Sacred Games, Profane Plans

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra (2007)

My first brush with Bollywood was back in my teens listening to the international music hour on WBAI radio in New York City. The hypnotic, exotic crooning of Asha Bhosle filled my room and transported me to an enchanted, incense-filled garden of peaceful delights. This doesn't have much to do with the reality of India, but it was an aesthetic experience which gained a foothold in my life.

A few years later I discovered the Namaste America television show, which features Bollywood music videos, gossip and news from India. At a local Blockbuster video store I found some Bollywood movies, and my enchantment endured.

Bollywood films are famous for being long, ornate, over-wrought, lush, epic musicals. Every film promises action, suspense, romance, music and dancing. Besides the escapist and entertainment value, there is the value of learning about another culture and another language. Sacred Games, in that sense, is not too different from a Bollywood film. It is a 900+ page epic of life in Bombay*, modern Indian politics, religious relations, crime, scandal, romance and Bollywood. Bollywood is somewhat peripheral to the plot but its influence suffuses the action as characters regularly sing Bollywood songs and invoke various film scenes and actors.

Sacred Games is primarily the story of a Sikh police detective and the Bombay gangster he seeks to understand. Chandra sometimes writes beautifully, and at other times - less so. I definitely got a taste of what it felt like to be the police detective and of how Bombay gangs operate. There is plenty to thrill and chill, and a lot to mull over and consider. I won't get too into the plots, since they are pretty byzantine, and ultimately, not well-organized or resolved. Many characters are more drawn-out vignettes than anything else and they do not contribute to the plot line.

What I liked most about this novel was learning about Mumbai, its gangsters and Indian culture, although I have read reviews by Indians that this is a somewhat piss-poor rendering of that, targeted at a western audience. If the latter is true, the overwhelming amount of Hindi (and Marathi?) in it is inappropriate. While I learned to curse in Bombay-ese by page 50, the sheer volume of Hindi in the text heightens the sense of the strange and exotic to the point of being annoying, rather than intriguing, especially by page 450 when you are halfway through the book. Most of the words are not in the glossary either. To put this in perspective, I was trained as a linguist and am studying Hindi, and this was still an impediment to rather than enrichment of the whole experience. When I asked the author about this at a conference, he said that it was meant to increase the sense of immersion and that all the Hindi could be found in a glossary on his website.

This book needed much more serious editing. There are a number of plot contrivances that work up to a point, others (such as the insets), which are interesting on their own, but which should have been edited out or published separately, as they don't contribute to the storyline or even to a greater understanding of the main characters. Nonetheless, if you are interested in India and in Bombay gangs in particular, and you like crime novels, this is a fun ramble through that terrain.

*Bombay is the name of the city in Hindi, Mumbai is the name in the local Marathi language.