Bollywood’s dark past is threatening to return

By Andy Mukherjee

Disaster. Flop. Average. If you had to bet on a Bollywood movie’s fate in 2024, those would have been your three best options in a year set to end with a 30 per cent to 40 per cent drop in box-office collections.

The world’s most prolific film industry is desperately hoping for a better 2025. And so are the city’s cops: When the theaters go empty, the body count starts to rise on the streets of Mumbai. That’s what the 1990s were like — and everyone’s dreading a repeat of lawlessness in India’s financial capital.

The fears are far from exaggerated. Baba Siddique, a local politician and real-estate developer who enjoyed close friendships with celebrity actors, was gunned down in October as he was about to get into his car. A member of the gang that claimed responsibility said in a Facebook post that “Bollywood, politics, and property dealings” were behind the murder.

Organized crime and the show business of Bombay — as the megalopolis was known until 1995 — have been joined at the hip for a long time. The Golden Age of Indian Cinema that began around the country’s 1947 independence from British rule had a 20-year run. Politics took a cynical turn in the late 1960s, and popular culture began to reflect the loss of idealism. Bollywood scripts shed the social concerns of a young republic and became the escapist fantasy the world knows today.

By the early 1970s, India was releasing hundreds of Hindi-language films. Banks wouldn’t finance them. That’s where the likes of Haji Mastan came in. One of Mumbai’s most powerful dons at the time, Mastan was a sucker for glamor. Dressed in all white, the stylish boss became something of a private-equity player for the entertainment business when he began to finance movies for his actress lover.

The mob had eked out its initial capital from the docks of Bombay, smuggling gold and electronics. As it reinvented itself for a more open economy in the 1980s and 1990s, bootlegging and extortion gave way to money-laundering, trafficking in drugs and guns ... and more cinema. Dons were no longer satisfied with a profit share, a 2003 report by the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies noted. They wanted “partnership by becoming producers and getting overseas rights for film and music distribution.”

Leading this change was Dawood Ibrahim, a policeman’s son who rose to prominence as the city’s most feared mobster in the post-Mastan era. Dawood began operating from Dubai in the mid-1980s, but his syndicate, known as the D Company, is believed to have carried out the assassination of the founder of T Series, a music-production powerhouse, in 1997.

That murder, as well as a subsequent attempt on the life of a producer — whose son Hrithik Roshan was the reigning teen heartthrob — shook the industry. Ibrahim’s suspected involvement in the deadly 1993 terror attack on Mumbai, in which 257 people were killed in a series of bomb blasts across the city, provided urgency to the cleanup. Bollywood has an entire crime noir dedicated to so-called encounter specialists, who would, instead of apprehending underworld operatives and producing them in court, simply execute them. One of my personal favorites is Ab Tak Chhappan, or “56 So Far,” a reference to the kill count.

Just when it looked like the city had escaped from that cycle of violence, there are fresh signs of unease. In February 2021, a car packed with explosives was found parked outside the home of Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest tycoon. An elite detective — a former “encounter specialist” — is awaiting trial in that case. While denying the ex-cop’s bail petition last year, a court said his aim was to spread terror in the mind of the Ambani family.

Siddique’s murder has deepened the foreboding. Police have invoked a harsh 1999 law designed to crush organized crime. But cops don’t know the underworld’s current level of engagement. “We must have made 20 to 25 films and earned profits, too,” Chhota Shakeel, an Ibrahim aide, had bragged in a 2001 interview, after authorities busted a high-profile case of the mafia’s movie-financing operations. “Instead of extorting money from film personalities, we thought we would do business with them.”

Have the proceeds of crime seeped in again, slipping through the veneers of Bollywood’s corporatization? It’s an important law-enforcement question. As the Indian investigative journalist Swati Chaturvedi wrote recently, “Nowhere else in the world does a film industry of this size face such organized threats.”

The repercussions go beyond showbiz. Lawrence Bishnoi, the leader of the group suspected of murdering Siddique, has been accused by the Canadian police of colluding with Indian government agents to kill and harass members of the country’s Sikh diaspora. A gangster who’s at the center of a diplomatic spat — and at the same time threatening to eliminate Salman Khan, one of India’s biggest film stars — adds a new dimension to the threat.

Arthouse Indian cinema has always felt smothered by kitsch. That has only gotten worse in recent years with right-wing propaganda films competing with the usual song-and-dance and action routines. But now Mumbai is losing control even on its signature over-the-top entertainers. Studios in the southern city of Hyderabad can lay claim to two of the biggest hits in a dull year. That is just like 1984 when the Mumbai industry’s dalliance with crime had begun to get serious. Meanwhile, the acclaimed drama All We Imagine as Light, nominated for two Golden Globes and the winner of this year’s Cannes Grand Prix, is struggling to find exhibitors at home.

A second-generation Mumbai producer recently sold half of his studio to Adar Poonawalla, the billionaire vaccine maker who earned handsome profits during Covid-19. The pandemic marked a crucial intermission. It fueled demand for original content people could stream at home on Netflix, Amazon Prime and homegrown apps like Hotstar+ when cinemas were under lockdown. Now everything is open, and yet audiences are so bored of the insipid fare on screens big and small, they’re neither out for a movie night, nor clicking through big-budget web dramas.

When everything starts bombing for Bollywood, things take a sinister turn in Mumbai.