Overlapping Territories: The Cartography of Home in Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games

Place studies form an important part of modern cultural studies and literary discourse. Place is a physical location bounded with territories. Places at all scales are constructed by means of physical and cultural elements. Borrowing theoretical ideas from modern geographic models, literary studies project home as a geographical unit. Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games published in 2006, abounds with spatial imaginaries ranging from nation to home. Homespace in Sacred Games is not a linear place; it is multiply situated. There are different dimensions for any place at any scale. Home has physical, geographical territories and abstract, cultural boundaries. Homespaces are made unique with their boundaries of sight, sound, taste, and tactile experiences. The possibilities of an individualized time sequence and historical existence may highlight any homespace as a new geographic model itself. Its spatial and temporal territories are subject to overlapping. Home is an imagined community wrought with the utopian concepts of companionship and belonging as it is portrayed in Sacred Games. The making of homespace is intertwined with the underlying gendered practices, institutional ideologies and economic structures. Home, as a power ridden place, produces disciplined bodies and acts as a site of conflict. Institution of marriage, religion, nationality, and legal systems are always active in the homescapes. Homespace in Sacred Games is simultaneously a contested place, open to struggle and conflict and an alternative place with subversive power.