By Jerome Weeks, KERA 90.1 Commentator
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kera/local-kera-561699.mp3
Dallas, TX –
Vikram Chandra's new novel, Sacred Games, is big - 900 pages big - and it comes with an index of 36 characters, plus a glossary of hundreds of Hindu and Indian terms, a glossary I promise you'll be using. All of this would indicate a daunting epic of multi-lingual fiction. Yet HarperCollins paid a reported $1 million for the novel, and for good reason. It's a literary thriller of Indian street violence, sexy Bollywood filmmaking and religious fanaticism. And at its heart, Sacred Games is a lush, appalling yet affectionate portrait of modern-day India - specifically Mumbai, the city we've known as Bombay.
Born in New Delhi, Chandra studied creative writing at the University of Houston and Columbia; nowadays he splits his time between California and Mumbai. It was on a visit there seven years ago that he saw his relatives, middle-class family members, living their lives with bodyguards. Sacred Games was partly inspired by the city's gang violence and by the Chandra family's work in Bollywood movies, with their fantastical mix of action-adventure and musical romance.
In his new book, In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India, journalist Edward Luce quotes a former cabinet official who says that corruption isn't part of India's system, in many respects it is the system. And in Sacred Games, Chandra portrays Mumbai as so thoroughly, matter-of-factly corrupt, it makes the cynicism of American hard-boiled novelists like Dashiell Hammett or Dennis Lehane seem perky. Police inspector Sartaj Singh takes bribes; that's the way the system works. But he stands out for his dignity, modesty and investigative skills. He tries to arrest a celebrated gang leader named Ganesh Gaitonde but Ganesh kills himself first, and Inspector Singh tries to learn why.
Sacred Games is narrated in part by a dead man - ordinary realism isn't going to capture India. Novelist Salman Rushdie, who was born in Mumbai, likes to cite one scholar's estimate that India has 300 million gods. In Sacred Games, the spirit of Gaitonde relates his own hungry rise to power, a rise that, as Singh discovers, involved bankrolling political parties and doing dirty work for the Indian government's intelligence service. Thus, what combined an urban crime novel and ghost story with The Godfather becomes a John le Carre spy saga as well, a history of the bitter nuclear rivalry between Pakistan and India.
Sacred Games is a demanding, ambitious epic that may frustrate some readers. It's as full of contrivances and characters and digressions as a Dickens novel - or a Bollywood musical. But it's also a warm immersion into a world of traditional family and faith - and a very current, chilling tale of religious terrorism. Like Mumbai itself - a city of 18 million people - it has so much, it verges on chaos. Yet it works. In the case of Sacred Games, it works amazingly well.
Jerome Weeks is a former book columnist for the Dallas Morning News and writes about books for artsjournal.com.
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