Haji Mastan on Mumbai’s Underworld: “There Is No Such Thing Here”
In 1993, a year before his death, Haji Mastan Mirza sat for one of his last major interviews. Dressed in his trademark white, speaking in measured Hindi with flashes of irritation, the man once called Bombay’s first celebrity don rejected the very idea that defined his public image. There was no underworld in Mumbai, he insisted. That word belonged to America. What India had was gundagiri — hooliganism, street fights, criminals. Not an organised mafia.
The interview, conducted by Smita Prakash and later circulated widely from ANI archives, remains the clearest record of how Mastan wanted to be remembered. It is also a study in denial. He played confused when the word “underworld” was used. “Who is the underworld? Is there a man underground?” he asked. When pressed that it meant organised crime — not ordinary thieves — he pushed back harder. Underworld, he said, was an American concept. In Bombay there were criminals, yes. Many of them. But organised crime of the kind people imagined? “No, it’s not that. There is no one like that.”
He drew a sharp line between gundagiri and underworld. Gundagiri was fights, bombs in Calcutta, local toughs. Underworld was something else — structured, hidden, American. He claimed earlier interviews had been twisted: he had spoken about hooliganism, not a mafia. Police and politicians might be involved in many things, he allowed, but that did not create an underworld in Hindustan.
This was not a one-off performance. Across interviews in the late 1970s and early 1990s, Mastan denied being a smuggler even while acknowledging the gold-and-electronics trade that built his fortune. “Kaun bolta hai hum smuggler the?” he once snapped. The line most often attached to him — “Main smuggler hoon, gunda nahi” (I am a smuggler, not a goon) — captured the distinction he fought to keep. Smuggling, in his telling, was business under licence-permit controls. Killing and extortion were for others.
He applied the same distance to the men who came after him. Varadarajan Mudaliar was dead, a “poor man” who was gone. Dawood Ibrahim had fled to Dubai. Their paths were different, Mastan said. Dawood had been a child in front of him. Dawood’s father had been his friend. “Was I also feeding him milk from a bottle?” he asked, mocking the idea of a close partnership. He did not know Dawood’s world and Dawood did not know his. The younger man had chosen another road.
That claim sits uneasily with the record. Historians and police officers of the era describe Mastan, Karim Lala and Varadarajan Mudaliar as the first generation that turned dockside theft and gold smuggling into something resembling a syndicate. They divided territories, kept a relative peace, financed films, and cultivated politicians and film stars. Mastan lived in a mansion on Warden Road, drove a white Mercedes, wore only white, and received a daily queue of people seeking food or favours. He was arrested under MISA during the Emergency and again later, yet he maintained he had never broken the law. “Never,” he told Prakash. When she pointed out that rising from a slum to that life without breaking rules seemed improbable, he shrugged: Oberoi had done it too. He did not know how others became rich. He had not broken the law.
The peace-broker image he cultivated is better documented. In Hussain Zaidi’s account and contemporary reporting, Mastan called rival gangs together when killings rose. Bloodshed was bad for business, he argued. They were Muslims facing a hostile government; fighting each other only pleased the authorities. He wanted them to swear on the Quran to stop targeting one another. The younger generation listened, then went back to shooting. Mastan was philosophical about it. The young would kill themselves. They would not last. Men like his friend Varda understood how Bombay actually worked.
By 1993 that world was already gone. Dawood’s D-Company had turned smuggling into drugs, extortion and, soon after, terror. Mastan had moved into real estate and a political outfit, the Bharatiya Minorities Suraksha Mahasangh, presenting himself as a defender of the poor and minorities. He spoke of slums, of riots, of innocent people jailed after bomb blasts, of processions that forced the Prime Minister’s office to take notice. He said he feared only God. No one else had the power to kill him. Security was unnecessary; five thousand men would surround Delhi if needed. The old don’s language had become a politician’s.
The interview is revealing precisely because of what it refuses. Mastan would not concede an organised underworld because that word implied a hierarchy, a code, and a permanence he did not want attached to himself. Gundagiri could be dismissed as individual bad behaviour. Underworld suggested an institution. He had spent decades building influence through docks, customs, police, politicians and film financiers. Calling it business and charity was the story that let him sit with Dilip Kumar and still claim he had never been a gunda.
Mumbai’s later dons did not bother with that distinction. The 1993 blasts, the gang wars of the 1990s, and Dawood’s status as a designated terrorist made the “gentleman smuggler” era look almost quaint. Mastan died of a heart attack in June 1994 in his own bed, not from a bullet. The city that had once queued at his bungalow for food moved on to a more violent script.
What he said in that last interview was therefore both true and incomplete. There was no carbon copy of the American Mafia in 1960s Bombay. There were overlapping networks of smugglers, Pathans, Tamil operators and dock workers who used money, community and political access instead of constant open warfare. Mastan sat at the centre of that arrangement and then spent his final years denying it had ever been an underworld. He preferred the word that left him looking like a businessman who happened to know everyone.
The footage still circulates because it captures a vanished style: the white clothes, the cigarette, the insistence that language itself was the problem. Call it gundagiri and the conversation stayed local. Call it underworld and it became a myth he could not control. Haji Mastan chose the first word until the end. History, and the men who followed him, chose the second.
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