Religion and Violence in Sacred Games
Sumanya Anand Velamur
When I began my PhD, people would ask me what my topic was. In the interest of brevity, I would say Religion and Violence in Mumbai, the umbrella theme that my PhD was nested in. Prodded to explain more, I would say I was specifically working on religious residential spaces and residents’ memories of violent events like the Bombay (Mumbai was called Bombay until 1995, when the name was changed to Mumbai) riots. Many of these well-meaning, sometimes even officious, people would then tell me what they thought I should be studying. More often than not this would include the violence perpetrated by the underworld. I found this interesting. In the context of religion, violence and Mumbai, and specifically in the context of the Bombay riots that took place in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition, why was this a recurrent theme amongst my middle class, (possibly) upper caste acquaintances? One reason could have been that this was really the case and that they had hit the nail on the head. After all, the underworld is universally acknowledged to have orchestrated the bomb blasts in 1993. But probe just a little deeper and one realizes that gangsters of Bombay could only explain part of the story. Why then this insistence that to understand the riots, one had to understand Bombay’s underworld?
Sacred Games, the Netflix Original series from India, explores the trope that religion and violence are indeed linked to organized crime in inextricable ways. Based on Vikram Chandra’s novel of the same name, the series is set in 80s and 90s Mumbai and the gangwars of that time. Given the superlative reviews it has garnered, it is important to reflect on how the series manages to portray this complex relationship. Why? Bollywood, or the Hindi film industry, is not new to the gangster movie genre. But most often, such films focuses on one man’s (or woman’s as is the case in Haseena Parkar) rise to become a gang leader;almost eulogistic stories of rags to riches where the individual is but a victim of extreme circumstance. In Ajay Devgn’s Once upon a Time in Mumbaai, for example, the story revolves around two underworld dons, characters fashioned on Haji Mastan and Dawood Ibrahim. Sacred Games too, begins with Gaitonde’s story from being a poor village boy to a gang leader in Mumbai. However, primarily it is the story of Mumbai and not that of Gaitonde. With a show this realistic, Sacred Games’ credibility increases and with it, its responsibility towards an honest portrayal.
God and religion take center stage in this series on Mumbai’s underworld in the 1990s. Some of the episode titles, Ashwathama for instance, are borrowed from Hindu mythology or mythological characters, stories that find themselves woven into the narrative. The opening dialogue in the first episode has Gaitonde asking rhetorically, “Do you believe in God?” Answering the question himself, he says, “God doesn’t give a fuck?” In his account of his life, he uses religion as a metaphor. Escaping, for example, from the religion of his childhood home, characterized by his Brahmin mendicant father, to the new religion of Bombay. The series also contains religious iconography. For instance, Ramanand Sagar’s TV series Ramayan makes an appearance to suggest, among other things, the mass consumption of religion. The fault lines within Gaitonde’s own gang seem to be on religious lines and therefore, the cause of his downfall also.
But what does all this have to do with violence? Gaitonde tells us, “A chicken bone in a Hindu hotel can cause more damage than a gangster; it’s been happening since pre-independence days. To create a rift amongst the Muslims, dump pork in a Mosque. To incite riots among the Hindus, dump beef in a temple. From the Hindu hotel I learned how religion can fuck anyone over.” I believe it is this aspect that my acquaintances refer to when they tell me that to understand religion and violence in Mumbai, I have to understand the workings of the underworld. The idea that religion provides an opportunity for gangsters to manipulate people for private ends is not new. And I dare say there is more than an iota of truth to it. But the assertion takes away from the fact that a large part of humanity was thus manipulated.
Organised crime, as Sacred Games demonstrates, provides us a platform on which we normalize violence. The 80s and 90s are often thought of as a violent time because of the underworld, and therefore, communal violence a normal, even logical occurrence of the period. I remember an incident when I was in school. I was probably in the 7th or 8th standard. One of the things that happened at morning assembly was that a student read out the day’s headlines, first in English and then in Hindi. On this particular day, the Hindi news reader decided to spice things up a bit and sang the headlines to the tune of popular Bollywood numbers of the day. I distinctly remember her voice booming into the microphone, “Kandivili mein kal, goliyan chali…” (shots were fired in Kandivili yesterday), in the tune of “churake dil mera, goriya chali…” ( the fair one walks after having stolen my heart). Retrospectively, I remember thinking what a morbid headline to set to the tune of a romantic number. This normalizing allows us to judge the events of the times with a different yardstick. But more importantly, to claim that someone like Gaitonde was to blame for the riots, was to absolve oneself of any crime (acts of omission as well as commission) because Gaitonde’s Bombay seems so far removed from the Bombay of my acquaintances.
Sumanya Anand Velamur is a PhD candidate at the Department of Archaeology, History, Culture Studies and Religion in the University of Bergen.
Holy Mumbai 