Guide
Matka King: The Real Story
The 2026 Prime Video series Matka King sent a lot of people searching for the real story. The show is fiction, but the world it borrows from was very real – and it was built by two men, Kalyanji Bhagat and Ratan Khatri.
Before the Matka: Betting on Cotton
Before Independence, Bombay had a game called ankada jugar – "figures gambling". People bet on the opening and closing rates of cotton, which were sent by teleprinter from the New York Cotton Exchange to the Bombay Cotton Exchange. In 1961 the New York exchange stopped the practice, and the game needed a new source of numbers. The answer was simple: write numbers on slips or use playing cards, put them in an earthen pot – a matka – and draw them out.
Kalyanji Bhagat and the Worli Matka
Kalyanji Bhagat came to Bombay from Kutch in Gujarat and ran a grocery business in Worli. In 1962 he started the Worli matka, which declared numbers every day and quickly spread through the city's mills and markets. The Kalyan market that millions still follow carries his name. After his death in the early 1990s, his son Suresh took over the operation.
Ratan Khatri: the Original Matka King
Ratan Khatri was born around 1932 into a Sindhi family in Karachi and moved to Bombay after Partition, where as a young man he worked in the textile trade and learned the cotton-rate game. He worked alongside Kalyanji Bhagat before setting up his own matka in the early 1960s – the operation remembered as "Ratan" or "Main Bazaar" matka, the root of today's Main Bazar.
Khatri's draws used playing cards pulled from a matka, and they were reportedly opened in front of the people who had bet – a big part of why punters trusted him. At its peak his network is said to have handled enormous sums: reports put betting across the matka trade at more than ₹500 crore a month in the 1980s and 1990s, with over 2,000 bookies in Bombay alone by 1995.
His business was never legal. During the Emergency (1975–77) he spent 19 months in jail. He stepped away from matka in the 1990s and died of a cardiac arrest at his home in Tardeo, south Mumbai, on 9 May 2020, aged 88.
Is Matka King a True Story?
Not exactly. Matka King, directed by Nagraj Popatrao Manjule and released on Prime Video on 17 April 2026, follows Brij Bhatti (Vijay Varma), a struggling cotton trader who invents a new lottery-style game in 1960s Bombay – drawing three cards every night at 9 PM. Brij Bhatti is a fictional character, loosely inspired by Ratan Khatri's life rather than a biography of him.
Kritika Kamra plays Gulrukh, a south Bombay widow who becomes the "Matka Queen", and Sai Tamhankar plays Brij's wife, Barkha. The show was popular enough for Prime Video to announce Matka King 2.
Matka has turned up on screen before: Prem Nath's character in Dharmatma (1975) was based on Khatri, and Khatri himself financed and acted in Rangila Ratan. The 2024 Telugu film Matka, starring Varun Tej, is another take on the same world.
What Happened Next
Police crackdowns in the mid-1990s pushed bookies out of Mumbai and into other states, and by the 2000s the trade had shrunk sharply. It never disappeared: the numbers moved to phones, result websites and, later, apps. Today dozens of independent markets declare results every day – see the timetable – and people follow them through charts that, for Kalyan, go back more than a decade.
What hasn't changed is the law. Satta matka is illegal gambling in most of India, and since 1 May 2026 online money games and their advertising are banned outright. Read what the law says.
Quick Answers
- Who is the real Matka King?
- Ratan Khatri, who ran Bombay's biggest matka operation from the 1960s to the 1990s.
- Is the Matka King series based on a true story?
- Loosely. Its hero, Brij Bhatti, is fictional, but the story draws on the real rise of matka and on Ratan Khatri's life.
- Who is the Matka Queen?
- In the series, Gulrukh – played by Kritika Kamra – a widow who becomes a matka operator.
- Who started Kalyan matka?
- Kalyanji Bhagat, who started the Worli matka in 1962; the Kalyan market is named after him.
- When did Ratan Khatri die?
- On 9 May 2020, in Mumbai, aged 88.
Sources: Wikipedia articles on Matka gambling and Ratan Khatri; reviews and interviews about Matka King in The Hollywood Reporter India and The Week (2026).