The launch of Amazon Prime’s gangster saga Mirzapur marks another milestone in the evolution of the Indian screen gangster. The TV series will go head-to-head with season four of Netflix’s Narcos, providing rich pickings for those wanting to see the grittier side of life outside the western world.
Telling the story of a crime dynasty ruling the town of Mirzapur in the dusty outlaw hinterland of Uttar Pradesh – a vast Indian state with more than 200 million people, which has long been synonymous with violence and corruption – the show is the latest to feed India’s perennial appetite for seeing the raw underbelly of its society on the big screen and on TV.
In recent years, Anurag Kashyap (India’s answer to Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese), has made a series of bloody, hard-boiled gangster movies, including the outstanding two-part Gangs of Wasseypur – a five-and-a-half-hour epic charting the destinies of warring coal-mafias in the lawless backwaters of rural Jharkand – while Netflix launched his hugely successful Mumbai gangster series Sacred Games that delved deep into the city’s underworld of gaudy mobsters, sassy molls, crooked cops and politicians.
India has always had larger-than-life gangsters, many of whom have provided real-life inspiration for compelling characters. Dawood Ibrahim, one of Mumbai’s most notorious villains and captain of the criminal D-Company gang – which was embroiled in trafficking, extortion and assassination rackets in Mumbai, as well as terrorist outrages – has had more than his fair share of Bollywood alter egos, including in the films Day and Company.
Even classics of Hindi cinema have required a gangster to provide a dark weight to their morality tales. The heartbreaking Mother India is a staple shown to pretty much every child at some point. It tells the story of an impoverished rural woman who struggles to raise her two sons and cope with a disabled husband without compromising her values. The movie ends with her shooting one of her sons in the back after he has grown up into a criminal and tries to ride off with a woman he has kidnapped from her village.
Sholay, the classic 1975 Bollywood action movie, is famous for having the greatest gangster in Indian cinema history. Gabbar Singh, played by the legendary Amjad Khan, is the demonic belly-laughing leader of a pack of bandits which loots and pillages villages in central India. And in a Hollywood-inspired tale that combines The Magnificent Seven with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, he is brought down by a roguish pair of hoodlums – played by superstars Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra – after they decide to go straight and help his victims. Gabbar Singh’s lines are now routinely quoted in everyday life in India, and the character has been used to advertise products ranging from toothpaste to biscuits.
Amazon has certainly chosen the right genre if it wants to tap the tastes of the Indian market and a global audience interested in an India that is increasingly confident on the world stage.
The gangster has always been figure that has been a cultural litmus-test of how the country sees itself. And Mirzapur takes us into the heart of a small-town India in which guns do the talking. An homage to the Bollywood mobster-movies of the 1980s, it stars the veteran actor Pankaj Tripathi as the godfather of a family involved in drugs, political intrigue and murder. A wholly modern take on everything from sex and parent-child relationships to the politics of being at school when your dad is mafia don, Mirzapur is the latest instalment in the eternal tale of the Indian gangster, a character through which Indians have always looked at some element of themselves – especially that which they would otherwise rather avoid.
Mirzapur is on Amazon Prime from 16 November
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