Mafia Queens of India

S. Hussain Zaidi and Velly Thevar turn their attention from the male-dominated Mumbai underworld to the women who ran rackets, outsmarted dons and bent entire criminal systems to their will across India. The book opens with a woman known only as 'Cleopatra', once a trusted lieutenant in Varadarajan Mudaliar's empire, and moves through a gallery of equally formidable figures: a numbers queen who built her own gambling dominion, a drug trafficker who evaded police using the most ordinary disguises, a Delhi madam who ran her red-light district with total control, and a Chambal bandit seeking revenge on those who wronged her. Told with the pace of a thriller and the eye for detail of veteran crime reporters, this is a gripping, unsensationalised look at the women the underworld tried to write out of its own history. Strongly recommended for true-crime readers and fans of Zaidi's earlier Mafia Queens of Mumbai.