Former Mumbai Police commissioner Rakesh Maria’s When It All Began: The Untold Stories of the Underworld attempts to slow down the rush of recollection. It is neither a crime chronicle nor a self-congratulatory memoir. Instead, it reads like a carefully assembled archive—part police diary, part oral history—of how Mumbai’s underworld took shape, professionalised violence, and eventually faded from public memory.
Maria’s central argument is deceptively simple: organised crime in Mumbai did not disappear; it evolved. The dons who once controlled visible territories, cultivated street reputations, and ruled through proximity have been replaced by figures who operate remotely—across jurisdictions, borders and platforms. Crime, he argues, has become less theatrical but more elusive, as command centres have migrated digitally, geographically and psychologically.
For nearly four decades, he documented everything: meetings, movements, names, rivalries. This meticulous record-keeping has resulted in a book thick with dates, transactions, relationships, and cause-and-effect sequences. Mumbai underworld is shown as a functioning ecosystem that responds to political shifts.
Maria traces the trajectories of early dons, many of them migrants, labourers or refugees who arrived in Bombay and turned to crime when legitimate avenues closed. Childhoods, formative experiences and loyalties are placed alongside acts of violence.
Maria contextualises crime. The early underworld, he suggests, emerged in a city still negotiating law, labour and survival. Crime became organised not simply through individual ambition, but because it learned to mirror business, contracts, payments, logistics and enforcement. The emergence of the supari system marks a crucial shift in the book, when murder is seen as transaction, not vendetta. Violence becomes professional, efficient and morally detached.
Maria’s own career intersects with this transformation. Though the book avoids casting him as its protagonist, his postings—especially during the volatile years of the 1990s—anchor the narrative.
The 1993 serial blasts form a turning point. In this part of the book, Maria shows us how fear, responsibility and institutional pressure surface, offering glimpses of policing under extraordinary stress. The Mumbai Police emerge as a learning force, often reactive, sometimes overstretched, occasionally innovative. Crime detection, according to Maria, is less about dramatic breakthroughs and more about accumulation of details, tracking patterns and interpreting silences.
The book’s most compelling passages reveal how crime adapts faster than law. As Mumbai globalised, so did its underworld. Financial flows became more complex, communication more encrypted, and physical presence less necessary.
The gangster no longer needed to inhabit the city to control it. Today, Maria says, invisibility makes crime harder to dismantle.
Maria’s vantage point—he writes from within the institution he served all his life—shapes the narrative. Structural questions about political patronage, or the porous boundaries between legality and illegality, remain largely implicit. Crime is treated as a phenomenon to be documented and countered, rather than interrogated. Readers looking for sociological or political analysis may find the writing to be conservative.
Maria is most comfortable as a chronicler. His book insists that the real story of Mumbai’s underworld is procedural, patient and unfinished. Crime did not end; it learned to disappear. For a Mumbai still tempted to believe that its worst years are behind it, When It All Began offers a quiet, unsettling reminder.
WHEN IT ALL BEGAN: THE UNTOLD STORIES OF THE UNDERWORLD
By Rakesh Maria
Published by Vintage Books
Pages 424; price Rs999