The progenitor. His theft of British trains under the guise of Qureshi set the decades-long feud in motion.
The characters are loosely based on the real-life rivalry between Shafiq Khan and Fahim Khan of Wasseypur.
Years later, GOW lives on through memes, pop-culture references, and film school syllabus. It stripped away the glamour of the "Bollywood Gangster" (typically seen in suits in Dubai or Mumbai) and replaced it with gamchas, country-made pistols ( katta ), and the dusty reality of the hinterlands.
The film meticulously tracks the shift from manual coal thievery during the British Raj to the sophisticated scrap metal trade and tender-rigging of the 90s and 2000s.