copyright 2025, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media,
Jump Cut, No. 63, summer 2025

Genre, history, and adaptation:
Sacred Games (2006/2018-’19) and the Indian liberalization experience

by Feroz Hassan

“On the one hand, there is no doubt that human actions and social decisions tend to have consequences that were entirely unintended at the outset. But, on the other hand, these actions and decisions are often taken because they are earnestly and fully expected to have certain effects that then wholly fail to materialize.”
—Albert O. Hirschman (130-31; emphasis in original)

Vikram Chandra’s 2006 novel Sacred Games and its eponymous Web series adaptation (Netflix, 2018-’19) allegorize contemporary Indian history—which since the late 1980s and early ‘90s has been marked by, among other epochal phenomena, economic liberalization and the rise of Hindutva’s identitarian politics. As the novel and the series both seek to account for liberalization’s entwinement with Hindutva politics, they arrive at significantly different understandings of how this has come to be. At the outset, I would like to emphasize that these texts offer not transparent or adequate representations of whatever the experience of liberalization has been, but rather they allegorize it based on a stylized staging of very selective features of that experience. The focus here will be on how the texts deploy genre to grapple with history, and what history does to genre: in this case, that of the gangster film. To this end, the article deals almost entirely with just one of the two primary narrative strands of the texts, the one about, and narrated by, the gangster protagonist Ganesh Gaitonde.[1] [open notes in new window]

A key premise of my reading is that both the novel and the series place their gangster protagonist at the crossroads of two paradigms of the gangster film genre: the classical Hollywood paradigm of the early 1930s and what I will call the communitarian paradigm emblematized by especially the first two The Godfather films (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972 & 1974). What the two paradigms share is the allegorical positioning of the gangster as a figure of free enterprise. The difference is that in the classical paradigm, this entrepreneurial subject is shaped by the imperative of individual success and so his subjectivity is modeled on a specific political-economic understanding of liberal individualism. In the community paradigm, the ideal of success is from the beginning defined trans-personally through the interests of family and community, and so the subject of capital here is self-consciously embedded in a communitarian imperative. Gaitonde’s narrative is one of a journey from the classical to the communitarian paradigm of the gangster mythology, which is another way of saying that for both the texts the subject of Indian liberalization disidentifies from communitarian claims before finding themself unexpectedly re-embedded in them. In these fictions, community claims come to signify either a paternalistic state (pre-liberalization) or identitarian politics (post-liberalization). These are therefore allegories of the failure of the liberalized subject’s aspirations when confronted with the rise of Hindutva politics. The very important difference between the two versions will be in how the liberal subject understands and responds to his[2] embedding in Hindutva’s communitarian-identitarian claims.

The two narratives of Sacred Games instantiate the intersection of adaptation strategies with concerns of genre. In general, there is a “fundamentally chronological relation between literature and film” when we study adaptation (Scholtz 4). However, the novel Sacred Games in many ways assumes the priority of the gangster genre in cinema in its attempts to narrate the unfolding history of Indian economic liberalization. The novel does not adapt a particular film, but it certainly adapts a film genre to the concerns of the Indian novel in English to allegorize the experience of economic liberalization. I will not be making any overarching claims about adaptation and the relation of genre to history because I have preferred to use this space to keep the focus on the texts whose intersections with a specific genre and a specific history are significant in themselves. But since I rely on a certain framing of the gangster genre across such different socio-historical contexts for my argument, a few preliminary comments on the essay’s engagement with the genre are in order.

I understand the history of gangster cinema cannot be reduced to what I am calling the classical and communitarian paradigms, and that scholarship over the past two decades has questioned the priority given to the handful of early 1930s’ gangster films for understanding the genre as a whole (Mason). It is also true that not every early 1930s’ gangster film hews to the characterization of the classical paradigm that I work with. For example, Gentleman’s Fate (Mervyn Le Roy, 1931) could be read an instance of the communitarian paradigm whose prominence I here (reasonably) identify with The Godfather films, while a later gangster film such as White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949) can be seen as inhabiting the logic of the classical gangster film even after we take into account the very different U.S. film industry and social landscape that inform its particulars.

I justify my heuristic schema of two paradigms on a couple of grounds. The first is that the features I identify as belonging to the paradigms and constituting their difference, such as the gangster as a figure of free enterprise and his differing relationship to community across the two paradigms, have had some popular critical currency. This is the understanding that the novel and the series seem to inherit and build upon in their characterization of Gaitonde. They are not concerned with sampling all the screen manifestations of the gangster but may be seen to be in dialogue with the screen gangster’s most iconic instances. These points should become clear as I build my argument. In any case, I do not posit generic categories and sub-categories as stable since my argument hinges on the fact that the texts I am reading are themselves caught between paradigms.

The second justification concerns the fact that genre naming is, as Rick Altman has argued, an exercise with multiple stakeholders such as filmmakers, the trade, audiences, and critics, each of whose imperatives can differ. He takes the example of the substantification of the woman’s film and family melodrama as distinct genres by feminist critics even when those terms were never used in the discourse contemporaneous with the release of films grouped under them. Altman finds this move “entirely expected [and] reasonable” in the interests of staking out critical positions (85). I frame the Hollywood gangster legacy in the way I do because I seek to demonstrate that it is a valid and productive entry point into understanding the dilemmas attending the gangster as an allegorical figure in the Indian context as constructed by the texts that I discuss.

The gangster as the subject of liberalization

Vikram Chandra’s preparation for the novel extends back to the mid ‘90s when one of the two protagonists, the police inspector Sartaj Singh, appears in his story collection, Love and Longing in Bombay (1997). This was a period when the Bombay underworld not only had a major say in film financing but also furnished the subject matter for several key films (Creekmur). Therefore, a temptation would be either to read the novel’s construction of the gangster as mythologizing the lives of one or several prominent real-life figures from this period, or to take the Indian gangster film as the prototype for the allegorical resonances of the novel’s gangster. The option of reading the texts against historical figures would not do justice to the broader resonance of the gangster figure with the idea of entrepreneurship in general and with a certain kind of liberal subjectivity in particular. The option of reading them straightaway with reference to Indian gangster films would not reckon with how fundamentally different Gaitonde is from most prior Indian screen gangsters. A more relevant point of departure to approach his character would be through the mythology of the Hollywood gangster developed in the early 1930s in films such as Little Caesar (Mervyn Leroy, 1931), The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931), and Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932).

Robert Warshow’s seminal essay on the Hollywood gangster as a “tragic hero” sees the figure as an allegory of the American “without background or advantages, with only… ambiguous skills” who “is required to make his way, to make his life and impose it on others” to achieve “individual pre-eminence” (131, 133; emphasis in original). This “making his life” and “imposing it on others” is achieved through activities that are “actually a form of rational enterprise.” Thomas Schatz follows Warshow in calling the gangster of this era of Hollywood “the perverse alter-ego of the ambitious, profit-minded American male” (85). More recent scholarship on the genre is also aware of the centrality of this equation even in the genre’s post-classical instances (Langford 144; Wilson 1-2). Like Warshow, who emphasizes the gangster’s need for self-assertion (“imposing [himself] on others”), other scholars have seen the gangster as dramatizing the ideal of individuation, opposed to both traditional structures and to the anonymizing alienation of the city (Mason 13-15; Wilson 3).

Where these scholars emphasize the ideology of individual success in relation to the “American myth” or ideology, aiming to ground these films in their national context, I will be using the broader characterization of the gangster as a figure of liberal entrepreneurial subjectivity. In this characterization, entrepreneurship refers not just to organized crime as a vehicle for the expansion of capital but to the gangster’s project of expanding the realm of the self. As Warshow points out, we get to see very little of the “rational enterprise” that the gangster figure nonetheless allegorizes, since the primary enterprise here is the self (131).

As for the use of the terms “liberal” and “liberal subjectivity,” I do understand that the gangster figure’s dramatization of them cannot do justice to the varied philosophical understandings of liberal subjectivity that might see this as a caricature. If it is a caricature, or better yet a fantasy, it is of selective features of a specific strain of liberal subjectivity that C. B. Macpherson has called “possessive individualism.” The first two postulates of possessive individualism see the individual subject as “the proprietor of his own person and capacities, for which he owes nothing to society,” and emphasizes this subject’s freedom from the will of others and so from any relations except those that serve its interests (263-264)[3] As a selective dramatization, it is a fantasy that narrativizes these features as unbound by even a minimal concern with broader economic and political postulates that Macpherson goes on to list, postulates by which possessive individualism seeks to accommodate the co-existence of individual subjectivities.

Now, what is taken for granted in the Hollywood gangster film is that the gangster as a figure of liberal entrepreneurial subjectivity provides an ambiguous but strong locus for spectatorial identification. The genre, as Warshow argues, may ultimately dramatize the impossibility of the ideal of success to which liberal subjectivity is captive, but he concedes that the appeal of the gangster lies in his embodiment of spectacular success, however transient. However, in India such an ambiguous but powerful point of identification with the gangster was unavailable for most of Hindi film history.

It is one of the commonplaces of Hindi cinema that big-business and organized crime have a symbiotic relationship. Its gallery of villains has often collapsed the businessman and the gangster figure (Virdi 87-120). But even without this explicit relation the businessman remained a suspect figure for most of Hindi cinema’s history. This may be explained with reference to post-independence Indian state’s suspicion of private enterprise. Suspicions of business as crime and as an extra-territorial threat to the national community preempt the emergence of gangster film in the classical Hollywood form in an Indian context. When Indian cinema made the equation between the gangster and the entrepreneur, it was to condemn both.  In the U.S. gangster film, the gangster-hero’s unapologetic embrace of an ambiguous entrepreneurial promise preempts any internally coherent condemnation. For most of Indian cinema’s history, this unapologetic ambiguity is absent.[4]

The most significant early appearance of an unapologetically ambiguous gangster hero on the Bombay screen landscape comes as late as the 1980s. And he does not appear in a Hindi film, but a Tamil one set in the Bombay underworld, Nayakan (Mani Ratnam, 1987), a film strongly influenced by The Godfather.[5] Even here, this is not the gangster from the classical paradigm. As in The Godfather, organized crime here figures as a family enterprise, and the patriarch plays the role of a community leader. This variation creates a community paradigm for the gangster film.

The 1980s was a time when the Indian state was contemplating economic liberalization without following up on it substantively, while the country’s unorganized working class started forming a bridge with the petro-capitalism of West Asia. This might explain the cinematic imagination’s occasional openness to the ambiguous promise of capital.[6] Yet, the fact that the Indian gangster genre does so under the community paradigm resonates with a popular conception of the Indian business firm as an (extended) family concern, now imagined through a generic trope as legitimately aspiring to emerge from the shackles placed on it by a regulatory state. Thus, in the community paradigm, kinship networks and filial obligations provide a horizon for the theme of precipitate ambition that it shares with the classical gangster film, one that has remained pre-eminent in Hindi cinema’s treatment of the gangster-hero right until Raees (Rahul Dholakia, 2017), which came out a year before the series, with some variable exceptions such as Company (Ram Gopal Verma, 2002), Don (Farhan Akhtar, 2006) and Don 2 (Farhan Akhtar, 2011).

Gaitonde in both the novel and the series is to begin with conceived as aspiring to the subjectivity of the classical gangster who seeks individuation through enterprise. The Gaitonde of the novel emerges from a past, a family, and a name he wishes never to revisit. For him, “there was only this day, this day’s night, and every day ahead” (52). In both versions of the text, family and community are strongly conflated with religious identity. This conflation serves to narrate the emergence of liberal subjectivity as a break from filial community underwritten by religious identity. The break from filial community in Sacred Games comes as an act of disidentification, whereas for the typical Hindi film gangster, the break from the family is usually enforced by circumstances.

The novel turns late and briefly to the facts of Gaitonde’s childhood in the hinterland at a crucial turning point in his relationship with a spiritual mentor (600-04). In contrast, the series foregrounds and builds upon those facts very early in order to clarify what exactly Gaitonde breaks away from in symbolic terms, and to give it a very precise historical referent. As a child, he develops contempt for his father, a Brahmin priest, for the man’s ritualist mendicancy, meekness, and inability to satisfy his mother’s sexual and consumerist desires. In his flight from his home and village to Bombay, Gaitonde pitches his aspirations against everything the father stands for: meekness in the face of both society and religion and a sparseness of ambition in all realms. And this meek pre-liberalization subject in the series is directly correlated in the series with an “emasculating” state when Gaitonde dates his arrival in Bombay to the time of the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi. Specifically, he identifies the Emergency with the coercive sterilization campaigns led by her son Sanjay Gandhi. In this period of Indian history, the Bombay underworld becomes for Gaitonde the refuge of the entrepreneurial spirit that chafes against the protectionist state (S1E1).[7]

This narrative of emergence from identity into individuation makes Gaitonde a classical rather than a communitarian gangster in both versions of Sacred Games. The additional strong marking of the pre-liberalization subject in the figure of the father as an upper-caste religious figure echoes older assumptions about “[the] inherent incapability of non-Western religions to absorb the spirit of capitalism” (Saxena and Sharma, 241). Both the novel and the series attempt to come to terms with the history that has given the lie to such assumptions. But Gaitonde as gangster-entrepreneur starts from these assumptions and so sets up an opposition between the liberal subject and religion: “I had no use for temples, I despised incense and comfortable lies and piety, I did not believe in gods or goddesses…” (63). In the series, this is accentuated further by Gaitonde’s suspicion that to overcome the sovereign divinity of religion, he needs to replicate his own sovereignty in its image. This yields the series’ most popular dialogue: “Kabhi kabhi to lagta hain ki apun ich bhagwan hain" ("Sometimes I think I myself am God”) (S1E1 prologue).

Disidentification from religious identity has never been a part of the Hindi screen gangster-hero’s mythology,[8] and it is highly doubtful that enterprise as a social experience was ever in India one of emergence out of religion. But using Gaitonde to stage an initial opposition between a liberal subjectivity and religion again fits in with the logic of the classical gangster genre. As Fran Mason writes, the 1930s gangster films articulate “the opposition between tradition or residual ideology and social change, in which [the gangster figure] dramatizes… the liberation of the individual and desire” (4). This move to adapt a mythology of liberal subjectivity as an initial counterpoint to identitarian-communitarian claims needs to be understood here with reference to the subject-positions that the novel and Web series occupy in Indian cultural production.

Chandra’s text is an Indian novel in English, a form that at the turn of the twenty-first century was as much global as it was national, using the language of the country’s professional elite. It is, therefore, a product of a liberal subjectivity that is officially skeptical of the imbrication of liberalism with identitarian politics. As Priyamvada Gopal writes of this body of work, “The rewriting of the idea of a plural and secular India in the ferocious image of communal and majoritarian forces constitutes a recurring theme in a great deal of… anglophone fiction” of this time (177; see also Srivastava).

The Web series is a production by a multinational platform, made by filmmakers whose careers have been forged in a film industry shaped by the forces of liberalization. One of the directors, Anurag Kashyap, and one of the screenwriters, Varun Grover, are well-known critics of Hindutva politics, but they are also figures who have played a role in forcing open the form of popular cinema in India without falling back on the state-sponsored realism of the arthouse cinemas of pre-2000s India. Their careers have been shaped by a formalized, free-market film industry rather than by state sponsorship. They, too, like the Indian English novelist might see themselves as part of a global liberal sensibility having to come to terms with its identitarian Other. What is important, therefore, is that they acknowledge originary assumptions about the incompatibility of economic liberalism and identitarian politics, assumptions that any serious commentator on contemporary history would blush to own up to now but which have had a certain historical reality.

For example, when certain free-market liberals, not necessarily those involved in making the series, decided to support the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the primary electoral vehicle for Hindutva ideology, in the 2014 elections, it was with the understanding that the party’s commitment to market-friendly policies would neutralize its identitarian priorities (Donthi). This is a point to which I will return in the conclusion. Here, I am suggesting that the liberal genealogy of both the versions makes the mythology of the classical gangster as a counterpoint to identitarian ideology attractive, even if this counterpoint may not be intuitive in the Indian social context.

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] 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).

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.

The liberal uses of providence

In the novel, instead of seeing the inevitability of dealing with the state and communitarian agents to continue his operations as regression, Gaitonde strains philosophically to integrate them into an overall realm of action dictated by his own self. He does not simply concede their primacy, just as the discourse of liberalization did not simply withdraw with the rise of Hindutva politics. He now seeks to negotiate his ascendance over them even as he accommodates their claims. To understand how he goes about it we need to identify more precisely the lesson that Gaitonde learns about his liberal subjectivity.

The incident with Dipika and the marriage with Subhadra, both of which precede Gaitonde’s participation in the riots, had already started to tap into Gaitonde’s need to commit to extra-personal notions of the self. Thus, even though he justifies his participation in the riots on business grounds, he finds that it has significant consequences for his self-identity. Gaitonde cannot consummate his marriage with Subhadra despite being able to have sex with prostitutes, signifying his as-yet-incomplete integration into the community. After the riots, he finds himself sexually restored when people identify him as a strong Hindu don. This suggests that the expansion of his range of self-identity cannot remain restricted to family narrowly conceived but needs to accommodate a larger communitarian-identitarian realm. After consummating his marriage to Subhadra following the riots, Gaitonde draws the following conclusion.

[Subhadra said,] “… Yesterday they were saying, now finally he’s showing his true strength. Now we know he’s a true Hindu leader.”

“Hindu?”

There were Hindus, and there were Muslims. Everything sits in pairs, in opposites, so brutal and so lovely.

Until then, all my life, I had felt like a ghost… I had come from nowhere and made a name for myself, but I had always felt that I was playing a part, many parts, and that I could switch from this name to another easily, that if I am Ganesh Gaitonde today, I could be Suleiman Isa tomorrow… I had held back from allowing the fragments inside me to settle into a shape, a form. I had led my men to believe in me, in Ganesh Gaitonde, and always secretly despised them for believing in me, because… I had believed in nothing. I had committed to nothing. And so I was a phantom of a man, capable of frenzied couplings with whores, in whose sopping chuts I turned to make myself real, but I was not fit for marriage. Marriage is belief, marriage is faith… I had been incapable of marriage, incomplete, imperfect and so impotent. But all the roads I had walked, thinking myself alone, all those broken paths had brought me inevitably to belonging, to the certainty of becoming something, one thing. I had burnt bastis, and so I had chosen… I stood ready now. I knew who I was. I was a Hindu bhai.” (395-96)

Here, Gaitonde encounters the limits of the plasticity of liberal subjectivity that are not reducible to some primordially communitarian Indian context as opposed to some properly liberal social contexts in the North Atlantic. The key ideas that Gaitonde starts out with are the plasticity of liberal subjectivity and its disembeddedness from the social contexts it traverses. Even as Gaitonde works in social contexts, he holds back from committing to them affectively, refusing to let them have a share in his subjectivity. He sees himself as the dis-embedded subject of the conventional understandings of capital. Such understandings see capital as an abstraction capable of mediating all exchange but, as many would argue, in the process reducing the object(ive)s of exchange themselves to abstractions. While capital has often been critiqued on these grounds for creating conditions of psychic atomization, Gaitonde sees its abstracting potential as liberating for the self. What he learns, though, as he is drawn into communitarian claims are lessons from more recent scholarship on money and capital forms. This scholarship emphasizes that the market economy is productive of, and is in turn shaped by, constantly evolving emotional and social relationships, and so its promises and its discontents lie elsewhere than its capacity for abstraction (Illouz; Konings; Zelizer; Giddens 109-114).

Viviana Zelizer speaks of the existence within capitalism of complex and varied “circuits of commerce, in an old sense of the word where commerce meant conversation, interchange, intercourse, and mutual shaping” (315). These circuits have complex features and rules of engagement, but the basic idea is that different realms of economic exchange make different locations of associational life possible for the same person without such associations acquiring the closedness implied by the idea of community. A circuit is therefore something that contradicts the idea of atomization, but also keeps the promise of a more fluid subjectivity open. People under capitalism learn to be aware of the complex rules of intercourse across the multiple circuits they traverse. This is compatible with the sense of having an autonomous subjectivity promised by capitalism, but such autonomy thrives on “the plastic nature of role-taking” that these circuits require, and which Gaitonde comes to think of as his “phantom” subjectivity. Atomism cannot automatically be the source of the discontents of capitalism since these circuits demand a subjectivity that is responsive to what is outside of itself. The conventional understanding of capital obscures the fact that the subject becomes affectively grafted into the shifting circuits which it navigates.[16] Gaitonde, who works with this understanding initially, imagines an endlessly plastic subjectivity without realizing that the circuits he navigates—such as his relationship with Paritosh Shah, his gang, his dealings with Shukla, the Intelligence Service and Jojo—are committing him more than superficially.

When the time comes for Gaitonde to acknowledge that his self-remaking embeds him into circuits that develop claims on him, he needs some way of thinking that they will allow him to retain the autonomy of his own self. He does this by invoking a grand, cosmic design, in which “everything sits in pairs, in opposites, so brutal and so lovely,” and within which he has a privileged position of “belonging.” What finally authorizes his acquiescence to the identity of a Hindu bhai is not any specific theology of Hinduism, or even an imagined history of a persecuted Hindu identity that feeds Hindutva discourse, but an alternate, quasi-theological conception of a cosmic design centered on himself that may crudely be designated as a sense of destiny: “But all the roads I had walked… had brought me inevitably to belonging.”

Gaitonde’s dilemma in the Indian context is similar to several historical attempts to philosophically reconcile the primacy of self-interest with the necessarily social mode in which all selves exist. Albert Hirschman’s history of the philosophy of self-interest demonstrates that arguments for self-interest in the eighteenth century were made on an assumption of its capacity to contain social conflict (“the passions”), and therefore had to contend with a collective horizon for the individual self. Further, Hirschman points out that every argument in favor of material self-interest as capable of containing social conflict, or of ultimately capable of working in the collective material interest, had to resort to some idea of an impersonal force that makes it possible. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is the most famous.[17] This resort to a quasi-theological force that is neither personal nor collective but transcendental gave these arguments a providential character.[18] This resort to a providential framework is also at work at the level of individuals’ perception of their own fortunes.

Max Weber argues that one of the key psychological roles played by major religions in the articulation of an “economic ethic” has been to provide a “theodicy of good fortune for those who are fortunate” (271), that is, an argument for why the fortunate deserve to be fortunate. In modernity, and under a capitalistic ethic, such a theodicy may seem redundant, as it does to Gaitonde in his initial phase when he attributes his fortune to his own efforts rather than to communitarian patronage. But at the moment that he needs to decide whether to take part in the riots, what holds his fortunes hostage is precisely the need to align himself with the Hindutva political community. An earlier Gaitonde who had not recognized the limits of his capacity for autonomy should not have had any hesitations aligning himself with it since it would simply be good business sense to accept the alignment. But the incident with Dipika has primed him to notice the affective commitment that business alignments also require. The terms on which he would now deserve his fortune are about to shift in a way that would demote the primacy of the autonomous self. This is a moment of crisis internal to the liberal self that is resolved by the invocation of a theodicy of fortune articulated by Shukla, a discourse that begins the transition of Shukla’s status with Gaitonde from a client to a spiritual mentor.

Weber elaborates that theodicies of fortune focused on individuals had given rise to new cults of “redemption” in which certain penances, prescriptions and abstinences administered by a “spiritual adviser” justify the acquisition and maintenance of good fortune. Shukla is such a spiritual adviser, someone who is unironically referred to in current public discourse as a “spiritual entrepreneur.” But, as a representative of a modern cult of redemption, Shukla speaks not of abstinence, penances and prescriptions but of methodical self-gratification. As Nandini Gooptu writes about the “New Spiritualist” (NS) discourses in contemporary India,

“The current concern with the self is… devoid of connotations of personal asceticism, self- abnegation, and world- renunciation. Instead, the primary concern now is with self- development, self- fulfilment, and self- empowerment” (74).

She argues that NS produces “an active, authorial self” for the neoliberal subject (76). Thus, the providential frameworks identified by Hirschman, Weber, and Giddens have an intensified contemporary historical resonance that the novel taps into.[19]

In keeping with the logic of contemporary theodicies of fortune, Shukla does not moralize in any conventional sense but merely trains Gaitonde to see his self-gratification as part of a “cosmic design.”[20] His role in smuggling arms to “protect” the Hindus is a part of that design, but he does not understand the design as an end in itself. Rather, he believes that the design relies on his agential or starring role to realize itself so that its existence confirms the primacy of his own self. The larger nuclear conspiracy remains hidden from Gaitonde, so that Shukla’s philosophy is not, unlike in the series, a vehicle for revenge against absolute failure, but a pre-emption of the failure by a promise of psychic integration. The self may no longer be absolutely autonomous or plastic, but retains its primacy. If, as in the series, the identitarian discourse in the novel preys on a crisis in which the liberal subject finds itself, the contours of the crisis the novel reveals are, unlike in the series, specific to liberal aspirations and liberal failures.

Gaitonde’s adoption of the providential view is an effect of his longing to integrate the various circuits (in Zelizer’s sense) of his existence into a cosmic vision, circuits that he would have earlier been content to keep discrete as a marker of his plastic subjectivity. As these circuits press their claims upon him, he feels that he needs to integrate them around himself in order to retain the primacy of his own self. We can understand the intensity of this need from the intensity of the frustration at his failure to obtain it. Gaitonde wishes to but cannot discuss Dipika’s claim on him with his men. He cannot bring himself to tell his wife that he murdered Salim Kaka for purely mercenary reasons, because that kind of murder is beyond the pale of the communitarian imagination she represents. He learns English because he understands it as cultural capital, but he is too embarrassed about it to let his men know. He has a similarly secret telephonic relationship with Jojo, a hard-headed television producer who sends him escorts. He cannot tell his intelligence handlers about his dealings with Shukla. And most of all, he cannot communicate his spiritual “discoveries” for fear of being mocked for seeking a validation by design:

“I had to keep all these segments of my world apart, Jojo from Guru-ji, Guru-ji from Mr. Kumar [his Intelligence handler], and some of myself from everything” (559).

Until the end, Shukla’s theodicy remains for Gaitonde a promise of the revelation of a pre-ordained integration of the circuits centered around himself.

This, then, is the crisis of this liberalization subject’s navigation of its circuits of commerce. This subject can accept the discrete character of the various circuits it negotiates so long as it does so successfully, since that character also assures its ability to enter and leave them at will. However, a moment of crisis in the successful navigation of the circuits can make the subject aware that their distribution and design is, inevitably, part of a much more complex network that exceeds its own subjectivity. In such circumstances, the discrete character of the circuits begins to appear like an aggravation because the circuits’ autonomy from the liberal subject appears to stand for limits to the priority of the self.

The way to repair the sense of disorientation could become, as it does in the novel, a desire for the perfect integration of the various circuits into each other through some impersonal force, as if this manner of securing them accords with a transcendental design or at least mitigates the threat by concentrating it along a single frontier (here, of communitarian identity) as opposed to multiple, scattered ones. Religion, understood here as the impersonal force sidelined by the empowerment of the human subject, could here step back in to contain the potential of the circuits to spin away from the liberal subject. Its reconstructed, providential discourse makes its identitarian-communitarian character palatable for such a subject. It offers the frontier along which real and imagined threats to one’s identity may be concentrated. It is, thus, that Gaitonde comes to sentimentally identify with the communitarian gangster Varadrajan of Nayakan, while his rival Isa does the same with The Godfather (559). However, as Jojo’s mockery of this reminds us, such an identification is simply the wishful conceit of a Gaitonde uncertain of his moorings rather than an actual parallel between him and Varadarajan (725-26).

The failure to achieve a compensatory integration of his various circuits is the primary failure of Gaitonde’s liberal subjectivity in the novel, not Shukla’s deception of him as in the series. When Gaitonde discovers that Shukla had been using him to smuggle nuclear weapons meant to destroy Mumbai, he is horrified not merely at the scale of destruction planned but more so by the loss of the consolation of the grand design. The grand design turns out to have not been centered on him. His last conversation with Shukla on the phone ends in Ganesh’s realization that Shukla’s plans are irrevocable and that the latter’s cosmic design never had more than an instrumental role for him. The following lines sum up the impact of this realization on him:

“And then there was a click, and he was gone.

The cars sped by me, bleeding their trails of light in the dusk. I felt as if I was falling. Then, in that moment, I didn’t think of my boys or millions of people of the country or the world. I thought only of me. That faint metallic snap in my ear sliced through my neck and into my stomach, and left me alone. I knew he wouldn’t come back. I wouldn’t find him, and he would not call me again. I was alone. Once again, I was Ganesh Gaitonde setting out into an unknown world, a knife hidden under my shirt.” (839)

This particular loss of the orientation first provided and then withdrawn by Shukla, rather than his deceit, is what Gaitonde cannot accept, and is the latter’s decisive failure in the novel. The novel and the series both see the susceptibility of the Indian liberalized subject to Hindutva’s political project in terms of an impasse in self-assertion. But where in the series the identitarian discourse creates and accentuates the impasse in order to co-opt the liberal subject, the novel relies on the questionable psychic resources that the liberal subject deploys to deal with the crisis. As such, the novel paints a picture of liberal self-deception and restores the liberal subject’s agency in its own failure.

Conclusion

I have argued here that both versions of Sacred Games deploy the mythology of the gangster as a figure of free enterprise who emerges on the cusp of Indian liberalization. In doing this, they place the gangster protagonist Gaitonde at the crossroads of two paradigms of the gangster film: the classical gangster figure from 1930s Hollywood and the communitarian gangster from The Godfather films. He starts out as a classical gangster figure who dramatizes an amplified understanding of liberal subjectivity as possessive individualism. His emergence is predicated on the rejection of a paternalist state and community identified with the primacy of given identities, especially religious identity. This is an innovation in relation to the history of the Indian screen gangster hero who has overwhelmingly been a figure whose self-interest is defined in relation to the claims of the community.

In the course of his rise, Gaitonde runs up against the persistence of state and communitarian claims, corresponding to the rise of Hindutva politics simultaneous with liberalization in India, and so he is called upon to remodel himself along the lines of the communitarian gangster figure. Where Gaitonde in the series collaborates with them under protest, seeing the state in particular as an implacable adversary, the Gaitonde in the novel seeks to integrate them philosophically into a realm defined by the primacy of his own self. The difference in his response is also a difference in how the two versions imagine the relationship between the multiple agents that represent claims on Gaitonde: family, gang, state, religion. These function autonomously in the novel, whereas they are revealed to be coordinated and dictated by the primacy of an apocalyptic identitarian imagination in the series. I have argued that these differences speak to the difference in modes of apprehending the simultaneous emergence of liberalization and Hindutva politics in the India of the past three decades or so. Where the series narrates this history in a paranoid mode that claims to uncover a conspiracy against the liberal subject by identitarian forces, the novel examines the mediating role of providential frameworks in reconciling liberal subjectivity with identitarian discourses.

I will conclude with some remarks on the choice of a different explanatory mode in the series from that of the novel. The first reason begins as internal to the problem of dealing with a classical gangster figure beyond the logic of the genre. The classical gangster’s rise and fall, ending in death, is precipitate and so this paradigm has no strong point of reference for exploring the re-embedding of such a gangster figure in communitarian claims. Gaitonde’s unwilling transition to the parameters of the communitarian paradigm, rather than an origin within it, brings about a cognitive dissonance in him that the two versions handle differently.

The novel chooses to develop the gangster-as-entrepreneurial-self figure beyond its screen persona to the extent that things like learning English and computing make of Gaitonde something more than simply the flamboyant, assertive gangster of the classical paradigm, though he remains that as well. He becomes a rationalizing-reflective liberal subject whose resources of self-deception are no longer drawn solely from the iconography of the genre. This allows the novel to plug into the circulation of providential discourses of the self circulating in post-liberalization India. This also points to the novel’s imagination of the liberal subject as necessarily aspiring to the cultural capital represented by the English-speaking elite even if one of its distinguishing qualities is the extensive use of vernacular slang of Mumbai.[21] The early 2000s was a time when to many “the triumph of English was obvious and indisputable” (Paranjape ix).

Gaitonde in the series never goes beyond the expressive strategies of self-assertion and flamboyance available to the classical gangster even when he finds his autonomy almost completely erased by the return of communitarian claims. This may strangely have something to do with the question of language as it has developed since the time of the novel. While English still very much retains its symbolic value for the aspirational subject of liberalization, certain gestures of domestication, if not resistance, to its primacy have emerged in the interim from within the liberalizing discourse. I cannot do justice to its complexity, but we don’t have to go far to find an instance of it in the voice of one of the series’ directors, Anurag Kashyap. Kashyap claims that he was approached by U.S. production companies years before the Netflix project to adapt Chandra’s novel into an English-language production. He refused then, and now still insists that he would not make any India-based production in English (Naahar).

Kashyap’s films are a part of a much broader emergence in Indian popular culture of the non-metropolitan figure as the more authentic subject of liberalization in its third decade, one who insists on the vernacularization of liberalization.[22] A certain ironic treatment, if not outright refusal, of the entitled refinements of the English language follows this insistence. This is made explicit on a couple of occasions. The first is the satirical portrait of the filmmaker whom Gaitonde employs to direct his biopic, named after Ram Gopal Verma with whom Kashyap collaborated on gangster films at the turn of the century. This English-speaking director is completely clueless about the underworld argot and so a figure of mockery (S2E3 -23:40). In another instance, when Gaitonde returns to Mumbai from his exile, he is greeted with a “Welcome” by his aide only to be mocked as inauthentic by Gaitonde (S2E6 -23:15).

The series’ ironic take on language is not limited to English but extends to the highly Sanskritized Hindi that Shukla and his aides speak. This bit of irony is another strategy by which the series maintains the liberal subject’s distinction from the identitarian discourse that ensnares it. Thus, the Gaitonde of the series too sees that a certain ideal of self-cultivation is tied up with language but sees this self-cultivation as also the erasure of the authentic self. To be clear, the series does not deny reason or reflection to Gaitonde as evidenced by his highly sophisticated conspiracy narration, but the language of liberalization for him remains about self-assertion and consumption, and so more in keeping with the original logic of the classical gangster figure. This is not meant as a mark of the vernacular subject’s unfitness for liberalization but rather to mark it as the authentic subject of that phenomenon.

That a multinational platform finally endorsed an Indian-language adaptation of the novel must have felt like a market endorsement of Kashyap’s position. And, indeed, the series’ enactment of the criteria by which the classical gangster measures his success—violent self-assertion—made of Gaitonde a wildly popular character in the first season of the series. The free use of abusive language in a series not yet constrained by the extent of state censorship to which films screened in the Indian theaters and on television are subject has been perceived as a marker of authenticity in representation, and a liberating consequence of a creative space not yet curtailed by the state’s presence (Sen; Sood).[23] But, in the novel, Gaitonde’s sense of inadequacy in the face of the English-speaking elite provides him with enough self-doubt to steer him both towards more nuanced maneuvers of self-deception as well as to an eventual recognition of the inadequacies of his liberal self. Gaitonde’s refusal of that very self-doubt in the series, even as he begins to doubt the whole world, makes his mode of apprehending that world inevitably paranoid, and not in any productive sense.

Lastly, the question remains as to why the series forgoes the liberal subject’s self-examination, especially when it was available to it from the source novel, in favor of a paranoid mode that serves primarily to testify to the intensity of the historic failure of liberal aspirations. This may betray the more intense anxieties about the erosion of civil liberties and the capture of state and its institutions by Hindutva forces on the back of the historic 2014 mandate for the BJP.[24] In this case, it may simply be sounding out the intensification of the failure since the novel was published. However, this strategic incoherence on the part of the series, what I have called its “insanity plea,” is also a refusal to account for Indian liberalism’s equally recent and much more damaging alliance with Hindutva politics.

When it seemed inevitable that the BJP would return to power in 2014, a majority of market-friendly liberals looked forward to it as a harbinger of more liberal economic governance. This was enough to diminish any concerns for the polity stemming from the party’s identitarian politics (Donthi). As time has gone on and as those concerns have unsurprisingly turned out to be well-founded, many advocates of economic liberalism have either remained unconcerned by it or plead deception, disappointment, or helplessness.

Gurcharan Das and Tavleen Singh are good examples of liberals pleading disappointment, as if their overlooking of the sectarian dangers represented by the BJP was a reasonable bet on “the economically liberal wing” of the party against its “culturally conservative wing,” and that economic liberalism automatically enforces political liberalism. What they do not acknowledge is that they were willing to countenance the danger in exchange for an economic pay-off for the market. In the event, not only did the pay-off not materialize, but the regime has been seen as accelerating “the destruction of capital” in the country that began after 2011 (Damodaran). This gives them the opportunity to read the regime’s dismal track record on civil liberties and its investment in remodeling the state along the lines of majoritarian identity as tied to its failures on the economic front. Looking back at their support for it, they could, like Gaitonde in the series, claim a hijacking of their economic agenda by identitarian nationalism. In this sense, the series is a perfect allegory of a certain liberal subject’s preference for the narrative of deception rather than a frank appraisal of its own culpability.

Notes