In the history of the underworld, women have often been written off. Mafia Queens of India brings them back to the center.

The journey begins with a woman known only as “Cleopatra.”. Once a trusted figure in Varadarajan Mudaliar’s empire, she lives in obscurity but still carries an aura of authority. Her guarded story unlocks a box of others: a gambling queen who carved her own dominion out of numbers, a drug trafficker who used the most ordinary disguises to fool the police, and a madam from Delhi’s G.B. Road who ran her brothel district with utter ruthlessness.

Each tale shows how audacity could be wielded just as effectively by women as by the men who overshadowed them. We travel to the ravines of Chambal where a bandit seeks revenge against those who’d wronged her. In another part of the country, a ponzi scheme dressed in the garb of religion, derails the lives of millions. In colonial Amritsar, a family is hunted by British troops and a woman’s revenge threatens to bring down an empire.

Told with the pace of a thriller and the intimacy of eyewitness reporting, Mafia Queens of India is a portrait of women who broke the rules, rewrote them, and sometimes paid the ultimate price. The myriad tales in these pages are a grim reminder that, in the dark shadows of the mafia, the most dangerous figures are not always the ones you expect to be.

These are women who ruled rackets, outsmarted dons, and bent entire systems to their will.