With rumours running rife of Dawood Ibrahim’s hospitalisation and subsequent death on Social Media and other platforms, in Karachi, let us take a filmy twist on the same and recall the many films and series fashioned on the dreaded gangster and his family. Dawood is an underworld don and a designated terrorist by both India and the US, who is charged with killing hundreds of Indian citizens in multiple anti-India activities over the years.
Company (2002)
The 1st film that comes to our minds is one made by maverick film maker Ram Gopal Verma and his 2002 film-‘Company’. It was a fictionalised account of the rivalry between Ibrahim and his former henchman Chhota Rajan. In the real world, the enmity split the underworld and led to a near-successful attempt on Rajan’s life in 2000. In the movie, Ajay Devgn plays the cool-headed and ruthless Malik, who shoves aside his mentor and rises up the hierarchy. Malik, in turn, mentors the young hothead Chandu (Vivek Oberoi). Their rock-solid friendship is undone by a horrible misunderstanding. Devgn is excellent as the don who thinks first and shoots later.
D (2005)
Another film that comes to our minds is Vishram Sawant’s D released in 2005. This also comes from Ram Gopal Verma’s stables and was among a number of gangster movies produced by him in the 1990s and 2000s. Randeep Hooda plays the character of Deshu, whose formative years resemble a romanticised version of Ibrahim’s origin story. The son of a police constable, Deshu gets involved in gang rivalry and goes on the warpath after his friend is killed.
Black Friday (2007)
Anurag Kashyap’s adaptation of Zaidi’s non-fiction book of the same name examines the conspiracy behind the 1993 serial blasts in Mumbai. Vijay Maurya plays Dawood Ibrahim with a mix of menace and mischief. Operating from a mansion in Dubai, Maurya, plays up the media-fuelled image of the don who exudes plumes of smoke and deadly intent. This gangster is man and myth rolled into one, and is easily the most effective Dawood Ibrahim in the movies.
Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai (2010)
Next on our list is Milan Luthria’s movie created in 2010. The film is based on an older rivalry, this time between characters based on Haji Mastan and Dawood Ibrahim. Sultan Mirza (Ajay Devgn) is the gentlemanly don modelled on Mastan, who ruled the Mumbai docklands in the ’60s and ’70s and inspired the anti-heroes in Deewar and Nayakan. Sultan is portrayed as a principled criminal, unlike the brash Shoaib Khan (Emraan Hashmi). Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai portrays Sultan’s reign as benign and Shoaib’s rise as the beginning of Mumbai’s fall, suggesting that had Shoaib been stopped in his tracks, the Mumbai bomb blasts would never have happened. In 2013, again, two films based on Dawood were released; Shootout at Wadala and D-Day.
Shootout At Wadala (2013)
What might Ibrahim’s trajectory have been if Manya Surve had not been killed in a police encounter in 1982? That’s the question driving Sanjay Gupta’s Shootout At Wadala (2013).
Surve, a hoodlum who carved his own path and killed Ibrahim’s beloved brother Sabir in 1981, was bumped off by the Mumbai police in what is described as the first such “encounter death”.
The tip-off about the fugitive Surve’s whereabouts came from Ibrahim, according to Mumbai gangster lore.
In Shootout at Wadala, John Abraham is Surve and Sonu Sood is Ibrahim, renamed Dilawar. Sood’s Dilawar is in the same mould as all the other villains the actor has played in countless films.
Like Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai, this film suggests that the Mumbai police used Ibrahim in his early years to take down other gangsters, only to shrink in horror later from the antics of their Frankensteinian creation.
D-Day (2013)
S Hussain Zaidi’s book Dongri to Dubai details a high-level operation to assassinate Ibrahim during his daughter’s wedding to cricketer Javed Miandad’s son in Dubai in 2005. According to Zaidi, the man in charge was Ajit Doval, the former Intelligence Bureau head (and present National Security Advisor).
Doval reportedly recruited a couple of fugitive gangsters to carry out the hit. The operation was botched at the last minute because a team of Mumbai police officers also landed up the venue, and, unaware of the Union government’s involvement, tried to arrest the gangsters, Zaidi wrote. There is no such confusion or turf war in Nikkhil Advani’s D-Day (2013).
The Dawood Ibrahim-like gangster Iqbal Seth, also known as Goldman, is holed up in Karachi as a guest of the Pakistani intelligence. A group of undercover Indian agents is in hot pursuit, risking life and limb to get Goldman back to India and face a trial. Then again in 2017, we saw two film releases based on Dawood and his operations; Daddy, loosely based on Ibrahim and Arun Gawli’s rivalry and Coffee with D, a satire on Don.
Daddy (2017)
Before Chhota Rajan, Ibrahim’s big rival was Arun Gawli. Ashim Ahluwalia’s Daddy, released in 2017, is an uncritical biopic of the mill worker’s son who became a dreaded mobster and a Maharashtra state legislator.
In Daddy, Arjun Rampal plays a good-looking, sanitised version of Gawli, while Farhan Akhtar is Ibrahim, who goes by the name Maqsood.
Coffee with D (2017)
Zakir Hussain plays Ibrahim as a down-on-his-luck hood in the misfired satire Coffee with D.
Sunil Grover is a television journalist named Arnab who scores an interview with the man known as “D”. The wig is floppy and the sunglasses larger than usual. Most movies venerate Ibrahim, but this one reduces him to a joke. Apart from movies on Dawood, there have been several series based on his family as well, especially his notorious sister Haseena Parkar.
Ek Thi Begum (2020)
The MX Player web series Ek Thi Begum (2020) also has a Maqsood, who is modelled on Ibrahim and played by Ajay Gehi. After Ashraf’s gangster husband is killed by henchmen of the Dubai-based Maqsood, she swears to get the big boss. Maqsood wears dark glasses indoors, puffs on his cigar, and looks every inch the movie version of the don.
Haseena Parkar
Apoorva Lakhia’s strange story, portrays Ibrahim’s real-life sister Haseena Parkar as a wronged woman who becomes a criminal because of circumstances and police harassment.
Shraddha Kapoor plays Haseena, while her real-life sibling Siddhanth Kapoor plays the future lawbreaker known only as “Bhai” in the movie.
