2018 - 2019
Sacred Games arrived in July 2018 as the first Netflix India original, adapted from Vikram Chandra's 2006 novel of the same name, a 900-page brick about Bombay's underworld, its politicians, its cops, and the rot that ties all three together. The show ran for two seasons of eight episodes each. Season one landed in 2018 under the joint direction of Anurag Kashyap (the Gangs of Wasseypur auteur) and Vikramaditya Motwane, with Varun Grover leading the writing room. Season two followed in August 2019, with Neeraj Ghaywan taking over half the directing duties alongside Kashyap.
The premise is simple and loud. Sartaj Singh, a troubled Sikh police inspector in Mumbai, picks up a phone and hears the voice of Ganesh Gaitonde, a gangster everyone believed dead. Gaitonde gives him twenty-five days to save the city from an unnamed cataclysm, and then the line goes quiet. From there the show crosscuts between two timelines. The present, where Sartaj chases a ticking clock with a RAW officer from Delhi pulling at threads he does not understand. And the past, where Gaitonde narrates his own rise from a Bombay slum to underworld kingship across decades of Indian political history.
Saif Ali Khan carries the present-day half as Sartaj, and the role did more for his career than anything in the preceding decade. He plays Sartaj as a man close to the edge. Pill-dependent, divorced, outranked, working a case nobody above him wants solved. It is a quiet, weary performance that anchors the whole thing.
Nawazuddin Siddiqui is the series's engine. His Ganesh Gaitonde is the single most magnetic Indian television performance of the streaming era, a part that he plays through voice-over across entire flashback seasons, narrating his own life with the cadence of a man who already knows how it ends. The voice is Bombay to the bone. Cocky, self-mythologising, fluent in the slang of the street and the boardroom.
Core ensemble includes:
Saif Ali Khan
Sartaj Singh
Elnaaz Norouzi
Jojo
Anurag Kashyap
Director / Co-creator
Radhika Apte
Anjali Mathur
Luke Kenny
Malcolm
Pankaj Tripathi
Guruji
Kubbra Sait
Kukoo
Kalki Koechlin
Batya Abelman
Beneath the gangster scaffolding, Sacred Games is a show about India telling itself hard truths about its own last forty years. The Gaitonde flashbacks walk through Hindu-Muslim communal violence, the Bombay bombings, the Rajiv Gandhi era, drug trafficking routes, the sanctification of politicians, and the quiet traffic between organised crime and the state apparatus. Varun Grover's script is critical of specific Indian political and religious dynamics, including the way Hindu nationalist movements consolidated in the 1980s and 1990s, the compromises of both Congress and the BJP, and the public cult of the godman figure. None of this is hinted at. It is said out loud.
The show caught political pushback for exactly these choices. A complaint was filed in court about a Rajiv Gandhi reference in episode one, and the discourse around season one ran hot for months. The writers did not flinch in season two, which pushes the Guruji material into an explicit critique of the religious right.
It is also, separately, an unusually honest portrait of the Mumbai police as an institution.
Sartaj is not a corrupt cop and not a clean one either. He is a man trying to keep his head above water inside a system that rewards the wrong things. The show takes caste seriously, takes class seriously, and treats its Muslim characters with a specificity that most mainstream Indian crime fiction does not manage.
Visually, the show looks like Anurag Kashyap. Grime, heat, neon on wet pavement, handheld cameras that get close to people's faces and then further away than you expect. Season one has the confidence of a director at the peak of his powers. The show speaks Hindi, Marathi, and English in the same scene and trusts you to keep up. The music is pulled from across four decades of Bollywood and street music, used with real taste.
Kashyap's Mumbai is not postcard Mumbai. It is a working city of informal economies, rented rooms, chawls, film studios, port warehouses, temple courtyards, and back alleys where the police cannot go because someone already paid someone. If you have watched Gangs of Wasseypur you know the register. Sacred Games applies the same eye to Bombay and gets something specific out of it.
Season one was a genuine event. Critics called it the arrival of Indian prestige streaming, and it opened the door for everything that followed in the Indian long-form space. Season two is the more debated item. Ghaywan's episodes are strong but the Guruji arc, which has to carry most of the season, splits the audience. Some viewers found the spiritual and conspiratorial material gripping and strange. Others found it slower and less grounded than the Mumbai crime engine of season one. My read is that season two is still worth watching, with the caveat that it is a different show by the end, more philosophical and less street-level than where it started.
Either way, the cultural impact is real. The Indian streaming shows that followed, from Delhi Crime to Mirzapur to Scam 1992 to The Family Man to Paatal Lok, all benefit from the runway Sacred Games cleared. It is the show that convinced a generation of Indian viewers that the best storytelling they could get was now on their phones.
Sacred Games works because it commits. It commits to its politics, commits to its language mix, commits to letting Nawazuddin Siddiqui talk for forty minutes at a time in voice-over, commits to Kukoo as a real character rather than a token, commits to a version of Mumbai that does not apologise for being ugly. Fans of the slow, talky, morally muddy crime-and-politics energy of The Night Manager and McMafia will find a lot to love here, and anyone who fell for the gangster-as-narrator trick in Peaky Blinders or Narcos is in for a treat. The comparison to Breaking Bad that some outlets reached for in 2018 is overstated, but the ambition is in the same postcode.
Watch it for Nawazuddin. Stay for the Mumbai that comes off the screen.
Neeraj Kabi
Parulkar
Jitendra Joshi
Katekar
Jatin Sarna
Bunty
Nawazuddin Siddiqui
Ganesh Gaitonde