argue, is best described as paranoid historiography, and paranoia in this instance figures as a symptom of the liberal narrator’s inability to come to terms with his own self-deception. Before I make my brief case for this reading and its implications, I would like to clarify that I am aware of the cautions against characterizing conspiracy theories as necessarily paranoid, and paranoia as necessarily pathological. I am not interested in doing either, but at the same time neither caution should prevent us from assessing the formal construction and historical motivations of any conspiracy narrative. This is what I am doing here.

The first justification for calling “paranoid” Gaitonde’s narration of history as a conspiracy is simply because that is how the series presents it. The series begins with Gaitonde’s flashback narration that alternates with the uncovering of the nuclear conspiracy in the present. The flashback circles around over two seasons to the point where Gaitonde begins his narration. In the second season, Gaitonde is introduced to a hallucinogen by Shukla. All members of the cult consume this drug. Paranoia is one of its withdrawal symptoms. When Gaitonde breaks from the cult and wants to abort the nuclear conspiracy, because a street-food dish named after him appeals to his narcissistic identification with Mumbai, he stops taking this drug. The precise words giving us this information are:

“Your elephant has gone mad. I have warned him that everyone is with us. If he does not start taking the pill soon, he will become paranoid” (S2E6 -10:32).

Similar paranoid episodes take over Sartaj towards the final episodes under the effect of withdrawal. This casts doubt not so much on the nuclear conspiracy but on the thorough coordination of all the forces in making Gaitonde its conduit. I am, however, not interested in affirming the self-pathologizing character or the complete unreliability of the narration since there is no discourse that emerges from outside of it, unlike in say The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Weine, 1921), that claims to provide us a “correct” perspective. I am interested in only one specific axis of unreliability that paranoia brings to the allegorical character of the series: Gaitonde’s consistently polarized understanding of his own agency as the narrator and of his agency in the narrative.

As narrator, Gaitonde claims authorship of the narrative, but the narrative is one of how he never was the author of his own life. These two propositions need not be incompatible but require some narratorial acknowledgment of an irony which is singularly absent here. Right at the beginning of the first episode, we see a woman Gaitonde has shot tell him that she had been aware that he was being deceived for over twenty years. We won’t know what this really refers to for a long time. However, as if needing to deny her reading of his life, Gaitonde frames the subsequent narration over fourteen episodes with the very next lines: “It’s my story. Everyone brings their parts. It is my job to connect the dots.” If he had been so thoroughly deceived as his narration will inform us, then the dots already had already been connected for him behind his back.[14]

A key feature of Gaitonde’s paranoia is the ability to doubt everyone in relation to himself but without doubting himself. Such a mode of comprehending the world may be understandable for “figures on the margins of society trying to come to terms with their own marginalization” (Butter 654) or in contexts characterized by heightened secrecy (Melley).[15] However, whatever the ideological plight of liberalism in contemporary India may be, marginality would be an impossible position for liberals to claim. And Hindutva’s rise was neither secret nor sudden. So, for an allegorical reading of Indian liberalization’s entwinement with Hindutva politics to adopt this mode, and to underline its own unreliability, seems to suggest the inability of the liberal subject to comes to terms with the dissonance between its originary aspirations on the one hand and the sense that they never really got off the ground on the other. It attempts to narrate this dissonance, but the narration has a built-in “insanity plea,” leaving us primarily with a testament to the intensity of the experience of failure rather than an examination of that failure.

Even accounting for the “insanity plea” and discounting a vast integrated conspiracy, we are told that the success of the identitarian forces can be explained by their having fed on a variety of discontents not specific to liberal subjectivity. If they exploited Gaitonde’s failure to free himself from state oversight, they exploited a still external structural constraint upon him. Similarly, they exploit the resentment of Constable Katekar’s son at his father’s death on duty, of Shukla’s aide Bataya’s Palestinian-Jewish identity, or the Pakistani intelligence agent Shahid Khan’s realization that his identity as the citizen of an Islamic nation is fractured at its origins in Partition violence. None of these are specific to the history of liberalization, so all that remains specific to Gaitonde is the narcissistic self-regard of possessive individualism that actually allows him to be the one to disidentify from the identitarian discourse just before the deployment of the nuclear weapon. If the achievement of the series is to testify to the intensity of the experience of failure for a certain liberal sensibility, its failure is the absence of the examination of the conditions of failure internal to that sensibility. The latter is the subject of the source novel.