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 ens, 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 endnotes 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.