From partition to Bollywood movies
Sacred Games
Vikram Chandra
Penguin/Faber and Faber/HarperCollins
Vikram Chandra's massive novel (as long as Tolstoy's War and Peace) is not only an extraordinary narrative but also a brilliant commentary on India's underworld of crime and international intrigue, mostly during the past dozen yearsin short, unforgettable. If you pick up the book, you'd better be prepared for a long haulnot simply reading for a couple of nights. Fortunately, given its length and the dozens of significant characters, Chandra has provided a "Dramatis Personae" at the beginning, which you can flip back to and use to place a character into context.
Where to begin? Possibly at the ending (revealed near the beginning) when Ganesh Gaitonde, a notorious underworld gangster, is discovered dead in one of his houses in Mumbai. One of the secret police agent's remarks, "We found Gaitonde in a house in Bombay. The house was built like a very deep bunker, with hardened walls. We found the builder and the architect who built it for Gaitonde. They told us that it was done in ten days, from plans faxed in by Gaitonde. He told them not to worry about money, just finish it. They did. We have a copy of the plans. The title page and some other identifying labels had been removed or erased, but there was enough text to allow us to trace the plans to the source. They were downloaded from the internet, from a North American survivalist website 'How You Can Survive Doomsday'. We examined the structure in Bombay. Gaitonde built a nuclear fallout shelter."
Why would a hardened criminala killer, in fact, of dozens of peoplesuddenly build a nuclear fallout shelter and disappear into that site before police and other government officials even knew of the structure's existence or that Gaitonde (seemingly on every detective's watch list) had returned to Bombay from overseas?
The answer unravels with daring complexity, beginning with Gaitonde's youth, in flashbacks which take us back to India's partition, with periods of continued animosity and terrorism between India and Pakistan. And always Gaitonde (even in prison and in exile) gets his hands into everything that can be converted into profit: smuggling, drugs, counterfeiting, money laundering, Bollywood movies. Thus, the sweep of the narrative is vast, often including minor characters in sub-stories that are only tangentially related to the main story of Ganesh Gaitonde's rise and unexpected fall.
The fall is observed in the most minute detail by the second major character in the novel: Sartaj, a Sikh on the Bombay police force, whose own private life ironically parallels that of the man he stalks. Ostensibly a failure (both in his personal life and in the Bombay police force), Sartaj doggedly pursues Gaitonde and in the process rebuilds not only his marginalised position on the force but also his self-esteem as a man who thought he had lost his masculinity. There's plenty of blood in Sartaj's story also.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of "Sacred Games" is its segue from underworld crime to political intrigue. The West is obsessed with terrorism, especially the fear of nuclear mishap (or a dirty bomb), as doomsday bestsellers and Hollywood (let alone governments) remind us all the time. Fear is constantly ratcheted up as politicians try to keep their populations on the edge in order to justify the latest hijacking of citizens' thoughts and rights.
Thus, the fact that Chandra's novel does similarly, implying a possibility of nuclear war between India and Pakistan, can only be disturbing. Gaitonde's personal Guru remarks on one occasion: "Every golden age must be preceded by an apocalypse. It has always been so, and it will be so again…. For more than fifty years we have put off the fight on our borders, and suffered small humiliations and small bloodshed every day. We have been dishonored and disgraced, and have become used to living with this shame…. But enough. We will fight. The battle is necessary."
Sacred games (involving religious figures) which subsequently become political games (involving government figures) take a nasty turn when what they truthfully become is patriotic games. For all its surface adventures, for its disturbing characters, even for its relentless narrative, Sacred Games needs to be taken seriously as a disturbing commentary on fanaticism disguised as patriotism. Vikram Chandra begs us to understand that nationalism has become the latest refuge of the scoundrel.
Charles R. Larson is Professor of Literature at American University in Washington, DC .
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