"Sacred Games," notes

Notes

1. The second strand deals with Inspector Sartaj Singh trying to follow up on ominous loose ends left in the wake of Gaitonde’s death. In the case of the novel, an engagement with this strand, as well as episodes tangential to both the strands (marked as “insets”) could yield insights into other dimensions of the liberalization experience and its position in a longer historical perspective on South Asia. Sartaj’s strand in the novel is not entirely dictated by the imperatives of the plot narrated by Gaitonde. For reasons that will become clear, this part of the narrative is less autonomous in the series. [return to page 1]

2. The classical imagination of the gangster protagonist remains by and large masculine and patriarchal. This does not mean that there are no female subjects of liberalization in the two versions of Sacred Games, but that the gangster protagonist has trouble accepting them as such. Jojo Mascarenhas is one such figure who appears in both versions, while Dipika and Mary Mascarenhas are other key female subjects of liberalization in the novel. Dipika will be important to the argument I make here, but my discussion of them, as of Sartaj, is limited by the argument’s focus on how the texts negotiate with the conventions of the gangster genre.

3. Macpherson’s book is a history of ideas in seventeenth century Britian that he sees as foundational articulations of the political theory of possessive individualism. Scholars have extensively critiqued this history, but this does not negate the validity of the postulate of possessive individualism as a framework for understanding the later development of capitalism, certainly by the time the gangster genre develops. For an overview of Macpherson’s argument, see Breakey.

4. As Virdi argues, in iconic 1950s films such as Shree 420 (Raj Kapoor, 1955) and C.I.D. (Raj Khosla, 1956), “Money, specifically big business, is tainted by being implicated in crime… The heroes “enter that world, unveil [the business-mafia nexus], and hand [the gangsters] over to law enforcement authorities” (104). Some of the Amitabh Bachchan films of the 1970s may be seen as more ambiguous representations of the gangster, and indeed his persona in these roles draws upon some of the features of the classical gangster, but these features are ultimately provisional because the Bachchan figure is someone inevitably caught between an ineffectual state (whose failures are felt in the breakup of the family from which he emerges) and an inexorably powerful shadow economy of crime. Ultimately, his gangster remains a victim of powers beyond his control and so at most a righteous vigilante figure who often only seeks to realize the promise of the state even if it means stepping beyond the bounds of its laws. The initial disavowal of community/family/state is rooted in a grievance rather than a drive to a liberal subjectivity’s self-maximization and is compensated for by the reaffirmation of the community/family/state. “The Amitabh persona is a 'proletarian hero' who is at the same time a representative of the state. It is the act of switching sides, positioning himself on the side of the 'illegal' (but morally upright) margin, that gives the figure its power” (Prasad 144).

Unlike the classical gangster whose absence of remorse is a key feature of his persona (Langford 138), the Bachchan figure requires a redemptive death. In the series version of Sacred Games, in fact, Gaitonde identifies with the Bachchan persona but only to disavow the redemptive death that is indicative of the latter’s reintegration into the social order (S1E4 -06:24). It would be instructive to contrast the aborted gesture of the gangster returning to the family fold in a classic film such as The Public Enemy with its redemptive counterpart in Bachchan’s most iconic role as the gangster in Deewar (Yash Chopra, 1974), a film with a strikingly similar family-state-outlaw dynamic to the first.

5. “[T]he Western inflections of contemporary Bombay gangster films seem to largely derive… from post-Godfather American cinema” (Creekmur 33).

6. The Godfather, on the other hand, as Fredric Jameson has argued, taps into possible nostalgia in the US for the elapsed norm of an extended patriarchal family form under advanced capitalism which now only a late-arriving ethnic minority from a late-industrializing part of Europe continues to possess.

7. S=season, E=episode. Timestamps in subsequent references indicate where the relevant portion begins. The timestamp is given in negative numbers because the Netflix app on most devices indicates time remaining in a film or episode rather than time elapsed.

8. See note 4 on the films of Bachchan where this trope again figure in films such as Deewar and Nastik [The Atheist] (Pramod Chakravarty, 1983), but only to be understood as mistaken and to set up an ultimate re-avowal. In any case, protests against “divine injustice” are not limited to the gangster figure in the history of Indian cinema.

9. “Typically, the gang itself is both indispensable and a burden, even a threat, to the gangster: he needs the support of his soldiers, and it is by his ascent from the ranks that his self-assertion is measured; yet the gangster knows only too well how dangerous it is to rely on any ties, even those of blood” (Langford 142). [return to page 2]

10. A more nuanced reading would emphasize the challenge in the Indian gangster film of the impossibility of integrating the “legitimate” family with this new community in most of these films, not just a replacement of one with another.

11. The phrase refers to the novel’s concern with the other important phenomenon in contemporary Indian history, the political assertion of marginalized castes. But this figures much more prominently in the other narrative strand.

12. The promise of the heterosexual, nuclear family that the female object of desire represents does not in itself constitute a communitarian counterpoint to the kind of understanding of liberal individualism dramatized in the classical gangster paradigm. As so much feminist scholarship has highlighted, this model of the family has historically been designated as a private space ruled by individual men that is recognized by but outside the public sphere, whereas the communitarian paradigm sees the family in extended terms and as an alternate public sphere to the one claimed by the state.

13. In the series, Gaitonde’s initial participation in anti-Muslim violence before the Babri demolition is prompted by the offer of money to buy the model of Rolls Royce that Isa drives (S1E4 -36-37 until -31:04). His participation in the post-Babri riots is instigated by Subhadra’s murder for which Gaitonde believes Isa is responsible. This is just after Subhadra exhorts Gaitonde to acknowledge the demands of the Hindu community for him to avenge the Bombay bomb blasts orchestrated by Isa. Though Gaitonde seems to connect the two by saying that Subhadra’s murder had “awakened the inner Hindu” in him, he also says that he adopted the framework of communal violence simply to avenge his personal loss (S1E7 -24:27 until -16:36).

14. The conceit of the dead Gaitonde’s narratorial voice actually accompanying Sartaj in the latter’s attempts at uncovering the nuclear conspiracy turns out to not so much be a reclamation of agency but of a piece with the hallucinatory episodes that overtake both characters towards the end of season two as they experience withdrawal symptoms from the drug administered by Shukla’s cult.

15. Though this does not mean conspiracy theories are limited to socio-political margins. Recent scholarship emphasizes that conspiracy theory for large parts of history was a mainstream mode of knowledge that became marginalized only around mid-twentieth century (Butter and Knight). The centrality of conspiracy theories to populist discourses globally, including to Hindutva, in the present appears to have brought this mode back into prominence. For an argument about how a Hindutva conspiracy theory informs legislation in the present, see Sharma & Jenkins.

16. Classical Marxism does recognize the single overarching circuit of class but Zelizer’s circuits are much more disaggregated and contingent. [return to page 3]

17. Hirschman further points to a general resort to this idea, even outside the context of the discourse of liberalism, that some force is at work in conspiring towards the onwards march of history: Hegel’s idea of the dialectical “Cunning of Reason” as the force that makes History cohere and advance is Hirschman’s example (19), but we could also think of Marx’s belief that capitalism can be overcome by a workers’ society only by helping capitalism’s impersonal logic to play out fully. This is what allows Raymond Aron to speak of certain modern thought systems as secular religions.

18. See for example Vico’s remarks, cited by Hirschman: “out of these three great vices [of ferocity, avarice and ambition] which would certainly destroy man on earth, society thus causes the civil happiness to emerge. This principle proves the existence of divine providence….” (17). Anthony Giddens too notes: “Providential interpretations of history were major elements of Enlightenment culture, and it is not surprising that their residues are still to be found in modes of thinking in day-to-day life” (130).

19. Having first found an audience in the New Age movements of the North Atlantic, this “new spiritualism” gains significant ground in liberalizing India with the sponsorship of the state and the corporate sectors (Nanda).

20. Shukla’s discourse appears to be similar in the series, except that it has a significant emphasis on the idea of sacrifice. Moreover, unlike in the novel, this discourse is not simultaneous with Gaitonde’s success but a consolation for his failures.

21. After making his first deal with Shah, Gaitonde finds a prostitute who can speak English and asks her to do so during sex even though he cannot understand a word (66-7). Later, describing his efforts at learning the language, he speaks of making the language submit itself to him, but it is clear that he has to submit himself to it, a fact underlined by his embarrassed need to hide his learning from the members of his gang (245-46). Therefore, Pankaj Mishra’s claim that Gaitonde is contemptuous of the English-speaking class in India is at best a partial reading. As in so many things, Gaitonde’s understanding of his relationship to English is self-contradictory. His contempt is also a ressentiment born of aspiration. [return to page 4]

22. In many ways, Sacred Games marks an end point of a certain phase of the global Indian novel in English. Reports of the huge advance Chandra had received for it had marked it as another potential highpoint in a global phase starting with Salman Rushdie’s Might’s Children and consolidated by the work of authors such as Rohinton Mistry, Amitav Ghosh, and Arundhati Roy. The novel’s failure to live up to the hype (Kachka) coincided with the rise of Chetan Bhagat whose work appeals to a new, more “provincial” rather than global, English-speaking class in India. As Ulka Anjaria writes, “[W]e see throughout [Bhagat’s] works a series of formal and aesthetic experiments that have been largely absent in the Indian English novel before his, such as formulaic characterization, an aesthetics of self-help, an interpellative form that stages a dialogue with his readers, and the vernacularization of English, bringing it closer to the polyglossic speech of young urban India” (31).

23. However, it did not take long since for OTT platforms in India to come under state scrutiny. (Sumeda)

24. There is already a huge scholarship on the question of civil liberties and democratic freedom under the current regime, quite apart from the various statistical measurements announced by think-tanks. For an overview of both current trends, as well as their historical antecedents independent of the emergence of Hindutva majoritarianism, see the contributions Dobson and Masoud. On the question of the reconstruction of the state by the current regime, see Khosla & Vaishnav.

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