Total Recall: Bombay, Gangsters and Satya

Bullets Over Bombay is divided into seven chapters, each of which is a well-considered essay on various aspects of the film

Title: Bullets Over Bombay

Author: Uday Bhatia

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 243

Price: Rs 399 (paperback)

Till the early 1990s, Indian gangsters had a reputation of being Robin Hoods. The likes of Karim Lala, Haji Mastan, and Varadarajan Mudaliar were smugglers, contract killers, and lent muscle to political parties, but they were also benefactors of the poor, protectors of the helpless. As a result, their representation in cinema was also often sympathetic — such as Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan) in Deewar (1975) or Sakthivel “Velu” Naicker (Kamal Haasan) in the Tamil film Nayakan (1987), which was remade in Hindi as Dayavan (1988). But all this would change