Jaipur Diary 1: Vikram Chandra on 'Sacred Games', writing and the anti-thriller

(This session was on the morning of the third day and, if my memory serves me right, I was quite tired the previous day after running between sessions and meeting a lot of people. As a result, I woke up late the next morning and missed a good portion of Vikram Chandra’s session. Below, I’ve reproduced whatever little I heard and it turns out that I didn’t miss a great deal. Or so I’d like to think. Also, apologies if the post reads like a news report; my role was that of a listener and what you see below is a listener’s extra-long summary of sorts)

One of the highlights of the literature festival this year was Vikram Chandra, author of the highly-acclaimed magnum opus, The Sacred Games.  The theme of his conversation with journalist Shoma Chaudhury was ‘The art of the anti-thriller’ where Vikram explains why Sacred Games shouldn’t be categorised as a thriller. But then, once you have Vikram Chandra on stage, how can he not talk about stuff other than Sacred Games? So, that apart, the soft-spoken writer also spoke about the intelligence and pickiness of a reader.

Slipping into his role as a creative writing professor, Vikram talks about a growing number of US scholars who’re researching romance novels. “We tend to think of audiences for romance novels as mostly women. And women who are, not exactly, intellectual and are looking for easy pleasures. But nobody’s actually ever investigated this.” Vikram then mentions scholar Pamela Regis’ A Natural History Of The Romance Novels and says that “there isn’t one romance novel. There are hundreds of sub-genres in a romance novel and readers are very picky about the novel they want to read.” Vikram again uses the example of the study on romance novels to say something, which sounded slightly unusual. “A lot of the times, readers start reading the end of the novel first.” But why would anyone do that? “What they (the people who were asked) said was that it enabled a reader to enjoy how the writer had handled the elements of the (writing) form.  Which is, in a way, a very clinical way of reading; 2000 years ago an Indian aesthetician said that it’s better to do this (read from the end) because when you do it, you’re not concerned with what happens next, but you’re receiving a much more exalted pleasure”.

And how did he start using the phrase “anti-thriller” for Sacred Games? “I started using this phrase while talking to my publishers. They were very excited (about the crime aspect) and I had to tell them ‘look it’s not exactly a thrilling book’.  There is a bomb, there’s a good guy and a bad guy but it breaks every rule of the conventional thriller”.

Vikram then goes on to talk about conventional narratives and forms and says that there is a limit to which you can “pervert” a form. His point is best illustrated in an example he cites from the book: “In the book, there’s a moment when Ganesh Gaitonde the gangster is going to make a movie which will star his actress-girlfriend… and the Bombay screenwriter tells him is ‘Sir, what the audience wants is a hatke movie but not too hatke!’” (Notice the use of convention in Vikram’s quote: hatke, the actress-girlfriend and Bombay screenwriter. Even the gangster’s surname is Maharashtrian a reminder of the underworld’s origins). “So, that tension between what you want the story to be and what the writer is doing with it, is a very a fruitful tension for the writer to play with.”

It’s at this point of time during the session that I’ve abandoned the faintest of thoughts of roaming around Diggi Palace, meeting up with people and peeping into other sessions.

Shoma then asks Vikram about the construction of Ganesh Gaitonde’s character; a man who’s story is based on the story of Chota Rajan. “When I started writing the book, what I knew of the underworld and the cops, was pretty much what I’d seen in the movies like everybody else. And since I felt fear and my family was being threatened, I was very ready to believe that these guys were monsters. The truly terrifying thing for me was to discover during the writing of this book, that these people are not monsters. They are people like us and want to have a narrative and chronological sense to their lives”

Vikram added, “Ganesh Gaitonde starts out as a sceptic and an atheist but becomes religious along the way. So my attempt was to create a human being, who is clearly a monster, does completely unspeakable things but (I had) to give you a sense of his universe and to make him believe in the living emotion and the inferiority of this complicated person”.

Vikram then said what, I think, are the most profound words ever uttered by an author on the Diggi Palace front lawns (in jest, of course). “After I’d finished the first draft of the book, I showed it to my wife who, after reading it for two full days said ‘I hate you for making me like this guy’ and I felt very pleased about that!”

So how much can he (or any writer) experiment with conventional forms given that the reader has a certain expectation from a book?  And did he have to avoid taking risks with Sacred Games keeping the reader’s expectation in mind? Vikram’s reply is lucid, humorous and frank. “I’m not saying I have great integrity or anything but I just did what I wanted to. I have no hopes of producing a massive fan following and so my imagined audience is actually very small. Hence, there are some readers who will read it and feel sympathetic towards it. So anything that happens above and beyond that is kind of incidental. So all the structures of the book that are in place are actually things that I did want to do. For instance, towards the end of the book in a thriller where you had a big climactic gunfight, I wanted very hard to not give the reader that. There is a climax but not that. And the Guruji actually tells Ganesh Gaitonde that when you write a big story you have to have a big explosion in the end. Hence, I didn’t want to do that big explosion and I didn’t do it”.

Vikram added that when he saw the shape Sacred Games was taking – that it was being produced for the marketplace – worried him and he told his publisher not to market it like a thriller or a detective story because “a reader who comes with that expectation only, is going to be very angry.” He said “And I did get a couple of very angry responses.”

Considering the fact that he’s an academician do the mechanics of his job interfere in his writing sensibilities? Is there a conflict between the two, asks Shoma? “It’s not exactly a conflict and despite the way I’m talking about structure and genre expectation, I hope you don’t believe that when I’m sitting down in front of my computer, I will be constructing something according to these rules. That will be completely paralysing. What leads you forward (while writing) are the characters, the story and the conflicts you’re building. It’s only much later in the process – maybe in the sixth or seventh draft – when you start working on larger structures and ideas.” Introspecting on the question and talking about it in broader terms, Vikram said “The tension between technique and freedom is something that all artists – even athletes – also experience. If you ever try to learn a sport, I think you’ll notice that, when you first start learning, you’re actually quite worse at doing that thing. And it’s only then that you suddenly become aware of technique. So what happens is you are taught technique, you’re taught analytical methods of thinking about what you’re trying to do but, over the years, by practicing it again and again, you achieve what athletes call a state-of-flow. And in that flow state, there is no separation between technique and the freedom – it becomes the same thing. And that’s when everything starts coming together. For me, it’s a kind of riyaaz; a daily practice in the material that I work with and learn something new about it”

Sharing his personal experiences while researching his magnum opus, Vikram said that it was “very easy” to meet gangsters “especially in Bombay”. But the task of meeting people was done in “a very random way; going into all directions possible”.  “Among that was the experience of meeting people on the other side of the legal line (gangsters). And that was very interesting since the bigger guys are sometimes easier to get hold of and get into a conversation with. The top guys act like corporate heads – they have a PR line they use to communicate and they think that you’re from the media. They want to tell a story that’ll extend their public persona. It’s the little guys – the casualties of the war – who are much harder to get.

And were there any jittery, tense moments during the research? “There were one or two moments when the situation got unpredictable. Like this one time where I had to go and meet this hitman in Colaba, Bombay and he led us to one of his watching bases because he felt safe around it. Also, he wasn’t very happy about it (the meeting) and was very aggressive unlike the other people. At that moment, I was wondering what was going on and where it would go. So both of us (Vikram and his companion) asked him two questions after which we said ‘Thank You sir’ and got up to leave!”

Vikram spoke a bit more about writing the book but by this time, my recorder’s battery died and my attention span started to reduce. Hence, a small portion of the session cannot be blogged about. Nevertheless, I think I managed to capture the essence of it and needless to say, the session was a mind-blowing one. Hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed listening to it.