Malayalam actor Dinesh Prabhakar on working in the Hindi web series ‘Bambai Meri Jaan’

malayalam actor dinesh prabhakar talks about his experience of working in bambai meri jaan which chronicles the evolution of mumbai underworld

“Finally, I have entered the underworld,” Dinesh Prabhakar says with a laugh. The actor has often talked about how he landed in Mumbai (then Bombay) to “see the underworld and be a part of it,” dropping out of college, inspired by the Malayalam movie, Aryan. “Even though that didn’t happen in real life, I have lived that life on screen,” says the actor, referring to his role, Anna Rajan Mudaliar, in the new web series, Bambai Meri Jaan, streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

Directed by Shujaat Saudagar and produced by Farhaan Akhtar and Ridhesh Sidhwani, Bambai Meri Jaan is inspired by the book Dongri to Dubai: Six Decades of Mumbai by S Hussain Zaidi, who is credited with writing the story of the series.

Anna, as Dinesh is addressed in the series, is a South Indian gangster, based on a key figure in Mumbai’s mafia history, Varadaraja Mudaliar, who along with Haji Mastan and Karim Lala (Haji Maqbool and Azeem Pathan in the series), ruled the underworld until Dawood Ibrahim and team took over the business.

Dinesh says that he got a call to audition for the role from Casting Bay, the casting agency of the series.

Even though this happened in 2018, the pandemic halted the shoot when they were half way through. “When the shoot restarted, it was difficult to rearrange the dates of the actors and the project got further delayed. By the time the shoot was completed, several shows were lined up for release on Amazon, so we had to wait,” he says.

Dinesh says that it was overwhelming to shoot on huge sets. “Since the story is about the Mumbai of the past, the art team had their task cut out to construct sprawling sets. However, some of my scenes were shot in real location, Dharavi, known as Asia’s largest slum. We had to finish the shoot within a couple of days because it was difficult to work in that crowded area. It was left to us to take the people into confidence to shoot the scenes, especially my introduction scene and the fight scene towards the climax, on a ground inside the slum,” he says.

He talks at length about the cast, including Kay Kay Menon (as Ismail Kadri), Saurabh Sachdeva (as Haji Maqbool), Nawab Shah (as Azeem Pathan) and Avinash Tiwary (as Dara Kadri). “It was an honour to share the screen with some of the finest actors, be it the experienced Kay Kay and Saurabh or the comparatively new Avinash,” he says.