Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur has won universal acclaim as a realistic film on the coal mafia of Dhanbad. Amitabh Bachchan described it in his blog as “Indian cinema at its best; honest, stark and as painfully real as possible.” The film is based on the rivalry between the Pathans and Quraishis, which starts before Independence when a Pathan begins to impersonate Sultana, a Quraishi dacoit, and loot trains. Here the facts begin to get a little mixed up. Sultana was active not in Dhanbad but in the terai region of present-day Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh. And Sultana was a Hindu, not a Quraishi.
Sultana was a Bhantu. They claim to be descendants of Maharana Pratap, the 16th-century ruler of Mewar. The king fell on bad times after he lost his kingdom to Akbar, the Mughal emperor. Bhantu folklore says that’s when the community dispersed to other parts of the country, and that their leader will one day take them back to Mewar. The British labelled them a “criminal tribe” and kept a close eye on them. Indeed, Gulphi, the most illustrious ancestor of the Bhantus, was the most skillful of all thieves. This was the milieu in which Sultana was born. His grandfather was a thief of some repute — Gulphi reincarnate, some would say. The Confession of Sultana Daku by Sujit Saraf (Penguin, 2009) is a dramatised account of Sultana’s life. Some of its narrative could be contested; nevertheless it gives you a view of the infamous bandit’s world.
The book starts right at the end, the night before Sultana is to be hanged at the Haldwani jail. He reads out a long confession to an Englishman, Lt Col Samuel Pearce. Because he came from a poor household, Sultana was sent to the Najibabad Fort by his mother and grandfather. The Salvation Army, called “Mukti Fauj” by locals, ran a camp there. Regular attempts were made to convert Sultana and other Bhantus to Christianity. In a fantastic twist, Saraf takes Sultana and pals to Delhi in 1911 at the time of the Coronation Durbar. And Sultana decamps with the monarch’s crown from his special train — he escapes through the hole in the royal toilet! The boys dump the crown in the river and return home. It is found in time to save the royals from some serious embarrassment. Apart from this incident, the rest of the book is very believable.
Crime, the book shows, was indeed a way of life for the Bhantu. He could conceal small knives in some deep crevice inside his mouth and his throat for years together, and use it when the moment was right. There were caste councils which took care of the family if a Bhantu got caught by the police. In return, the man had to share his loot with the council.
Saraf brings to life the social pulls and pushes of colonial India. Though they claim descent from the Rajputs, Sultana knows he doesn’t have their DNA: he is short, has hardly any facial hair and is dark. He is contemptuous of the Banias but cowers before the Thakurs. Against the British, of course, he is powerless. The British had sent Freddie Young, the fattest police officer in the whole of India, to hunt down Sultana. Young finally caught him in the jungles of Nainital. When he swung from the Haldwani jail, Sultana was still in his 20s. He is certainly not the Sultana whom Kashyap has mentioned in his film.