Sacrificing Cuckoo: Transgender representation and spatial containment in bifurcated Mumbai noir in Sacred Games

The representation of Mumbai in the Netflix adaptation of Vikram Chandra’s novel Sacred Games (2018–19) is structured around a binary between the magical urban and the criminal underworld, positioning the city simultaneously as a site of aspiration and of decay. In the 2018–19 Netflix adaptation of the novel, safety is not the absence of violence but a narrative mechanism that sustains the coherence of a caste-Hindu middle-class imaginary of Mumbai. This imaginary operates within a framework I term chronotoponormativity – where time and space coalesce to structure the visibility and mobility of marginalized bodies, particularly those that challenge the normative social order. This article explores how the character of Cuckoo, a transgender bar dancer, is framed through the logic of cinematic safety, in which her labour and mobility are carefully curated to uphold dominant spatial governance. Drawing on scholarship on urban underworlds, the criminalization of bar dancers and the gendered architecture of safety in neo-liberal Mumbai, the article situates Cuckoo’s visibility and eventual erasure within broader patterns of how trans and working-class bodies are made hypervisible as spectacles but systematically excluded from state protection. This article argues that these dynamics are not incidental but central to how Mumbai’s urban future is imagined – one in which normative femininity, caste privilege and middle-class respectability define who is safe and who must be contained or sacrificed.