‘His only superpower is honesty’: Nagraj Manjule and Vijay Varma on ‘Matka King’
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Nagraj Manjule has directed shorts, features (including the Marathi blockbuster Sairat), produced movies, acted in a few, and contributed an episode to the anthology series Unpaused: Naya Safar. Vijay Varma is no stranger to streaming, having been in several shows, among them Dahaad and IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack. Both have joined forces for the hotly anticipated Matka King on Prime Video.
Directed by Manjule and out on April 17, the Hindi series stars Varma as Brij Bhatti, a middle-class cotton trader in 1960s Mumbai. Brij looks around at the straitened economy and decides to do something about it. That something is reinventing gambling by introducing a new game and new rules that benefit both the people running the operation and the gamblers.
Although the makers have denied it, Brij Bhatti resembles Ratan Khatri, a storied operator who innovated on the rules of matka gambling in the early 1960s, trumping his predecessor Kalyanji Shah.
“In those years, the game had all Indians in its grasp,” Manjule observed during an interview. “People of a certain generation are very familiar with the word matka, but they don’t necessarily know how matka evolved and became so popular. It was interesting to explore not only the scene but also look at the people, their joys and sorrows, their vulnerabilities and dreams. The combination of the...