“Apni gaadi mein bethunga,” a young Dara tells Haji, in Prime Video’s Bambai Meri Jaan after he is offered a ride in a luxury car he is smitten by. “Beshak bethega,” Haji, the uncrowned king of Mumbai, responds, with the kind of grin that has already enlisted the potential it can glean. It’s an exchange that typifies the Mumbai gangster genre as a world built on thick, reckless assuredness. Where prophecy becomes the only method of comprehending and transacting with a world tantalisingly within and beyond reach. Where the flat refusal of the existing status quo becomes the hallmark of working-class stardom. It’s bewitching, rousing, but also tiringly familiar. In Bambai Meri Jaan, a mafia protégé climbs from promise to power, until he becomes his own worst enemy. It’s an unambiguous echo of the world we have seen a thousand times over, lifted and somewhat salvaged by the soaring performances of Kay Kay Menon, Avinash Tiwary and Saurabh Sachdeva.
Menon plays Ismail Kadri, a righteous police officer of the ‘pathaan unit’, created by the Mumbai police to stifle the burgeoning world of Mumbai’s mafia, led by a calm and mesmerising Haji Maqbool (Sachdeva). More than mere ideology, religion adds to the contours of the story as Kadri and Maqbool trade edicts with folded sleeves. This is a distinctly Muslim world, crafted assiduously without the need for benchmarks or symbolisms. Both men crave honour, but pursue it through contrasting means. “Neend achi aati hai,” Ismail claims to Haji after he questions his incorruptibility. Haji’s designs might be questionable but his results offer the satisfaction of tangibility. Results that eventually claw into the fibre of a reluctant Ismail.
Ismail has four children, among whom Dara, played by Tiwari, lives up to the promise of a notorious childhood. He bunks school, rigs bets and defrauds men on the street. A simple blink-and-miss routine built around a RADO watch helps Dara and his gang of adult misfits swindle working class men out of hard-earned money. It’s hardly as exciting or euphoric as the sequence suggests, but it builds into the myth of the gangster coming from a place of unreliability. Because it doesn’t take a genius to con people, but courage, to stare indignation in the eye and become that which dignity can no longer recall. Dara appears bullish, because he possibly can’t fall any lower in the eyes of those who will him to do better, or different. It’s the tense relationship between Menon and Tiwary that just about gives this series the whiff of freshness.
The freshness in this 10-episode series, created by Rensil D’Silva and directed by Shujaat Saudagar, however, doesn’t spread to the wider canvas or the way the narrative travels from its margins, towards the centre and back. We get the trademark voiceover (Menon’s voice) laying down the history of a post-Independence Bombay and the hand that the likes of Haji played in coldly shaping it. By the time Dara grows up to become an unmalleable thug in his own right, his father, crushed and beaten, has been assimilated by the soft-spoken czar of Bombay. The day his son breaks free of his shadow, Ismail, as a matter of debt, is let go. “This fire that you have started will engulf us all,” Ismail tells his son, whose hot-headedness becomes the prologue of his swift ascent. It’s an ascent built on unsparing violence that tragically, but also ironically, continues to reconcile with various forms of domesticity. For every gun-wielding gangster, there is the holster of a woman’s bosom more than happy to cushion the recoil. It’s fascinating to the point that you wish someone would just focus on the women for a change.
To say that Bambai Meri Jaan is old wine served in a redesigned bottle is both true and false. To an extent there is a sense of authenticity to the visual appeal that the show manages to create. The costumes, the art direction, the raw landscape of a Bombay built as if from urban folklore is far too attractive to write off. But walking these exalted pavements, the bloody streets that edify a city’s self-image, there is the friendly sight of gun-toting men, for better or worse, repeatedly claiming it. Sure there is still a sense of thrill to watching mobsters do lusty, macho things, but at what point will this piecemeal epic about a city’s underbelly, depart the gut in one thankfully unwrinkled motion. All so we can move to seeing it anew.
Both Kay Kay Menon and Tiwary are brilliant here in an unspecific way. Unspecific because we’ve been offered so many Mumbai gangsters, both fictional and derivative, it’s practically impossible to slice the subtext off of one to be able to coat with it the identifiable texture of another. Other than religious insignia or nomenclature, they talk and behave the same, culminating in a multiverse that is now producing supermen without the uniform to identify them with. These actors, including a wonderful Sachdeva, deserve a change of tone or approach that no encyclopaedic knowledge of the city’s gangster era will yield. Maybe, like Dara, someone needs to light fire to it and boldly begin from scratch. For there is nothing wrong with Bambai Meri Jaan per se, except it feels like a vogueish, premium copy of something we’ve seen, in its skimpy underclothing. It probably doesn’t even matter how and where.
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