Nawazuddin Siddiqui justly enjoys the reputation of being one of India’s finest actors especially after Gangs of Wasseypur but international stardom is in prospect as his latest venture — playing Mumbai gangster Dilly Mahmood in the BBC’s eight-part global crime thriller, McMafia — is being distributed by Amazon Prime Video to “more than 200 countries and territories worldwide”.
The fictional TV series is based on the non-fictional bestseller, McMafia: Seriously Organised Crime, by the BBC’s former central Europe correspondent, Misha Glenny.
He has written pages and pages on the nexus between Bollywood, financiers, politicians and such gangsters as Dawood Ibrahim, Chhota Shakeel and Chhota Rajan.
McMafia has been filmed in London, Zagreb, Qatar, Prague, Cairo, Belgrade, Belize, Istanbul, Moscow, Tel Aviv, and Mumbai.
The series got off to a cracking start on New Year’s Day, with Nawaz making his debut in episode 2.
His rival in Mumbai’s underworld is Benny Chopra, played by Atul Kale, who utters the very first bit of dialogue in episode 1: “Good God, Mr Vadim, I finally managed to drag you away from Moscow... come.”
Their meeting is taking place somewhere in the “Arabian Peninsula”.
Vadim Kalyagin (played by Russian Merab Ninidze), who heads a branch of the Russian mafia in Moscow, wants to move his heroin through Mumbai, but says: “I need to be sure that this route is really secure, Mr Chopra.”
The superbly boastful Chopra convinces Kalyagin: “I own the port authorities; I own the police; in Mumbai, I am God!”
In episode 2, one of Kalyagin’s enemies, Israeli Semiyon Kleiman (David Strathairn), attempts to hire Mahmood by offering $500,000 a month but the latter wants more: “I p**s on Benny Chopra’s mother but without cash I can’t take the port away from him. I’m a Muslim — in this country every dollar is 50 cents for me. There is the police, city hall, Shiv Sena....”
He gets 600,000 Euros ($720,000), sent to him at Parminder Advisory Services from London by Alex Godman (James Norton), the central character in the drama — the English-educated son of an exiled Russian mafia family. But like Michael Corleone in The Godfather, will this innocent man be sucked into the family business (especially after his favourite uncle, who had ordered a hit on Kalyagin, is butchered by the latter’s thugs)?
Mahmood is shown bribing a Mumbai cop, having sex with his enthusiastic girlfriend Manju (Rajshri Deshpande), and spying though a telescope on his rival’s HQ and counter-boasting: “Benny Chopra, let’s see who is God!”