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Summary
A shadow economy built on matka made a few rich while devastating countless lives, with the understated Ratan Khatri at its core.
Through the 1960s, every evening at 9pm, in one of the seamier pockets of Mumbai, a man in a crisp white kurta would shuffle a fresh deck of cards. With theatrical precision, he would select three. Within minutes, these three numbers would be relayed across Mumbai's teeming chawls, to the bazaars of Gujarat over crackling trunk lines, and to the shadowy wagering halls of London, Dubai, and Tehran.
In the aftermath of this nightly, illegal lottery called matka, a handful of fortunes were created, but many more lives were quietly and brutally ruined.
At the centre of this sprawling, illegal economy sat Ratan Khatri, a figure of curious understatement. A Sindhi refugee, who had arrived in the Maximum City with nothing but the memory of Partition and a shrewd head for numbers. He capitalized on the desperate optimism of the poor and the sheer greed of the wealthy, leveraging both to build a notorious reputation as India's Matka King.
Cotton to cards
Born around 1932 in Karachi, Khatri migrated to Mumbai (then Bombay), a city characterized by its surging textile mills and a massive influx of hopeful and vulnerable migrants. Khatri’s early interest in numbers and chance was an inheritance from his family, which dabbled in betting on cotton-price fluctuations.
In those early years, matka gambling was not yet a slick underground industry but a humble numbers game rooted in commodity-price speculation. Players would bet on the opening and closing rates of cotton transmitted from the New York Cotton Exchange to the Bombay Cotton Exchange in what was colloquially known as Ankada Jugar (gambling on figures).
When the New York Cotton Exchange halted those rate transmissions in 1961, the market for numbers-betting in India faced imminent closure. That vacuum provided an opportunity for ambitious operators like Kalyanji Bhagat, who pioneered a version called Worli Matka.
Khatri initially worked for Bhagat. But around 1964, he struck out on his own and established what became known as Ratan Matka (also known as Main Bazaar Matka or New Worli Matka). This was matka but with a difference: instead of relying on real commodity-price numbers, he used playing cards, drawn once in the evening and then at midnight. The randomness of cards gave gamblers a sense of fairness and transparency, which was rare in underground betting.
Under Khatri's shrewd, if criminal, stewardship, the illegal matka racket exploded into a massive illicit enterprise. By the 1970s, the network’s daily turnover was reportedly as high as ₹1 crore, an enormous amount of untaxed wealth for the time. His clientele represented a cross-section of Mumbai’s socio-economic ladder: from the destitute mill-labourers placing minuscule bets with their weekly wages, to wealthy businessmen, famous figures from Bollywood, and even powerful politicians discreetly funnelling enormous sums into the pool.
But power in the netherworld is fragile. During the Emergency between 1975 and 1977, Khatri was arrested and spent 19 months in jail. By the time he came out, the business was already faltering.
Films to footnote
A brief flirtation with Bollywood gave him some comic relief, though it did little for his business. In 1976, he backed the Hindi film Rangila Ratan, starring Rishi Kapoor and Parveen Babi. The film, in which he played a minor role, may have reflected a desire to transition from numbers and secrecy to the cinematic stage, although he had always had dealings with people from the film industry. Those who knew the matka world say that for a time, Khatri would have film stars pick the numbers in private draws late at night.
By the 1990s, police crackdowns forced many matka bookies and operators to move base to Gujarat, Rajasthan, or other states. From over 2,000 big and medium-time bookies, the numbers dwindled drastically as punters migrated to other forms of gambling. Illegal lotteries began to pick up among those seeking quick wins, while betting on horses gained traction among those who wanted a legal semblance or a more socially acceptable risk.
Soon, with several states launching official lotteries, matka’s charm faded. Khatri gave up the game that made him infamous, though whispers said he would still place small bets at the race course in Mahalaxmi.
When Khatri passed away at 88 of a cardiac arrest in his Tardeo apartment in May 2020, the news was a historical footnote rather than a tremor in the city’s contemporary underworld. In the end, the Matka King was just another forgotten number in Mumbai’s long ledger of crime.
English (US) ·