Mirzapur, Sacred Games and India's new wave of mafia TV.

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The Indian screen gangster – long a staple in Bollywood – has evolved in recent years, with Netflix and now Amazon Prime tapping in to the country’s interest in crime stories.

Rolling deep … Mirzapur. Photograph: Amazon
▼ 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 Gamesthat 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-Companygang – 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. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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