Sacred+Games

We had a lively and wide ranging discussion of Vikram Chandra's //**Sacred Games**// at Joan and Christina's home, although only a few people had read the entire work (some 950 pages).

//Sacred Games// was compared to Tolstoy's War and Peace and to the //Iliad// because of its leisurely progression through "war"--the criminal fight and potential for nuclear war with Pakistan as well as the communal conflicts--and peace in the descriptions of home life, the streets and restaurants of Bombay, the waterfront, and the romantic interest between Sartaj and Mary. The language at times was very lyrical and almost metaphoric (although nothing like the sustained, broad-ranging metaphors of the //Iliad)//. Several discussants felt this was a great work of literature, and certainly worth the read. Once you get into the characters and discover how the many threads of the plot are tied together, it is difficult to put down.

The group also ranged over the topics of globalization, economic trends, and life for the poorest people around the world. Can the rise of a middle class in India and China change life for the people at the bottom end of the socioeconomic scale?

A review, "[|Bombay Noir]" in the //New Yorker// gives only a hint of the breadth and scope of the book. Here is an excerpt from that review:

//In the interconnected stories of “Love and Longing in Bombay” (1997), Chandra gracefully evoked a city of immense struggles, dreams, and pain. In “Sacred Games,” that city, dominated by megalomaniacal criminals and corrupt cops, has put on much “resplendent and rotting flesh.” But then Bombay itself has transformed rapidly in the past decade and a half—a period during which the city’s official name was changed to Mumbai—as India’s religious and political conflicts have finally caught up with the city’s traditionally business-minded and cosmopolitan communities. In December, 1992, during the nationwide riots that followed the demolition of a sixteenth-century mosque in Ayodhya by Hindu nationalists, hundreds of people in Bombay, mostly Muslims, were killed; retaliatory bomb attacks, allegedly masterminded by a Muslim don living in Dubai, killed nearly three hundred people, creating religious tensions among the hitherto secular fraternity of criminals. Though Bombay has prospered greatly from the liberalization of India’s state-controlled economy in the nineteen-nineties, it has also become home to feral forms of capitalism. In recent years, a series of scandals and scams have exposed an intricate network of greed, envy, and lust which binds politicians, tycoons, and civil servants to Mafia dons, Bollywood stars, and slumlords.

Such material—with its prodigies of arcane socioeconomic detail and suggestions of disorder—might appear overwhelming to a novelist. But Chandra, who grew up in Bombay and who now teaches creative writing at Berkeley, mines it confidently. Sartaj and Gaitonde, pursuing their separate destinies across Bombay, happen upon an extraordinarily diverse sampling of humanity—from an aspiring Muslim fashion model from provincial India who ends up as Gaitonde’s mistress to a militant Maoist who turns into an armed robber. More ardently than most recent chroniclers of India’s most hectic metropolis, Chandra embraces the vitality as well as the vulgarity of the millions chasing the “big dream of Bombay”: the “boys and girls who had come from dusty villages and now looked down at you from the hoardings, beautiful and unreal.”//