Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.15291/sic/2.13.lc.5
Slow Violence in Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games: An Ecocritical Reading
Melba Sabu
; Christ Deemed to be University, India
Meghna Mudaliar
; Christ Deemed to be University, India
Abstract
This article gives insight into the ways in which enforcement and institutional vigilante activities portrayed in Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games foreshadow the urban thicket of garbage dump yards and slum dwellings. The text will be analyzed from an ecocritical perspective to establish aspects of slow violence and its explicit and implicit results. Chandra’s plotline, regarding several entangled human tragedies against the background of refuse, urges a study of the novel through the lens of waste studies. However, he fails to address the reasons for the characters’ opinion of Mumbai being uninhabitable and infamous for treating human life as expendable. The novelist also seems to normalize the issues of inequalities in waste management and justifies the anthropocentric utilitarian perception of resources. The depictions of Mumbai gang wars against a disturbingly overlooked state of dilapidated lives and misplaced ideologies mention waste as being both created and ignored. Such representation also compels a close reading of consumerism and criminal aspiration.
Keywords
ecocriticism, slow violence, socio-environmentalism, waste studies
Hrčak ID:
311140
URI
Publication date:
19.6.2023.
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