Chandu Champion is a newly released Bollywood film starring Kartik Aaryan and features the character of age 88 Ratan Khatri, a renowned Indian gambling kingpin who is now getting his own biopic titled ‘Matka King’
Chandu Champion features a biopic of war hero-turned-Paralympic champion Murlikant Petkar showcasing his life from the early 60s to the present day.
Who is Ratan Khatri on whose real life story Matka King web series is based on, biography, age and cause of death reason
The newly-released film features several real incidents and historical figures, one of whom is Mumbai gambling kingpin Ratan Khatri.
Ratan Khatri’s role in Chandu Champion
Ratan Khatri’s role in the film Chandu Champion itself is quite small but it has garnered a lot of attention. In the film, Murlikant Petkar gets paralysed after suffering injuries in the 1965 Indo-Pak War. While undergoing treatment in a military hospital in Bombay, he comes across a hospital attendant, Topaz (Rajpal Yadav), with a gambling habit.
Petkar ends up lending some money to Topaz to gamble on his behalf. The sequence eventually showcases Ratan Khatri as the chief guest for an event where he gets introduced as the ‘Matka king’ of Bombay.
Real-life Ratan Khatri bio
While Ratan Khatri was a prominent figure in the Mumbai gambling scene, there is hardly any information about his early life. Ratan originally hailed from Sindh and came to India after the Partition. He settled in Bombay permanently and introduced organised gambling in the form of matka back in the 1960s. The word matka comes from a word for an earthen pot, which were used to draw the numbers.
Khatri and his matka syndicate hosted various idlers wagering on the daily fluctuating cotton rates from the New York market. By the 1970s, Ratan Khatri became the gambling kingpin of the city, and raked in several lakhs of rupees each day. This eventually earned him the popular moniker, the Matka King of Bombay.
When the Indian government declared a national emergency in 1975, Khatri even spent some time in prison. After spending several decades in the matka business, Khatri eventually retired in the 1990s. He continued to live a quiet life in Mumbai before eventually passing away recently, in 2020, in his 80s.
Khatri, 88, died after a brief illness at his home in Navjeevan Society in the Mumbai Central area. Khatri was born to a Sindhi family in Karachi, British India. Khatri co-produced Bollywood film Rangeela Ratan with Ramchanchandra Bhikubha and apart from financing the film, he had also acted in it.
Even after taking retirement from “Matka’ gambling business, he used to place bets on his favourite horses at Mumbai’s Mahalaxmi Racecourse.
Matka King biopic
Matka King is an upcoming new series inspired by the rise and fall of Mumbai gambling kingpin Ratan Khatri. While the show is a biopic based on Khatri, it will likely be a fictional story showcasing the journey of a Bombay-based Matka King, not particularly Khatri.
The series stars Vijay Varma in the lead, and it will officially stream on Amazon Prime Video. Nagraj Manjule is the director behind the show, which also stars Kritika Kamra and Gulshan Grover. Amazon Prime Video recently announced that filming for the show has begun. The announcement also featured a first look poster of Varma as the Matka king.