Raman Raghav – The Serial Killer Mumbai Forgot

Raman Raghav was one of the very few criminals who created a very real, very urgent sense of fear in the common middle-class Mumbai. India has had its fair share of serial and spree killers, but reports about them rarely made headlines.

For decades, the common Indian thought was that murders without a motive happened only in foreign countries. And they should be forgiven if they did. Newspapers rarely used their real estate to talk about killers like Raman Raghav. But for the person on the street, Raman Raghav was a legitimate threat, at least for a few weeks in the early sixties in Mumbai.

Raman Raghav, the Indian Serial Killer who confessed

Today, around thirty years after the man’s death, frighteningly little is known about Raman Raghav, the man who once roamed the streets of suburban Mumbai and forced the middle class to sleep with their windows closed, no matter how warm the temperature was. Raghav came into the spotlight when a number of poor, shanty-living Mumbaikars were mercilessly killed with a similar modus operandi – a stone to the head.

For some peculiar reason, there are only two accounts of Raman Raghav, and both are by the police officer who finally apprehended Raman Raghav. Late Ramakant Kulkarni, the young police officer who finally apprehended Raghav.

According to Kulkarni, in his book, the murders were ‘motiveless’. And this, in hindsight, rings true. Kulkarni has written this in his book ‘Crimes, Criminals and Cops’. The book is currently out of print.

But just going through Raman’s victims’ list, there seems to be no apparent motive. He killed men, women and infants who lived in ramshackle shanties by bludgeoning their heads. So, there’s absolutely no motive for the murders – apart from what was later proven in court – that Raghav was suffering from Chronic Paranoid Schizophrenia.

From the legal point of view, this was the classic open-and-shut case. Murders took place, a man was picked up on suspicion, and he admitted the murders, even taking the police officers on a tour to show where he had hidden the murder paraphernalia.

Raman Raghav – the Serial Killer Who Inspired Anurag Kashyap

Of course, there’s the colourful aspect of how Raghav said it all, for some ‘murgi’ (cooked chicken) and coconut oil, as is described in this BBC article.

Some bits and pieces of information emerge from research. Anurag Kashyap made Raghav 2.0, a movie influenced by the person, which you can now watch on Zee5.. Vasan Bala, who wrote the script for the film, says that Raghav turned into a misogynist and necrophile.

The very fact that Raghav committed his murders in the northern area of Mumbai, and in ramshackle huts, shows that he had absolutely no planning as well. A very early book on murder that this blogger has read revealed that Raghav could only get some paise from the victims, so money was definitely not the motive.

Humans tend to ignore what they can’t understand. And why Raman committed close to 40 murders with no motive other than mental issues is something difficult to understand. There are criminals and then there are criminal-minded people, like this boy who didn’t take no for an answer even after getting INR 80 Lakh by blackmailing a school girl. Raghav, for all he did, never got even a fraction of that amount. But ask any eighty-year-old in Mumbai in those times, and they will tell you how they kept their windows closed for a few days because a killer is lurking outside.

Image: By Mumbai Police records., Fair use,

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