How to Cook up a Cartel
Even with its feminist gaze, Dabba Cartel’s biggest win is how it resists baking its narrative with one-note markers of gender and social identity. The result is a batch of hungry women out to hunt—sinking their teeth in this world to devour it to their heart’s content.
At this point, the origin story of a desi drug cartel is as overdone as the IIT/UPSC aspiration story. It’s been thoroughly wrung out, even if one centres the premise in a kitchen filled with women. Homi Adjania’s Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo—featuring a women-controlled drug cartel fronted as an herbal and doll-making business—premiered on Disney+ Hotstar only two years ago. The 2022 Jahnvi Kapoor starrer Good Luck Jerry (also platformed by Disney+ Hotstar) told the story of how a young, small-town woman gets mired in an illicit, messy business to better her circumstance.
The banality of its set-up, however, is not lost on Dabba Cartel (2025). In fact, it is this keen awareness and the mastery with which it plays within this oversaturated genre, that sets this Netflix crime thriller apart from the other content vying for attention. Directed by Hitesh Bhatia, the seven-episode series is set in Thane, Mumbai, revolving around five women of different ages and socio-economic backgrounds as they join forces to run a drug cartel using a home-cooked tiffin service as pretext. It’s a motley group consisting of Baa (Shabana Azmi), her young daughter-in-law Raji (Shalini Pandey), their house-help Mala (Nimisha Sajayan), real-estate broker Shahida (Anjali Anand) and Varuna (Jyothika), a struggling entrepreneur who lives in the same society as Baa and Raji.
In their fight to reclaim their agency and identity, these five women lose themselves so entirely, it’s heartbreaking—an apt allegory for how, no matter how hard they may try, women are set up to fail in a world only designed to cater to and elevate men.
Each of these women have distinctly disparate outer and inner lives. Now long retired, Baa was once a name feared in the Mumbai underworld. Shahida is a queer, working Muslim. Raji is a pregnant, upright housewife content with running her modest tiffin service to support her husband’s dream of relocating to Germany. Mala is a single mother desperate to break free from her ‘kaam-waali bai’ identity. Once a force to reckon with at a pharma giant, Varuna is coming to terms with the heavy cost she has had to pay to be a wife and mother.
The gender of this pentagon that forms the nucleus of Dabba Cartel marginalizes its key players so fully that all other differentiators—class, culture, age, even religion—pale in comparison. Despite a hackneyed plot, the show cleverly weaponizes the quotidian sexism and invisibilization of its women to great advantage.
On the surface, it may look like all of them are pushed into the snare by economic constraints and their need to punch above their weight, but the turbulent waters run deep. For Mala, getting rich quick is her only chance at a social upgrade. Albeit illegal and dangerous, the windfall gain can secure her daughter’s life and accord her the respectability that only comes with money. Nimisha Sajayan is feisty, abrasive as the quick-mouthed and brusque Mala, discontent with the cards she’s been dealt, looking for a way out.
For Raji, making more dough is her way of shouldering her husband’s uncontainable ambition. For Varuna, it’s her clutching at the seams, trying to sustain some sense of past glory, a last-ditch effort to not drown entirely. This struggle for survival manifests itself in her upscale clothing label. In dire need of funds, it is an albatross around her neck that she can’t seem to shake away. For Shahida, financial independence is a ticket out of spaces where she must hide her sexual orientation to get by. For Baa, it’s almost like waking up to life again.
Azmi is a joy to watch as Kaashi, a woman with a stormy past, secrets too dangerous to spill, whose appetite for risk and chaos demands more blood. Her scenes with Lillete Dubey—who plays her longtime friend and partner-in-crime Maushumi—are electric. Together, they are like Sholay’s Jai and Veeru with a torrential shared history. It’s their quiet, unflagging bond that forms the show’s emotional core.
Like Dubey’s Maushumi, Dabba Cartel also features the character of sub-inspector Preeti (Sai Tamhankar), who isn’t directly related to the cartel, but sails in the same boat, marginalized just like the others for her gender. Infantilized by her colleagues, she is assigned to investigate the pharma scam involving the unregulated under-the-table sale of a banned drug—by the same company where Raji and Varuna’s husbands work.
The story of the men in the series forms a parallel arc. Jostling for centre-stage, they relentlessly try to be main characters of a narrative that’s not theirs, and collide head first with the women in the climax. Vishnu Menon and Bhavna Kher’s incisive writing deftly ratchets up the tension, letting it simmer in the first six episodes—until the explosions in the finale. It’s an unvarnished and unchecked unraveling.
One of the standout moments is the major confrontation sequence between Varuna and her husband Shankar (Jisshu Sengupta). Superbly written and performed, it paints a poignant portrait of how easily men violate boundaries in a marriage, how women are gaslit and manipulated into toeing their expectations only to be tossed aside as a piece of useless furniture once they’ve served their purpose—which almost always is restricted to child bearing and rearing.
Dabba Cartel employs the covert making and selling of drugs by everywoman in a city as nondescript as Thane as an excuse to show how casual sexism can drive women to the point of no return. In their fight to reclaim their agency and identity, these five women lose themselves so entirely, it’s heartbreaking—an apt allegory for how, no matter how hard they may try, women are set up to fail in a world only designed to cater to and elevate men.
Creators Shibani Akhtar, Vishnu Menon, Gaurav Kapur and Akanksha Seda also play clever in making the kitchen the epicenter of the mayhem. There cannot be a better site to situate gender violence. It’s not always sexual or explicit: more often than not, it’s emotional, mental, psychological, social, financial, and professional by people who claim to mean well.
The choice of actors who play the key roles is also telling. Dabba Cartel is a true pan-India project, roping in some of the finest talents from across Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Malayalam, and Hindi film industries. At different stages of their career and popularity, each of these actors is looking either for a breakthrough or a renaissance. It’s arguably the first project that does not care about Anand’s body size, Sanjayan’s south-Indianness, or Azmi’s cult status.
Despite its feminist gaze, Dabba Cartel’s biggest win is how it resists baking its narrative with one-note markers of gender and social identity. The crime thriller series frees them of the straddle that is their popular image and lets them be. The result is a batch of hungry women out to hunt—sinking their teeth in this world to devour it to their heart’s content.
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Sneha Bengani is a film and culture critic. She has written extensively on cinema, gender, books, and pop culture for some of India’s leading news publications, such as CNBC-TV18, Firstpost, CNN-News18, and Hindustan Times. Over the years, she has lived in various cities across the country but her home and heart are in Jaipur. You can find her on Instagram: @benganiwrites and Twitter: @benganiwrites.
