Zeishan Quadri

Timeline

1. 1983Born in Wasseypur, Dhanbad, the youngest of three children and the only son of a civil engineer.Dhanbad was then part of Bihar and is now in Jharkhand.
2. 2000sSchooling at Doon Public School, Dhanbad, then a bachelor's degree in Meerut, followed by eighteen months in Delhi working at a call centre and for HCL.
3. 2008Moves to Mumbai with acting as the plan and no contacts in the industry.
4. 2009Meets Anurag Kashyap and pitches the Wasseypur story. The story is sold on 30 May 2009, on the condition that he writes the script and plays a part.
5. 2012Gangs of Wasseypur is released in two parts, on 22 June and 8 August, after screening at the Cannes Directors' Fortnight.
6. 2014Writes dialogue for Revolver Rani and acts in Akki Vikki Te Nikki.
7. 2015Directs and produces his first film, Meeruthiya Gangsters, edited and presented by Kashyap.
8. 2020Acts in Bicchoo Ka Khel and produces and co-writes Halahal and Chhalaang.
9. 2025Enters Bigg Boss 19 on premiere night and is evicted in week seven, on Day 49.

Who Zeishan Quadri is

Zeishan Quadri is a writer first and everything else second. The story he carried out of Wasseypur, the neighbourhood in Dhanbad where he grew up among families whose feuds ran for generations, became Gangs of Wasseypur, the two part crime epic released in 2012 that changed what Hindi cinema thought it could do with a gangster film. He is credited with the story and shares the screenplay credit with the director Anurag Kashyap. He also acted in it, as Definite Khan, in the second part.^[1][2]

The rest of his career is best understood as an attempt to keep working after a debut that would define most people permanently. He has written dialogue for other directors, acted in films and series, produced projects for streaming platforms, and directed one feature of his own. None of it has matched the cultural weight of the first thing he wrote, and that is not unusual for a writer whose first produced script became a reference point for a generation of Hindi film watchers.^[2]

What makes him a useful subject is the gap between the film and the industry around it. Gangs of Wasseypur is quoted constantly, watched repeatedly and taught in film schools. Its writer spent the following decade pitching projects that were announced and then shelved, a script with Madhur Bhandarkar that never went anywhere, a film with Pritish Nandy Communications that was dropped, a third Wasseypur instalment that Kashyap publicly ruled out in 2024. Indian cinema produces a great many writers like this and very few of them get a second act this visible.^[2]

In 2025 he got one anyway. Bigg Boss 19 put him in a house with fifteen other people, most of them much younger, several of them creators who had never read a screenplay, and the audience got to see what a writer from Dhanbad does when he is bored, provoked and on camera for sixteen weeks. He lasted seven of them.^[3]

Wasseypur, Dhanbad and the family

He was born in Wasseypur in 1983, in a Dhanbad that was still part of Bihar and is now part of Jharkhand. He is the only son and the youngest of three children; his father, Syed Imran Quadri, was a civil engineer, and the family lived in the protective, slightly closed way that a single son in a Muslim household in a rough town is often raised. He has described his childhood as strict, and the description fits the place.^[2]

Wasseypur in the 1980s and 1990s was a cluster of mohallas built around the coal trade, where the scrap trade, the transport contracts and the muscle that protected both had produced a set of feuding families whose names still carry weight in the district. The film that bears the neighbourhood's name is not documentary, but the families in it are drawn from people he grew up among, and the dialogue has the rhythm of a place rather than of a screenplay class.^[1][2]

He went to Doon Public School in Dhanbad and then left for Meerut for a bachelor's degree. The move to Meerut, rather than to Delhi or Aligarh, is a small detail that explains a lot: it is a city of coaching centres and rented rooms, and it is where a young man from a coal town goes when the family wants a degree but not the expense of a big city.^[2]

Before films, he worked in Delhi for about eighteen months, at a call centre and at HCL. Call centre work in that period meant night shifts, an American accent drilled into a Bihari tongue, and hours of talking to strangers about problems that did not matter. He has said the job taught him how people talk when they are annoyed, which is a fair description of where his dialogue comes from.^[2]

Mumbai, 2008, and the story he carried

He moved to Mumbai in 2008 to act, and like most people who move to Mumbai to act, he spent the first year discovering that the industry does not have a door marked enquiries. What he had, and what most of the queue outside casting offices does not, was a story. He spent that year watching world cinema, Majid Majidi, Fatih Akin, Akira Kurosawa, and learning how a film is put together rather than how a performance is delivered.^[2]

In 2009 he got a meeting with Anurag Kashyap, who was then the most approachable director in Mumbai for anyone with an unusual story and no film school pedigree. Quadri pitched Wasseypur. Kashyap bought it. The story was sold on 30 May 2009, and the deal included two conditions that Quadri negotiated for himself: he would write the script, and he would play a part.^[2]

That negotiation is the single most important decision of his career and it is worth pausing on. A first time writer with no credits is normally paid a fee and removed from the process. Quadri asked to stay in it, and Kashyap, who has a long record of backing people from outside the industry, agreed. Three years later the film came out with his name on the story and the screenplay.^[2]

The script took the shape it did because of where it came from. The story runs from 1941 to 2010 across three generations of a family in Dhanbad, and the coal mafia setting is not a backdrop but the economy that every character is trying to escape or control. Kashyap shot it as a five hour film and then released it in two parts, which is the only way a story of that length could reach cinemas.^[2]

Gangs of Wasseypur, 2012

Part one released on 22 June 2012 and part two on 8 August, after the full film screened at the Cannes Directors' Fortnight. The cast was the strongest ensemble Hindi cinema assembled that decade: Manoj Bajpayee, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Pankaj Tripathi, Richa Chadha, Jaideep Ahlawat, Huma Qureshi, Piyush Mishra and Tigmanshu Dhulia. Both parts were critically acclaimed and commercially successful, and the film has since acquired the kind of following that produces memes, quoting contests and annual rewatches.^[2]

Its influence is easy to underestimate from a distance. Before 2012, the Hindi gangster film was either Mumbai noir or a stylised western. Gangs of Wasseypur put a small town in Bihar at the centre of an epic, used district level politics as plot, and let its characters speak in a dialect that most of the audience had never heard on a cinema screen. A generation of films set in the Hindi belt followed, and most of them were trying to do what this one did first.^[2]

Quadri's own contribution is often described as the story, which undersells it. The screenplay credit is shared with Kashyap, and the structure, the jumps in time and the way the film keeps handing the story to a new generation, are the work of both men. The dialogue has a texture that could only come from someone who had heard those men talk.^[2]

He also played Definite Khan in the second part, a role he negotiated for before the script existed. It is a small part in a very large film and it gave him a face the industry could place, which is worth more to a writer trying to work in Mumbai than the fee was.^[1][2]

Writing for others and the films that did not happen

The years after Wasseypur were busy in a way that does not show up on a filmography. He wrote the screenplay for Blood Money in 2012, a corporate crime film that used his name in its marketing and did not do much else. He wrote the dialogue for Revolver Rani in 2014, the Sai Kabir film starring Kangana Ranaut, and acted in Akki Vikki Te Nikki, a small comedy directed by Vipin Sharma.^[1][2]

He was also attached to a remarkable number of projects that never reached a screen. He was reported to be writing a script with Madhur Bhandarkar for Madamji, a Priyanka Chopra starrer that was announced and then quietly disappeared. He was reported to be writing Oh Womaniya for Pritish Nandy Communications, to be directed by Anu Menon, and a Fardeen Khan film called Firauti. Both were shelved. He was reported to be producing Sarbjit, with Omung Kumar directing, before that film went ahead without him.^[2]

This is the ordinary weather of the Mumbai industry and it is rarely written about, because the trade press reports announcements and not the silence that follows them. A writer with one hit and no producing power can spend five years in development and have nothing to show for it. Quadri's file is a clear example: between 2012 and 2015 he was attached to at least four films that did not happen.^[2]

The third Wasseypur film is the one that keeps returning. Mumbai Mirror reported that he and Kashyap would collaborate on a third instalment, with Kashyap insisting that Quadri write and direct it. In 2024 Kashyap publicly said the story was not happening. A decade of speculation ended with a denial, which is how most sequels to films that ended properly tend to finish.^[2]

Meeruthiya Gangsters and the move to direction

His first film as director and producer was Meeruthiya Gangsters, released in 2015. It is a crime comedy about a group of young men in Meerut who decide that kidnapping is a business, and it is drawn from the same instinct that produced Wasseypur: take a small town, find the criminal economy underneath it, and let the humour come from the gap between ambition and competence.^[1][2]

The film was edited by Anurag Kashyap, who also presented it with Prateek Entertainment, which tells you how the project got made. A first time director with a cult screenplay and no directing experience needs a godfather, and Quadri had one. He promoted the film in several cities, including a visit to Aligarh Muslim University, where he also served on the jury of the university's Filmsaaz festival.^[2]

The reviews were mixed and the film did not become a hit. What it did was establish him as a director rather than only a writer, which matters for anyone trying to raise money for a second film. He has not directed a second feature, and the reasons are the same ones that keep most Indian directors from a second film: finance, timing and the fact that a first film which does not make money closes doors rather than opening them.^[2]

The Meerut setting is worth noting. He had already put Dhanbad on screen; Meeruthiya Gangsters took him to western Uttar Pradesh, and later projects were reported to be set in the same belt. He writes about the Hindi speaking small city as an economic system, and he does it from the inside, which is rarer in Mumbai than it should be.^[2]

Streaming, 2020, and a second wind

The streaming boom gave him a way back in. In 2020 he appeared in Bicchoo Ka Khel, an ALTBalaji series produced by Ekta Kapoor, playing a role in a story about a small town writer who gets pulled into crime. In the same year he produced and co-wrote two films that reached audiences the cinema had stopped giving him: Halahal, a crime drama led by Sachin Khedekar and Barun Sobti, and Chhalaang, a sports comedy with Rajkummar Rao and Nushrratt Bharuccha.^[2]

Chhalaang is the more interesting of the two for his career. It is a mainstream, star led, Hansal Mehta directed film, and his name is on it as a writer and producer. Working on a film of that size is a different job from writing a two part epic, and it shows that he could operate inside the system as well as at its edges.^[2]

Halahal, a fictionalised treatment of a real murder case, is closer to his own instincts. It is grim, procedural and built on a father's search, and it plays to the part of his writing that is interested in institutions rather than in gangsters. Both films released within months of each other in 2020, which was a year in which streaming platforms were the only places releasing anything.^[2]

He continued acting as well. He played a negative lead in Woh Bhi Din The, directed by Sajid Ali and produced by John Abraham Entertainment, and a deputy CBI officer in Bloody Daddy. Neither role was large enough to change how the industry classified him, but both kept him in work, and the second was in a film with a genuine star in it.^[2]

Bigg Boss 19

Bigg Boss 19 premiered on 24 August 2025 with Salman Khan hosting and a cast of sixteen that mixed television actors, creators and one film writer. Zeishan Quadri was in the original sixteen, and he was the only contestant that season with a writing credit on a film as widely quoted as Gangs of Wasseypur. The show introduced him with a clip from it, as it was always going to.^[3]

He was nominated in the first week, on Day 2, along with Abhishek Bajaj, Gaurav Khanna, Natalia Janoszek, Neelam Giri, Pranit More and Tanya Mittal, and survived. The season's parliament format gave him a natural role, because a room full of people arguing about rules is a room in which a writer who has spent a decade on structure can see the move before it is made.^[3]

He also became, for a stretch, the house's irritant. On Day 11 the comedian Pranit More did a roast in which he said the kitchen no longer needed gas because Zeishan provided enough kerosene, and Bigg Boss turned the line into a debate in the Assembly Room. The housemates were asked whether he ignited conflicts, and the vote went his way, which removed Pranit from the captaincy race. It is the only recorded instance this entry found of a housemate winning an argument in a reality show on the strength of a metaphor.^[3]

He lasted forty-nine days. In week seven, on the Weekend Ka Vaar episode of 12 October 2025, he was evicted after receiving the fewest votes, in a task where the four nominated contestants stood at podiums that lit green for safe and red for out. Baseer Ali and Neelam Giri were declared safe, Ashnoor Kaur survived, and his podium turned red. The episode reportedly left Shehbaz Badesha and Tanya Mittal in tears.^[3][4][5]

In the same episode, Salman Khan used the platform to answer A.R. Murugadoss, who had blamed him for the failure of Sikandar, and to close a long running rift with the singer Arijit Singh. A contestant's exit shared a weekend with two industry stories larger than his own, which is a fair summary of his relationship with the spotlight.^[4]

He finished fifteenth of the eighteen housemates who entered the season, and he left before the show's biggest storylines had formed. Koimoi reported that he was paid about 71,400 rupees a day, which works out to roughly 35 lakh rupees for the run. The figure is a reported estimate from production side sources rather than a disclosed fee.^[6]

What has not been confirmed

His date of birth is given as 18 March 1983 by biography sites and by the profiles that reproduce them. Wikipedia gives only the year, 1983. He has not confirmed a full date publicly, and the day and month should be treated as an aggregator entry rather than a record.^[1][2]

His education is described differently in different places. Profile sites say he studied computer science at a college in Meerut; Wikipedia says he left Dhanbad for a Bachelor of Arts in Meerut. The two cannot both be right and no interview settles it.^[1][2]

The year he moved to Mumbai is also inconsistent. His Wikipedia entry gives 2008 in the early life section and 2009 in the career section, and the story sale is dated 30 May 2009. This entry uses 2008 for the move and 2009 for the pitch, which is the sequence that fits both.^[2]

His net worth is an estimate with a very wide range. Aggregator pages put it between six and fifteen crore rupees, which is a span wide enough to be meaningless, and there is no disclosure behind it. This entry does not repeat a figure.^[1]

His production company, his share of the rights in Gangs of Wasseypur and any ongoing project after 2025 are not in the public record. He has not announced a next film since Bigg Boss 19, and announcements in this industry are not commitments.^[2]

Whether the third Wasseypur film was ever a real project is unresolved. The reporting said Kashyap wanted Quadri to write and direct it. Kashyap denied it in 2024. No script, budget or producer was ever named by either man.^[2]