‘His only superpower is honesty’: Nagraj Manjule and Vijay Varma on ‘Matka King’

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 game and its players drew me.”

The eight-episode series is based on a concept by Ashish Aryan. Created and written by Manjule and Abhay Koranne, Matka King pits Brij against rivals and a government morally opposed to gambling.

“We’ve tried to approach the subject of gambling in a complex as well as entertaining way,” Manjule told Scroll. “All I can say at this point is, people always prefer the side that they have chosen. You are the hero of your own story, while someone else is the villain. But I don’t feel that the world is black and white.”

The cast includes Sai Tamhankar as Brij’s wife, Bhupendra Jadawat as Brij’s brother, Kritika Karma as Brij’s business partner, and Siddharth Jadhav as Brij’s employee. Also in Matka King are Kishor Kadam as a Maharashtra government minister, Bharat Jadav as a police officer and Girish Kulkarni as an investigative journalist.

For Varma, Brij Bhatti is a 360-degree turn from some of his recent characters, especially the serial killer from Dahaad. “I have played diabolical characters who have stayed with viewers in very powerful ways,” Varma said. “So one of my personal goals in Matka King was to make people trust me in the first episode itself. I had to establish that Brij is trustworthy and honest about what he is doing when it comes to the game.”

Manjule didn’t only cast Varma for his acting prowess or star value. “He doesn’t play the part like a salesman who has something to peddle,” Manjule observed. “He portrays the character as someone who is thoughtful about gambling. Vijay isn’t just an excellent actor, he’s also a great guy. We hit it off in our very first meeting. Any doubts that I had about doing the show were dispelled.”

Manjule summarised Brij Bhatti’s character in a single line, Varma said. “The most significant thing was the clarity with which Nagraj told me, his only superpower is honesty,” Varma recalled. “This characteristic can’t be spelt out, it has to be felt and experienced. Your trust builds up in the character, you start to believe that he is speaking the truth.”

The story of Matka King spans the 1960s and 1970s. Brij works in a cotton trading company led by Laljibhai (Gulshan Grover). Laljibhai runs an illegal side business in which bets are placed on the cotton trades of the day. Brij not only improves the game but also injects fair play into the process.

“Every character, every story is a product of its times,” Manjule said. “Characters are shaped by their society, its politics. From the cotton mills to the film industry, Mumbai was growing in all directions. Why did matka emerge when it did and why did it flourish? Gambling is an ancient practice, after all. While our research focused on the evolution of matka, we were more interested in whatever else was taking place around it.”

Varma added, “Globalisation hadn’t happened yet. People were doing anything to make their money grow.”

While the show covers dramatic events – Brij’s rise, the challenges he faces, the reaction of government agencies – the treatment is broadly realistic. Brij is shown to be calm, cool-headed and pragmatic. The character was never meant to be a hothead, Manjule said.

“Brij Bhatti is actually a kind of sutradhar [narrator],” Manjule added. “He is emotional, but he doesn’t allow emotions to rule his decision-making. He wants to be somebody, he wants to prove himself. He make a lot of money, but he isn’t really doing this for money. There are people who love the job more than the result. If Brij is this type, it follows that his emotional graph is controlled too.”

Like Brij Bhatti, Varma and Manjule are outsiders to a well-entrenched system. After graduating from the Film and Television Institute of India, Varma got an early break with Amit Kumar’s crime thriller Monsoon Shootout in 2012, but the film was released only in 2017. While Varma has been in several films and shows, notably Pink, Gully Boy, She, OK Computer and Mirzapur, it’s Dahaad in 2023 that proved to be his breakthrough.

“I came here with nothing, with just a dream and undying fire in my belly,” Varma said. “I didn’t have anything going for years. There were very small things, maybe personal victories, but those were so personal that nobody else was celebrating them with me. What this did for me, strangely, was that it took away the power of failure, the power of pain, and the power of defeat. I don’t feel pain to the degree that I used to. I don’t feel failure strongly. I don’t feel defeated even when something doesn’t work because I’ve seen enough.”

He says he feels “detached” from the “noise outside”, and is “very happy to be in the process of creation”. He abides by Manjule’s advice on Brij: “He isn’t interested in winning or losing, he’s just interested in the game.”

Manjule doesn’t even live in Mumbai, preferring to stay away in his home on the outskirts of Pune when he doesn’t have to be in the entertainment capital for work.

“I am not from Mumbai, I still don’t feel that I belong here, nor will I ever belong,” Manjule said. “I flee from the city whenever I get the opportunity. But I have understood something of Mumbai.”

He credits his co-writer Abhay Koranne with sharpening Matka King’s exploration of Mumbai. “Abhay understands the city very well,” Manjule said. “The research by Ashish Aryan [who’s behind the story concept] was helpful too. All of us had discussions on how we should deal with the story. We sieved the information, in a sense. Film is a collaborative medium, which only improves when everyone is involved.”