Anurag Kashyap will do justice to Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games on Netflix

When Netflix announced its entry to India earlier in 2016, critics wondered whether the new-age content provider would make original programming in India or repeat its roster of successful shows from the US.

The question of local sourcing is one that the company has faced in other markets. Last week, the European Union mandated that at least 20 per cent of the content Netflix shows in Europe ought to be locally produced.

It comes as a pleasant surprise, then, that the company has hired Anurag Kashyap’s production house Phantom to produce a series on Vikram Chandra’s 2006 novel, Sacred Games. Set in the Mumbai underworld, the novel charts the story of Inspector Sartaj Singh, made memorable in a brief appearance in Chandra's earlier collection of inter-related short stories, Love and Longing in Bombay.

The novel begins with Sartaj being tipped off about the final hiding place of dreaded underworld kingpin Ganesh Gaitonde. This is one of the finest sequences in the novel, as Ganesh, holed up inside his super-fortified bunker, regales Sartaj with stories of his heroism and rise from mofussil obscurity.

From here, it's all in a day's work for the inspector as he deals with fighting couples, delinquent boys and issues of national security. We are given glimpses into Sartaj's emptiness and work - hard, police work - as respite from thought. The inspector makes the best of circumstances; he is a wily survivor and it is to Chandra's credit that he imbues him with such touching humanity that the character, warts and all, wins the reader's empathy.

The Netflix adaptation comes as a blessing for Kashyap who has been looking to repeat the large canvas of Gangs of Wasseypur. To that end, he has set a number of his projects in Mumbai, none of which have worked. These include Yudh, the Amitabh Bachchan-starring television show that ran for a brief period in 2014, and last year’s turkey, Bombay Velvet.

His recent directorial venture, Raman Raghav 2.0, is a noir film that is unlikely to find many takers. And then there is the current tiff with the censor board which has made as many as 89 cuts in his production, Udta Punjab, about the drug menace in the northern state.

Sacred Games, therefore, comes at the right time, providing Kashyap with the sort of creative fulfilment the director needs to get back in the game. Apart from the action sequences surrounding Sartaj, the novel also points to the larger socio-political currents churning India of the 1990s - the rise of religious fundamentalism and its effect on local politics and crime syndicates.

At one point in the novel, the daughter of Gaitonde's money handler approaches him to convince her father to allow her to marry a lower caste man. The girl, knowing fully well that her father would never accede to such a union, gathers the courage to approach Gaitonde because he is the leader of a gang widely known for its inclusive status, with Hindus, Muslims, Dalits and OBCs (Other Backward Castes) working together as bhais. Gaitonde tries, but what ensues is another matter.

In a striking similarity with reports about real life underworld gangster Chota Rajan, Gaitonde is also used by the Indian intelligence towards breaking the back of his rival, Muslim don Suleiman Isa.

Chandra, who was born and raised in Mumbai, plumbs the history of the city to spin a yarn whose attention to detail is admirable. In that respect, this book belongs to a long line of odes to the Maximum City, a list that includes such stalwarts as Midnight’s Children and A Fine Balance.

In fact, the novel is at several places reminiscent of the sprawl of Gangs of Wasseypur. It boasts a Dickensian cast replete with Bollywood starlets, plastic surgery and "nippy star natter". What is a source of constant joy in this expansive fantasy land is that people with contrasting personalities, with such offbeat worries and cares, can survive — or should one say, even manage to go around together — within the claustrophobic confines of the booming metropolis that Mumbai is.

In no other city of India can such a diverse society flourish, and it is this spirit of Mumbai that Kashyap tried capturing, if unsuccessfully, in Bombay Velvet. To this reviewer, the material of that film was too dense to be wrapped in a crisp two-hour frame.

Kashyap may just taste success with Sacred Games in the series format, allowing him greater narrative leeway.

Netflix is committed to making the series available to its global audience on completion. For a player that has seriously upended the game of content production and distribution with classics like Making A Murderer and Orange Is The New Black, Sacred Games provides an opportunity to showcase India in a microcosm.

Let’s hope one of our finest (but also mercurial) auteurs delivers on this one.