When Mirzapur premiered on Amazon Prime in 2018, there was already a formidable precedent for its lawless north Indian hinterland and warring rival families. Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) had established a new cinematic language for the gangster rooted in the Hindi heartland—one that was also funny, violent, sprawling and contemporary.
In the years that followed, over three seasons, Mirzapur created its own vocabulary, its own characters, its own fandom and eventually its own subgenre. Kaleen Bhaiya, Guddu, Munna, Golu and Beena became instantly recognisable names. Fans followed these characters and their chaos, celebrating their wins and mourning their ends.
Now, after three seasons, Mirzapur is moving in the opposite direction to the one that might have been expected of an OTT show. Mirzapur: The Movie opens in cinemas on 4 September, bringing back several of its most recognisable characters and, crucially, Munna, who was killed in season 2.
For Gurmmeet Singh, who has directed episodes in all three seasons and directed the film, the scale of that fandom was something no one could have predicted when they began. What surprised the makers was not merely the number of viewers but the range of people who connected with it. “We had no idea that this show would be accepted on such a mass scale,” he says. “It has managed to cut through geographical barriers. It’s cut through linguistic barriers.”
The roots of Mirzapur go back to creator and writer Puneet Krishna, who had originally imagined it as a film. The origin was not a fully formed gangster story but a single image. “I had this visual in my mind of two brothers sitting on a bike with guns in their hands,” he recalls. “It was not even an idea of a story, it was literally that one visual.” When he got a call from producers Excel to develop a web series, Krishna wrote the story in his hometown of Meerut.
The world around him supplied some of its details. Krishna remembers an incident from his own college years. A friend who wanted to contest an election would carry a gun, drive around in a jeep and visit the women’s hostel looking for votes.
“I was not Munna, I was the guy sitting in the jeep behind Munna,” Krishna says. “I was studious, so possibly I could have gotten the girls’ votes for him.” This tableau captures something essential that worked its way into the show: that violence, politics, aspiration and everyday life could coexist without those in that world finding the combination particularly strange.
There is also an interesting historical loop here. Krishna remembers the impact Gangs of Wasseypur had on him when it arrived in 2012. “When Anurag Kashyap made that film, my heart was broken, to be very honest,” he says. “I had been working on something in that world.”
Singh says, “I don’t even think that we were thinking we were going to match something like Wasseypur. We just thought we were doing our own small little thing.” The makers were too immersed in their own project to think about occupying someone else’s territory. If Wasseypur gave the north Indian gangster story a landmark cinematic form, Mirzapur took that language into the streaming age and, over three seasons, became the dominant reference point for a new generation of gangster dramas.
The distinction, Singh says, was also in what they wanted the audience to feel. “Though the show is very dark and gritty, and it deals with very morose themes at times, what we really wanted to bring into the show was a sense of hope. We wanted to bring a sense of aspiration into that world.”
In 2018, Indian streaming was still finding its vocabulary. The restrictions of theatrical filmmaking (censorship, star economics, runtime and the pressure of the box office) did not apply in quite the same way. Mirzapur could be excessive, violent, expansive and intimate all at once.
For Singh, that freedom was fundamental. “Suddenly there was this new avenue called streaming, where you could tell stories with the same quality that you could tell on film,” he says. “It was such a freeing experience to be able to make something like Mirzapur, which was completely unhinged. They might be despicable in what they do, but they’re lovable because you understand them,” he says.
That emotional accessibility also changed the cultural lives of the actors who played them. Pankaj Tripathi’s Kaleen Bhaiya became one of the defining characters of his career; Ali Fazal’s Guddu Pandit marked a decisive departure from the polite, romantic roles with which he was associated; Shweta Tripathi’s Golu transformed dramatically over the seasons. Rasika Dugal, meanwhile, was cast against expectations as Beena Tripathi, a character whose sexuality, ambition and ruthlessness were radically different from the roles audiences associated with her.
“We were very clear that we wanted to cast people who were affable on screen,” Singh says. “If you look at the casting, whether it’s Pankaj Tripathi, who’s supposed to be playing the big bad supremo, he’s just instantly engaging. You’re on his side, no matter what. So if you look at it, the darker the characters are, the more lovable we’ve cast them.”
The same logic applied to Divyenndu’s Munna and Dugal’s Beena, both of whom become increasingly dark as the series progresses. “All of these great actors were going to explode anyway, they were going to break through. If it was not Mirzapur, it was going to be something else. We were lucky that we were able to all bring them on board,” Singh says of the ensemble.
For Dugal, Beena became particularly significant because the character opened up parts of herself as an actor that she had not previously explored. “It gave me the confidence that I could easily inhabit a body language that I had always sort of admired, but never quite been able to practise in my own life,” she says.
But the impact of Mirzapur went beyond professional versatility. “It’s also sort of made us a part of popular culture,” Dugal says. “That’s not an experience that every actor has.” She remembers encountering memes about Beena soon after the first season, and people approaching her at airports to recite her dialogue.
Divyenndu’s Munna could easily have become a caricature: entitled, volatile, violent and frequently absurd. Instead, Divyenndu consciously worked in the opposite direction.
“My constant thing was to make him more and more human,” he says. “He’s honest. He’s an in-the-moment guy.”
Munna’s death at the end of season 2 should, by the conventional rules of serial storytelling, have been final. But Mirzapur had by then acquired an audience that did not simply consume the story but actively participated in its mythology. Fan theories, memes and demands for characters to return became part of the cultural conversation.
The film is not a prequel in the conventional sense. It is set within the timeline of season 1, before the events that eventually transform the characters and their relationships. For the filmmakers and actors, that meant returning to the characters at a very specific point in their evolution. It also allowed the makers to introduce new faces into a familiar world. Singh says the script was written first, without worrying about the practicalities of which actors could return. Most of the original cast was keen to return, although one could not.
For the actors, this meant returning to versions of characters they had inhabited years earlier, but with the knowledge acquired over three seasons. For Dugal, that was particularly disorienting. Divyenndu describes his own return as “coming back from the dead”. The challenge was whether to reproduce the performance audiences remembered or find Munna again from a different place.
After all these years, after that first image of two boys on a bike with a gun, the makers are going back to a world before the deaths, the memes, the theories and the mythology. Somewhere in that gap between what Mirzapur was and what it has since become lies the challenge, and perhaps the significance, of bringing it to the big screen. The audience knows what is coming. The characters do not.
‘Mirzapur: The Movie’ is in theatres.
Udita Jhunjhunwala writes about cinema, art and contemporary culture.