I started Matka King very reluctantly and randomly, expecting a gangster story, thinking I was watching a rise.
Not because the show promised anything simplistic, but because the Indian streaming ecosystem has trained us well by now. Put a morally grey man in period clothing, hand him an empire to build, and somewhere along the way, the camera will ask you to admire the violence it takes to get there.
That is usually how these stories announce themselves. A man begins with nothing, a city is larger than him, and the system is older than him. Then slowly, through instinct, hunger, luck, and a little moral compromise, he builds something that becomes impossible to ignore.
For a while, Matka King lets you believe that it is that story too.
Brij Bhatti begins as someone you want to root for. There is something deeply attractive about his certainty in those early episodes. There is not an ounce of arrogance yet. Just a kind of clean confidence where he believes in work, in fairness, and in integrity amidst the corrupt power surrounding him. He has that rare quality of a man who still thinks principles can survive contact with ambition.
And because Vijay Varma plays him with such ease, you believe him.
That is the trap.
You do not watch Brij become corrupt in one dramatic moment. There is no single scene where the man you admired disappears, and the monster arrives in his place. It is slower than that. Quieter, more uncomfortable. He changes by learning how to explain himself better. Every compromise that he has to make when the world wants to pull him down, finds a justification. Every betrayal he faces gets wrapped in purpose. Every wound he causes becomes, in his mind, part of a larger design only he is brave enough to see.
That is what makes Matka King interesting.
Not the gambling, not the empire of satta matka that the real-life Ratan Khatri (whose life the character is loosely based on) created, and not even the underworld.
It is the slow horror of watching a man mistake his own mythology for morality.
Brij’s “integrity” is one of the show’s sharpest ideas, almost like a character study. At first, it feels real and almost old-fashioned. He wants to do things differently. He wants to build something cleaner in the world of gambling than the men before him. He wants to believe that he is not like Lalji Bhai, not like the men who profit from desperation without ever touching its consequences.
But integrity, in Brij’s hands, begins to change shape.
It stops being instinct and becomes all about image.
The white suit he starts donning says it before he does. It is not subtle, and perhaps it does not need to be. Brij wears purity like a costume long after purity has left him. The cleaner he looks, the more compromised he becomes. The more he speaks of legacy and not compromising on honesty in gambling, the less he can see the people standing in front of him.
That is the real rot.
Not greed alone. Greed would have been simpler to defend.
Brij’s downfall is more dangerous because he still believes he is noble.
This is where Vijay Varma becomes impossible to look away from. He does not play Brij as a villain waiting to be revealed. He plays him as a man who keeps adjusting the mirror until he can still recognise himself in it. There is charm, warmth, calculation, insecurity, pride, tenderness, and cruelty, often within the same stretch of silence. You understand why people follow him. You also understand why they eventually begin to fear him.
I fell in love with Vijay Varma while watching this. Not in the casual “good performance” way. More in the sense that you begin trusting an actor so completely that even when the writing slows (and in 50-min episodes, it does), your attention stays because he is still working, still shifting, and still letting something decay behind the eyes.
And Matka King gives him a strong world to decay within.
Lalji Bhai (Gulshan Grover) represents the older system that Brij first enters. He is the established order, the man who understands power as control, access, dominance, and hierarchy. Brij’s early rebellion against him feels almost righteous because Lalji Bhai belongs to a world that already looks morally exhausted. You want Brij to defeat him because Brij seems to promise something different.
That promise is what makes the later transformation hurt.
Because Brij does not simply defeat Lalji Bhai. He absorbs the logic of the system and then convinces himself he has improved it.
Darab (Viineet Kumar Siingh's cameo) stands at the other end of that journey. If Lalji Bhai is the old order, Darab is the future waiting with less patience and more blood. He represents the future world Brij thinks he can outsmart, contain, or negotiate with. But men like Darab are not interested in Brij’s idea of ethics. They are what happens when power stops pretending it needs dignity.
Between Lalji Bhai and Darab, Brij is trapped between the past he wants to replace and the future he cannot control.
And somewhere in that space, he loses himself without realising.
The tragedy is that people keep showing him what he has become, but he refuses to acknowledge it (or even act on it.)
Barkha (Sai Tamhankar), his wife, sees it first, or at least sees it most clearly. She is not just the moral anchor of the show; she is the life Brij betrayed. Her becoming stoic is not a dramatic rebellion. It is quieter than that, and stronger because of it. She refuses to let his money or empire become her son’s inheritance. She refuses to let comfort become complicity.
She is right to leave.
But her leaving breaks something in Brij, too. The thread that connected the old Brij to the new one.
That is the painful part. The people who do the right thing around Brij also become mirrors he cannot bear to look into. Barkha’s refusal tells him that his story about himself is no longer convincing. Not to her. Not to the person who knew him before the suit, before the numbers, before the throne.
And then there is Anmol, his son.
A child’s refusal carries a different kind of violence. Adults can argue, adults can justify, adults can lie to protect themselves. A child refusing to meet you leaves no room for performance. It says what no speech can say.
You have lost the future you thought you were building for.
His brother Lachu’s (Bhupendra Jadawat) betrayal and confrontation cut differently. He is not simply the brother who wrongs him or gets wronged by him. He is part of the life Brij came from. The family line, the original world, and in fact, the reason why he started his whole journey in satta matka. When that relationship breaks, the damage is not only emotional. It is structural. It shows that Brij’s empire is no longer expanding outward; it is eating inward.
Brij wanted to build something that would protect his people.
Instead, it becomes the thing his people need protection from.
Dagdu (Siddharth Jadhav) may be the show’s most quietly devastating presence. He begins as witness, companion, narrator, and almost keeper of Brij’s humanity. He sees the man before the myth settles fully over him. His loyalty does not feel blind at first; it feels grateful. Human. There is affection in it, and pity too.
That is why the shift matters.
For so long, Dagdu calls him “Seth.” There is reverence in that word. Habit too, yes, but also distance. Brij is above him, ahead of him, someone to serve, follow, explain, protect.
And then betrayal arrives.
Suddenly, he is Brij.
Not Seth.
Brij.
It is such a small linguistic shift, but it says everything. Respect does not always die with a scream. Sometimes it dies in how someone says your name.
Dagdu turning grey does not make him less moving. If anything, it makes him more human. He does not break because he is greedy; he breaks because Sulbha (Jamie Lever) becomes the line. There is only so much watching, absorbing, and enduring a person can do before loyalty begins to feel like self-harm.
That is another thing Matka King understands well. Brij does not fall alone. He pulls everyone into the moral weather of his own making. The people around him are forced to become harder, quieter, more compromised versions of themselves simply to survive proximity to him.
Gulrukh (Kritika Kamra) is different. A young, beautiful widow cut off from her family, she first enters Brij’s life as access to a world otherwise closed to him, the polished, elite circles his ambition has always looked toward but never fully belonged in. But what begins as strategic proximity gradually becomes something more corrosive.
Whatever exists between them never feels like love. Not truly.
Gulrukh sees the king in Brij before most others do, and Brij, by then, has slowly already begun craving that version of himself. In her admiration, he finds not intimacy but affirmation. She reflects back to him the man he wants to believe he has become. As she rises beside him into the role of the Matka Queen, becoming the refined face of the empire in rooms his usual world could never enter, she does not merely accompany his ascent; she accelerates it.
Because Gulrukh does not pull Brij away from who he is.
She rewards him for becoming someone else.
That makes her dangerous.
Not because she corrupts him, but because she confirms him.
Barkha knew Brij before he needed an audience. Gulrukh meets him closer to or on his way to the throne. And Brij, by then, is already beginning to prefer admiration over intimacy.
There is a cruelty in that, too.
Not loud cruelty. The ordinary kind. The kind where a man starts choosing the version of himself that flatters him most, and calls that destiny.
The show’s most revealing moment, for me, is not one of the big confrontations. It is the situation around his brother’s wedding. On paper, it is almost a flex. Brij showing what he can do, how far his system reaches, and how much he knows & controls.
But emotionally, it feels like something darker.
It is the moment where he begins to behave as if probability and fate are the same thing. As if knowing people and patterns means controlling outcomes. As if the world itself has become another matka number he can read before anyone else.
That is where the God complex begins to show.
Not in violence.
In certainty. And the people around him can't help but notice.
The pacing does hurt the show at times. There are stretches where you feel the length, places where the series lingers without deepening as much as it could. A tighter version may have carried more force. But even when it slows, the character work keeps the centre intact. You stay because Brij is still changing, and because everyone around him is changing in response.
That matters.
Because Matka King is not at its best when it explains the mechanics of matka, detailed though those explanations are. It is at its best when it shows what happens to a man who begins believing that honesty in one part of his life can excuse corruption in all the others. Brij convinces himself that because he brought integrity to the game, because he made matka fair where others made gambling crooked, everything else can be rationalised. The lies, the betrayals, the compromises, the blood around the business, none of it, in his mind, negates who he is at his core. If the foundation is honest, he believes the structure built on top of it cannot truly be rotten.
And the finale makes that clear.
By the time Brij is shot in prison, the honest version of him has already been dying for a long time. The bullet is not the end of innocence. It is only the confirmation. The man who once believed in integrity has already turned integrity into performance, family into collateral, loyalty into debt, and ambition into destiny.
By then, the white suit still remains, but is stained by blood.
That is perhaps the cruellest part of it.
The image survives longer than the man does. The performance of purity outlives the purity itself. Even when everything beneath it has changed, Brij continues dressing like someone untouched by what he has become.
And maybe that is the tragedy in its simplest form: he does not stop pretending because he no longer knows he is pretending.
That is why I am not sure I am excited for Season 2 in the usual way.
I will watch Season 2. Of course I will. I want to know what happens next.
But I also suspect the most compelling part of Matka King may already be behind us.
The empire may grow or fall from here, the violence may escalate, the world may get bloodier, louder, harsher, but we have seen versions of that story before.
What made this season linger was not the king after the crown. What I found more compelling was this season’s quieter tragedy.
It was the man before the myth fully swallowed him.
And that man, I think, is already gone, fully disappeared into it.
Maybe that is why Matka King stayed with me. Not as a perfect show. Not as something without pacing issues or flaws. But as a story about a man who outlives the best version of himself and keeps calling it success.
Some falls are loud. Some are public. Some arrive with blood, betrayal, and prison walls.
But some begin much earlier.
In a white suit.
In a justified lie.
In the moment a man stops asking whether he is still good, because too many people have already started calling him great.
