Second World War

The Second World War functions in this book not as a distant European conflict but as a decisive local turning point, a historical rupture whose consequences reached directly into the lanes of Bombay and the lives of the women who would become its most notorious criminals. Its outbreak in 1939 interrupted the city's first experiment with prohibition, and the resulting vacuum of enforcement opened the gateway for bootleggers and smugglers, reshaping the city's criminal economy and setting the stage for the underworld that dominates the narrative.

Prohibition and Its Collapse

Prohibition had always been central to Mahatma Gandhi's and the Congress' agenda, and on 1 August 1939, two years after the first Congress ministry was created in the Bombay province, prohibition was introduced in the city. The law-enforcers faced problems in the very first week of implementing it, with clashes between groups for and against prohibition. The home minister at the time, Barrister K.M. Munshi, carried out an intensive recruitment programme in the police force to implement the Prohibition Act effectively, creating an exclusive cadre called the X Division headed by a DCP, Prohibition, and training new sub-inspectors for special prohibition duty while bringing men from the Excise Department into the city police department.

However, when the Second World War broke out in 1939, the mammoth prohibition force was diverted for security measures to the docks, and the implementation of prohibition suffered. This diversion was the war's most consequential local effect: the elaborate enforcement apparatus built to suppress alcohol was suddenly redeployed, leaving the prohibition laws on the books but largely unenforced. The war thus created the conditions for a thriving black market in liquor, and the criminal networks that would later dominate Bombay's underworld found their first foothold in this gap between law and enforcement.

The Post-War Reimposition and Its Consequences

In 1946, after the Nazis were defeated, the Congress government came back to power and prohibition was imposed on Mumbai again. Veteran politician and then chief minister of the Bombay province Morarji Desai, who was staunchly against the selling and consumption of alcohol, declared complete prohibition in liquor sales in Bombay from 6 April 1950, by passing the Bombay Prohibition Act of 1949. Before this order fell into place, the Christian and Koli communities distilled their own liquor, like jambul, jira, moha etc., while most of the other alcohol available was imported from the West, particularly England.

Unfortunately, prohibition did nothing but sow the seeds for bigger crimes in Mumbai, opening the gateway for bootleggers and smugglers. A number of 'aunty joints' sprung up to quench the thirst of the alcohol-deprived population, with poor Goan Christian women brewing liquor in their backyards and kitchens and selling it discreetly for a good price. Since their patrons found it difficult to pronounce their names, they were nicknamed according to their physical attributes like Gori Aunty, Chikni Aunty and Baidewali Aunty. Bootlegging was seen as a most lucrative business with profits running into thousands of rupees, and these aunty joints soon went on to become part of the Mumbai culture. It was during this time that Jenabai Chaavalwali remarried an already married Iqbal Gandhi, still illegally dealing in grain but tired of making minuscule amounts, before she met Tamilian don Vardharajan Muniswami Mudaliar.

The War's Legacy in the Underworld

The war's disruption of prohibition enforcement did not merely create a bootlegging economy; it helped forge the very structure of Mumbai's organized crime. The smuggling networks that emerged from this era connected Bombay to global trade routes, with figures like Haji Mastan, who had come to Mumbai in 1934 along with his father, starting as a mechanic repairing cycles before moving to the Mumbai docks as a coolie in 1944, where his job was to unload huge boxes and containers from ships coming from Aden, Dubai, and Hong Kong. In the years to come, he made millions of rupees from smuggling gold, silver ingots and electronic goods and, along with Karim Lala and Vardharajan Mudaliar, went on to form one of the most formidable gangs in Mumbai. The war's diversion of security forces to the docks had inadvertently signaled where the real money lay, and the docks became the gateway for the illicit trade that would define the city's underworld for decades.

The war's legacy also extended to the legal and enforcement frameworks that would later be used against the women in this book. The pattern of creating special enforcement units and exceptional laws to fight specific crimes, first seen with the X Division for prohibition, would be repeated with laws like MCOCA, a stringent law promulgated by the Maharashtra government in 1998 after the abrogation of the TADA, formulated because the state government did not have any firm law with which to fight organized crime. The war thus stands at the beginning of a chain of state responses to crime that would eventually target the very women whose stories emerge from the criminal economy the war helped create.