If Matka King were a person, he would be slapped with a restraining order for dangerously stalking a celebrity named Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story (2020). The new Prime series feels like a play-by-play simulation of the breakout Sony LIV hit: tonally similar, historically and stylistically connected, antihero protagonists with identical narrative arcs and beats and conflicts and rise-and-fall rhythms and even theme music. The likeness is uncanny, and as is often the case, the stalker is inferior in every department. I would have bet my (non-existent) property on this dream director-actor alliance. In terms of the storytelling template, it has a bit of Hansal Mehta and some Neeraj Pandey, but director Nagraj Manjule (Fandry, Sairat, Jhund) himself seems to be missing. Loosely inspired by the life of Ratan Khatri, a Sindhi cotton trader who reinvented gambling with a popular new game in 1960s Bombay, Matka King stays too generic to scale the peak of a genre that treads the thin line between glorifying and humanising careers of crime. The sense of deja vu is strong, and Manjule’s voice is at sea with the scale of a show that’s designed to replicate rather than create.
You know how it goes. There’s alliteration in the names of the central character and actor, Brij Bhatti (Vijay Varma), because he’s a mix of superhero and supervillain. Bhatti’s rise is overfamiliar; a domestic crisis coincides with a classist boss (Gulshan Grover) and an unfair system, so our man decides to make his fortune out of the whims of fate. There's no context to how whipsmart the Karachi-born Bhatti is or why he is so comfortable with numbers; we are just supposed to run with the idea that he's a revolutionary genius who revolutionalises gambling with a game called Matka because he's determined to rule the city that breaks people like him. (Where does he get his vision from? Who is he, really? Is oppression the only trigger?). In doing so, he alters the vocabulary of Bombay. “Matka” enters the linguistic fabric of the place, soon to become a term of slang synonymous with “dumb luck” or “fluke”. His self-made journey to the top and bottom features the usual suspects: a growing ego, a brother-cum-cofounder (Bhupendra Jadawat) tired of being in his shadow, a faithful Man Friday (a solid Siddharth Jadhav) who narrates his story (his voice-over appears and disappears at will), a wife (Sai Tamhankar) trying to forge her own path, a Parsi girlfriend (an uncomfortable Kritika Kamra) from a higher social strata, an obsessive journalist (Girish Kulkarni) out to expose him, and jealous rivals that range from gangsters to governments.
Once the walls start closing in, Bhatti gears through vintage stages of betrayal, exile, vulnerability and defiant decline. Regardless of the source material, it's hard to get past the formula of it all. It doesn't help that the staging looks unnatural. Those kitschy period details, the green-screen conversations in moving cars, the slow-mo entries and exits, the dozens of extras and reaction shots across two India's — you can tell that the show uses the pulpy craft of 1970s Bollywood as a crutch to hide its shortcomings. It’s consumed by the inherent entertainment of “payoff” moments, the kind where Bhatti has the last laugh and the grin of a Cheshire cat when faced with systemic barriers. The screenplay does well to milk the mechanics of the game: the nationwide mania surrounding the reveal of the opening card every night, the relay of information to Matka centers across the country, the jamming of phone lines, the popularity of the game across demographics. One of these crowd-pleasing scenes features Bhatti realising that he’s on a delayed flight that might hinder his holy routine of personally unveiling the opening numbers at 9 PM. Minutes later, he has that am-I-invincible look on his face after the pilot turns out to be a fan who helps him transmit the numbers. Another scene like this unfolds in a police station when he’s in custody.
The banner problem with Matka King is its sanitised reading of its main character. There’s something off about the way it positions the greyness of his hustle. Bhatti is that classic Indian trope: a rags-to-riches criminal with impenetrable principles. The man stands out from his greedy competitors because he promises honesty and transparency in gambling; his crookedness is straight. He is essentially the messiah of the masses — he refashions an elite vice for the public and makes it accessible to everyone. He is in the business of selling dreams to those who can’t afford them; his conscience (he’s one breath away from going “parampara, pratishtha, anushasan” on us) becomes his atonement. Now it’s one thing for Bhatti himself to be deluded and whitewash his motives by behaving like a massy movie director who believes that his work is an act of philanthropy. He genuinely convinces himself that he is not exploiting desperate mill workers and blue-collar toilers; if anything, he’s offering them a way out of their rigged destinies. Vijay Varma plays Bhatti like that — as a striver who reverse-engineers the meaning of morality to widen the goalposts. He commits to the mentality of a man who latches onto the ambivalence of honour in a predatory field to soften his own conscience: a Gully Boy heart in a Scam 1992 body. He sleeps better at night knowing that he doesn’t cheat in the art of manipulation. He refuses to “sell out” to a particular Dongri don because, in his head, he is a purist with values.
But it’s another thing for the series itself to view him through the same lens. I’m not saying it should vilify an opportunist like Bhatti for preying on the disenchantment and disparity of a nation divided by independence. The least it can do, however, is scrutinise his mind and be curious about his capitalist complexities. Yet it is too seduced by the binary narrative of dissent; Bhatti is treated as a hero and crusader by virtue of being an anti-establishment player. His delusions are reframed as audacity and courage because he’s the ‘lesser evil’ and the (relatively) good guy in an environment that’s averse to new power. His ethics are highlighted in a storyline that’s reluctant to hold him accountable. The filmy reverence is fine, but it crosses the line when Bhatti enters his victim era: with his family, his infidelity, in politics, in his business, in his manhood. It’s natural for him to act like the world turns against him, but the film-making gets carried away and loses perspective of his legacy. Unlike the middle-class guilt of Harshad Mehta, Bhatti is romanticised and scapegoated to the point of no return. There is no epiphany, and his humanity is flaunted as a device to offset the addictions he spreads. The storytelling trivialises his flaws in favour of a rags-to-riches tale, as if to suggest that he’s made it by hook or crook and that’s all we should admire. It’s like the means don’t matter when an individual takes on the status quo.
The treatment somewhat feeds into this age of mythbuilding, where persecution complexes are weaponised to sell murky ideologies and reframe revenge as a form of cultural justice. The consequences of Bhatti’s ways are rarely confronted, because it’s more important that he’s a gritty outsider daring to puncture an invite-only club. His post-partition bitterness is only mentioned in passing; the irony is that he sets the blueprint — of corruption, perception and image-building — for the very State he challenges. Unfortunately, the black-or-white tone of the show isn’t equipped to explore these complications. Instead you have the subtext spelt out in a newspaper headline that reads “Matka: A Symptom, Not a Cause of a Rotten System”. Because how else does one conclude that Brij Bhatti was just another bad-boy billionaire and misunderstood genius who meant well? How else does one recognise that winners like him deserve credit for the story they become rather than the spirits they trample?
Along the way, there are glimpses of the intellect buried within the algorithm. A few supporting characters reveal a more contemporary picture of a society that creates and mythologises a Brij Bhatti. Like the sincere reporter whose pitches are consistently rejected by an editor who’s afraid to offend higher powers; he is introduced as an obstacle in Bhatti’s rise until he, too, finds himself on the same page of victimhood. Or like the painfully honest cop who gets disillusioned for not being allowed to do his job. Or like Bhatti’s right-hand man, who slowly loses confidence in his friend for overlooking his needs. Or like the family members who pay the price for being related to a kingpin. Or even the subplot of Bhatti befriending a Muslim superstar and producing a film called Bharat Ka Beta to perhaps prove his patriotism to the government. These are peripheral threads, but they’re proof that the series is aware of where the priorities of the camera — and by extension, the system — lie. And tellingly, the hard truth it conceals: pawns remain invisible on a board where the kings get busy hijacking the limelight.