Mafia Queens of Mumbai: Stories of Women from the Ganglands
This month I’m looking at women who fought back and survived, women who have stories to tell or be told, making this weeks book Mafia Queens of Mumbai: Stories of Women from the Ganglands by S. Hussain Zaidi with Jane Borges. The accompanying cocktail is a Mumbai Mule, it is 2 oz Vodka, 1 oz spiced ginger syrup…and this is spiced, recipe included in the original link to make your own, ½ oz lemon juice, sparkling water, and a mint sprig to garnish. So lets do this.
This book came to my attention off a fantastic Bollywood movie, Gangubai Kathiawadi, starring Alia Bhatt as the titular character, and the opening credits cites Mafia Queens of Mumbai as inspiration for the movie. And Gangubai’s story is definitely in here, along with many other women who found their way in what is absolutely a man’s world, that of the criminal underworld of Mumbai.
Now, arguably, most criminal underworlds are dominated by men. It’s because of this that the women who make a name for themselves stand out so much. Think Griselda Marco, think Heidi Fleiss, think Ghislaine Maxwell. They stand out because…well, on some level it’s not surprising when men break bad. But when women do it…well, go big or go home.
So we start with Jenabai, who was born Zainab in the 1920’s in Mumbai. At 14 she was married of Mohammed Shah Darwesh and had five children. Zainab was born Muslim but was god love her, was all about freedom, and protected Hindu’s during communal turmoil caused by British rule at that time. In 1947, partition took place where the Indian subcontinent was broken into the Union of India and the Dominion of Pakistan. Zainab’s husband moved to Pakistan but Zainab stayed in India and continued to fight for independence. I love her already.
However, she now has the problem of five kids to feed and a deadbeat husband who jumped international borders to avoid child support. Ok, I’m kidding, completely different time and place when all this happened. But she did need to feed her kids. During partition, Pakistan got most of the farmlands, so Zainab got into the grain smuggling business. Because she was fluent in all the local dialects she got along quite well with the smugglers and traders, who began calling her Jenaben, which means Sister. And since her primary grain of smuggling was rice….chaaval….she came to be called Jenabai Chaavalwaali….sister boss who deals in rice.
Rice dealer does not sound very gangster. But prohibition was also a thing in India in the 1940’s. And much as in America, when they outlawed alcohol, crime rose with smugglers and bootleggers. Because fuck the police.
She was already smuggling rice, it was nothing to move to smuggling alcohol. Yes she was Muslim. But there were no prohibitions against smuggling alcohol, only drinking it. And Jenabai did what smart smugglers always do. She began reporting on the competition to her local law enforcement, playing both ends against the middle. See, she’d receive a piece of the bounty for every tip that led to an arrest. So she’d sell her own supplies, report her competitors, and receive a bounty on their arrest. She eventually became well known enough to provide advice as a respected aunty to the criminal underworld, including to Dawood Ibrahim, who remains a running theme throughout the book. In the west, we all know the name Pablo Escobar and Sinaloa Cartel. In the east, it’s Dawood Ibrahim. And she was his respected aunty, helping him out of tight jams.
Jenabai’s story is largely told by her daughter, Khatum. So we have eyewitness testimony to this story, which is fortunate because there are passing few written reports of the women in this book.
The second story is the one they made the movie out of, and let me just say, the movie was an outstandingly faithful play by play of the book. Like….Hollywood should take lessons from Bollywood on how to adapt a book to a screenplay faithful.
Gangubai was born Ganga Harjeevandas Kathiawadi and grew up in the village of Kathiawad in Gujarat. The family was a very proud, well respected family locally, with ties to royalty. Which meant nothing to Ganga who wanted to be a Bollywood star. And the stars in her eyes grew bigger when her father hired a new accountant who was from Mumbai and said he knew people who could get her in the movies. So the pair eloped, and spent a mad few days in Mumbai before her new husband left him with his aunt Sheela while he found a new residence for the couple. Except…well, he was legally her husband. They had eloped and gotten married. Which in the 1940’s Mumbai meant he could do with her what he wanted. And what he wanted was to sell her into prostitution for an easy 500 rupees. Maybe it was 1000. Either way, he sold her to Sheela and vanished. And Ganga had to figure out what to do next.
She knew she could not return home. She’d stolen from her parents and eloped, she would likely be killed if she tried to return. Recognizing there was not much else she could do, she turned herself to becoming the premier prostitute of Kamathipura. And after about 12 years of this, she had a particularly brutal client show up, who damaged her so much she was hospitalized. After that, she figured out who he worked for…one Shaukat Khan, who was just becoming known as an up and coming crime lord in Mumbai. And Ganga, who began using the name Gangu from the time of her very first client, appealed to his better nature. Showed him her scars from the offending asshole. And when Khan agreed to handle it when the man returned, Gangu forever endeared herself to him by calling him brother.
And from then on, he called her sister. And beat the ever loving shit out of that guy next time he showed up at the cat house.
Gangu would eventually stand for local elections, which is when she earned the title bai, making her Gangubai. And she would speak passionately on behalf of the women in her district to the highest politicians in the land, ensuring that decades after her death, she is still revered as a protecting goddess.
Now, both of these were outstanding stories, and Zaidi is an amazing author. But the one that truly sucked me in and I couldn’t put down was the story of Ashraf…aka Sapna didi. Sapna….appropriately enough…means Dream. Ashraf entered the underworld after her own husband was killed on orders of Dawood Ibrahim. Told you he’d make an appearance again.
Having determined her husband had been killed on orders, she reached out to a local gangster, Hussain Ustara. And as seems to be the case when outstanding women enter the scene, Ustara was completely captivated by her. She wanted to learn everything she would need to kill Dawood Ibrahim. And she became an apt pupil of Ustara, learning guns, hand to hand fighting, motorcycles, the underworld crime syndicates so that she, like Jenabai, could turn informant and do everything she could to damage Dawood’s criminal enterprises, hoping to lure him back to Mumbai from his hideout in Dubai.
Eventually, Ustara and Sapna would have a falling out, largely due to him making a pass at her that was emphatically not reciprocated, causing her to leave and cut all contact with Ustara. He kept tabs on her and she got pretty far along in her assassination planning phase. Unfortunately, one of her men betrayed her plans, and she was herself violently murdered in her home. Ustara in turn made plans to avenge her on Dawood. But…Ustara was a creature of habit, and he loved pretty ladies. He was gunned down by Dawood’s men on his way I think from an assignation.
From drug baronesses to gangland molls, from forgers to bookies, the women in this book run the gamut of crème of the crop, absolute best in the business. Because when women break bad, they go big. And turn entire districts to supporting them, through local philanthropy. The neighborhoods LOVED these women, and more often than not, would support and hide them from law enforcement. But, even the most loved have enemies, and that is invariably how they would meet their down fall.
I loved this book, it was so well written, a series of vignettes, short stories told about specific moments in Indian history, and the women who added a truly vibrant element to 20th century Indian criminology.
