Bollywood Dreams; Vikram Chandra tries his hand at Mumbai noir.(Sacred Games)

Byline: Nisid Hajari

Do all novels about India have to be huge? Something about the sprawling, tumultuous Subcontinent lends itself to narratives of similar dimensions. "Midnight's Children," "A Suitable Boy," "A Fine Balance"--the pillars of postcolonial Indian literature are often thick around the middle. Vikram Chandra's sparkling debut novel, "Red Earth and Pouring Rain," was a similarly sweeping tour d'horizon of India under and after the British. His third book, "Sacred Games" (Faber and Faber ), clocks in at 900 pages.

That's where the similarities end, however. While unstinting in its ambition and flourishing in its characters, "Sacred Games" is not trying to emulate the great Victorian epics. Instead Chandra aims for a more intriguing act of literary decolonization--of low, not high, fiction. His hero--the jaundiced Sikh police inspector Sartaj Singh--brings all the force of noir convention to the mean streets of Mumbai. He is world-weary in love, stalled in his career, with a hint of violence in his set jaw. His principles are dirtied but never drowned by the cesspool of corruption that is Mumbai. He pursues rich as doggedly as poor--the blackmailer of a stylish and adulterous housewife, the murderer of a Bangladeshi immigrant. And although his nemesis, the underworld don Ganesh Gaitonde, dies early on, his unfolding backstory serves as a mirror for Singh's own darker ...