Sacred Games: Between god and gunfire

The other day, an acquaintance asked me if I prayed. I replied that I had sincerely prayed exactly once, and not finding the experience all that it was cracked up to be, never returned to it. With a beatific smile that couldn’t hide an underlying pity, she said if I had done it exactly once, then my reasons must have been intensely personal and therefore selfish, narrow, and myopic. Religion, it seems, is a by-product of looking within, a process of untethering the self from ego and insecurity. Why, then, does it do the opposite so often? The answer, of course, is that religion on paper is a world away from the lived realities of its organised variety — which circa 2018 is a metonym for large-scale, seemingly limitless power.

Towards the end of the first season of the Netflix series Sacred Games , an adaptation of Vikram Chandra’s 2006 novel of the same name, the battered slumlord Ganesh Gaitonde (Nawazuddin Siddiqui, in red-hot form) has a quasi-religious epiphany during a conversation with Guruji (Pankaj Tripathi, who just cannot be kept out of the good stuff these days). Gaitonde is previously seen dissing politicians whose career hinges on communal polarisation. Yet, in this moment, we see a vulnerable (he has been tortured for two weeks straight at this point) Gaitonde falling into the same trap that he perceives everyone around him to be fooled by. With a mixture of spiritual hokum and tough talk about defending the motherland against mysterious, malicious forces, Guruji manipulates Gaitonde expertly, until he believes he has been chosen from millions for a special task.

Power play

Sacred Games , by which I mean the novel as well as the show (by the third episode, we realise there are small but significant plot divergences between the two), is, quite simply, a profound meditation on the intersectional mechanisms of power. The two men at the heart of the story — the desi, hard-boiled sleuth, Inspector Sartaj Singh (Saif Ali Khan, unrecognisably competent), and the mob overlordGaitonde — take turns to play victim and oppressor, game-player and game-changer, god and Mephisto. When a phone call from Gaitonde reaches the over-the-hill Singh, the latter finds himself racing against time to foil what could be the worst-ever terror attack on Mumbai.

The show has been directed by Vikramaditya Motwane and Anurag Kashyap — the latter shooting the Gaitonde scenes and the former, the Singh storyline. They were always going to have their tasks cut out, for Chandra’s novel is structurally complex and dizzyingly ambitious. At its core, it is a Mumbaiyya cops-and-gangsters thriller, with all the incumbent trappings of the genre. But it is also, courtesy periodic flashback chapters called ‘Inset’, something like a wide-canvas socio-economic Dickensian parable, with enchanting little episodes covering the Partition, among others.

Motwane and Kashyap are two of the most gifted craftsmen in Bollywood and this is evident in the finesse of the series. BL ink caught up with Motwane in Delhi last week, and the director spoke at length about the making of the show, divergences from the novel, and the ways in which the narrative coaxes humour out of the unlikeliest places.

Talking about the book, Motwane says, “I love the Inset sections; they’re probably my favourite part of the novel. But unfortunately, in the first season, we have not been able to include these beautifully written parts. When you’re writing dramatic television, you have to insert a cliffhanger every now and then. So you have to make do, dil pe patthar rakh ke (with a heavy heart). You have to take a call on whether these parts will actually help you capture an audience. We’re trying really hard to bring in the Inset texts in the second season.”

From page to screen

Going by the evidence from the first season, Motwane and co have made the right sacrifices during the adaptation process. Right from the first episode, bullets and one-liners fly thick and fast. The opening shot — the iconic Pomeranian-flung-from-the-top-floor scene from the novel — has Siddiqui’s deadpan voice-over telling us, “Bhagwaan ko maante ho? Bhagwaan ko l**d farak nahi padtaa (Do you believe in god? God doesn’t give a f**k).” This is just one of the many moments that convince you that the writing team — Smita Nair, Varun Grover and Vasant Nath — is the real star of the show. Freed from the fetters of the Censor Board and attentive to details, the writing feels real and urgent. In a memorable scene, Katekar (the constable who works for Singh; their bromance lends the show its most poignant moments) feeds the fish in Singh’s aquarium, saying in Marathi, “Go on, eat, a cop is telling you, eat!”. For those who understand even the rudiments of Hindi and/or Marathi, the alliterative cadence of “Kha! Khaaaa-ki-walla boltoy, kha!” is something else entirely.

Siddiqui enjoys another scenery-chewing turn as Gaitonde, the gangster who unironically believes he is above god. It’s a tribute to his crystalline dialogue delivery and unimpeachable presence that at no point do you feel déjà vu, despite there being several points of intersection with his other gun performance in Gangs of Wasseypur . Khan enjoys his best outing in many years, conveying a subtle mix of vulnerability and fortitude (which manifests as stubbornness), and enjoying great chemistry with Radhika Apte, who plays Anjali Mathur, an R&AW agent trying to uncover the terror attack plot.

Crucially, there are many superb supporting acts — Kubbra Sait is outstanding as Kukoo, the siren with a secret who develops an unusually close bond with Gaitonde. Jitendra Joshi, who plays Katekar, is every bit as good. The really surprising package comes from human anti-ageing cream Luke Kenny (I checked; he is 49 years old and it’s terribly unfair that he still looks like he does), who plays a globetrotting, nihilistic assassin called Malcolm Mourad, the show’s angel of death.

Behind the violence

Beyond religious violence, the philosophical underpinnings of Sacred Games , both the novel and show, are rooted in Hindu tropes, most obviously the concepts of predestination, dharma and eternal return. This is reflected in the names of the episodes — Ashwathama, Yayati, Brahmahatya, Rudra and so on. For Motwane, this conceit was very useful from a narrative point of view, as he explained how it fit in with the needs of dramatic television.

He says, “See, the beauty of the book is exactly that — this cyclical quality of conflict, the idea that one spark can lead to a massive fire 70 years later. The connections that Sartaj and his family have with all these other characters, this is something that you read in the book and go ‘Wow’. And the events that happen there end up having repercussions on a global scale, which is interesting and ironic and just beautifully written.”

Motwane also discussed how shady godmen and other demagogues tap into the pent-up energy and sexual frustrations of young, angry men. “Everything’s about power in this show, really, but the sexual part of the story is something that is very common in this country,” he notes. Before we know it, we have something like the Sri Ram Sene on our hands.

Many of these themes are tied together in the character who seems set to be the Big Bad in the second season: Khanna aka Guruji (Tripathi). While there have been a number of godmen villains in Bollywood in recent years (Amol Gupte’s delightfully hammy turn in Singham Returns comes to mind), Tripathi’s Guruji is different. His sense of calmness is almost preternatural. After we finally see Guruji’s hand in the goings-on in the show, we understand why Gaitonde calls him “mera teesra baap” (my third father). Even a gangster as dreaded as he is might feel reduced to a snivelling child in front of Guruji’s commanding presence.

In the final equation, Sacred Games reels you in with a killer bassline of god, greed and gunfire — and keeps you hooked with a masterclass in modern-day dramatic television, by turns slow-burning and edge-of-the-seat action. What’s more, it tries to match the novel’s tonal shifts with stylistic tics of its own — the cinematography at several places imbues the narrative with an otherworldliness, congruent with the book’s dharma riffs. The novelist Garth Risk Hallberg, while reviewing the book back in 2007, had singled out a passage for doing something very similar. In it, Singh is thinking about a potential bomb scare while seated at his desk — note the last two sentences, for they slyly reinforce the perception-is-paramount dictum implicit in modern-day Hinduism:

“He was at his desk, in his dingy little office with the weathered benches and untidy shelves. Kamble was hunched over a report. Two constables were laughing in the corridor outside. There was a little pool of sunlight from a window, and a pair of hopping little sparrows on the sill. And all of it was dreamlike, as gauzy as the wafting of early morning. If you let yourself believe in that other monstrous thing, even a little, then this ordinary world of bribes and divorces and electricity bills vanished a little.”

Sacred Games ends, as is the way of the streaming era, with a suitably tasty if somewhat predictable cliffhanger (yes, even those who have read the book will hang off this particular cliff). It has already done enough to be rated as the most impressive web-only Indian show.

One hopes that as the action escalates in the second season, so do the ambitions of the makers.

Aditya Mani Jha works at Penguin Random House India

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