Sharvan Singh is a struggling boxer who works for the local politician and head of the State Boxing Federation, Bhagwan Das Mishra. He drifts away after Mishra only makes him perform domestic tasks and errands rather than boxing training. Singh falls in love with his niece, Sunaina, who is mute. But her father tells him to get a job first before thinking about marrying her. For the job, Singh tries to get into state level tournament but is not selected because of Mishra. He then goes to Varanasi and is trained by Sanjay Kumar.

Singh defeats Mishra's boxer and wins a medal, after which he gets a job in the Indian Railways. Singh and Sunaina are married as per the latter father's promise. But, Mishra despises the marriage and threatens his brother to face the consequences. Singh tries to maintain between his job, training, family life and learning sign language on Sunaina's request. Meanwhile, his boss in the office tries to harass him by putting too much work pressure on him. Mishra gets Sunaina's father fired from his job and expels her family out of their home. They go to their ancestral village to live but are held captive by Mishra's goons in his village house. Mishra also breaks his brother's leg.

Later at Sanjay Kumar's house, both Kumar and Singh are attacked by mob after being falsely accused of eating beef. Kumar gets seriously injured in the attack and is admitted to ICU; Singh survives the attack. He then tries to find Sunaina but fails and meanwhile she is forcefully engaged by Mishra to a crippled businessman for money. Singh fights and qualifies to the final for national level tournament. Sunaina and his mother manage to call Singh and tells him about their whereabouts. Singh goes there and rescues Sunaina and her family. Mishra manages to disqualify Singh on health grounds but reinstates him after Singh apologises; Mishra also throws a condition that he will have to lose the match and retire from boxing. Singh loses the final match.

• Vineet Kumar Singh as Shravan Kumar Singh
• Zoya Hussain as Sunaina Mishra
• Jimmy Sheirgill as Bhagwan Das Mishra
• Sadhana Singh as Meera, Sunaina's Mother
• Ravi Kishan as Sanjay Kumar
• Shakti Kumar as Bhatia
• Rajesh Tailang as Shravan's Father
• Shree Dhar Dubey as Gopal Tiwari
• Chittaranjan Tripathy as Krishna Kant Yadav
• Sukhesh Mishra as Gopal Das
• Shikha Chauhan as Guddi, Shravan's sister
• Abhay Joshi as Inspector
• Neeraj Goyat as a Boxer
• Deepak Tanwar as Boxer
• Nawazuddin Siddiqui as the Baaraat Singer

Scripting

Actor Vineet Kumar Singh mentioned that he was not getting the kind of work he wanted in films. He then decided to write his own script on boxing, as he a sports backgroung and had been a national-level basketball player and played at six National Games at mini and sub-junior level. The idea of the film came to Singh based on his observation of the condition of sportsperson's in the country. He mentions: "I’ve seen lots of stories like this, which stayed with me over the years. I wrote this film because I wanted to play this character and I knew the only way to do that is by writing it myself." Singh wrote the script with his sister and basketball player Mukti Singh Srinet, in 2013 and was seeking a financer for it. He looked at the "player's struggles — those who couldn't find their way up because they couldn't land in the officials' good books; the bad conditions they lived, played and practised in". He mentioned a single incident that triggered the script was when he saw his senior, who had won several boxing medals and whose photographs had appeared in the newspaper, was "stealthily porting luggage" at the Varanasi Junction railway station to make ends meet. When Singh saw him, he was trying to hide his face behind the luggage. Singh said that the incident "really shook" him because he was also a sportsperson. He took inspiration from the story of some other players who worked as a sweeper or who sold their medals for some money. While he was pitching his script, Singh also worked on his stamina for the role by running, skipping and cardio-training for two hours every day. Singh had one condition that he would be the lead actor of this film, but no producer agreed on it.

Development

Eventually, director Anurag Kashyap got to know about it with whom Singh had worked earlier on three films including Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), Bombay Talkies (2013) and Ugly (2014). Kashyap felt that the script was very similar to Rocky (1976) and asked Singh to show him a "Rocky" in India. Kashyap however, found one sequence in the script interesting where the protagonist tries to get a government job. He expressed two conditions on which he will make the film to Singh, that he is going to change the script a little and Singh should "need to look like a boxer". For Kashyap, boxing and the case of Narsingh Pancham Yadav, who was accused of doping, prompted him for the film. Singh said that he knew about the "politics, caste bias and power struggles in sports associations" but the social-political side in the script was derived by Kashyap. For the preparation, Singh could only find mixed martial art fighters in Mumbai who were expensive. After which Kashyap connected him to boxer Vijender Singh, who put him in touch with coaches in Patiala. Singh sold off all his belongings for money and left Mumbai the same night for the training, after Kashyap decided to make the film. The script was written by Kashyap, Singh, Mukti Singh, K.D.Satyam, Ranjan Chandel and Prasoon Mishra. Anand L. Rai called Kashyap and offered him to direct Manmarziyaan, but Kashyap said he wanted to make Mukkabaaz first. So they both agreed and decided to co-produce. In July 2017, it was announced that Kashyap and Rai are coming together for a film called Mukkabaaz.

Casting

Delhi's theatre actress Zoya Hussain makes her feature debut with the film, where she plays a mute girl. Kashyap had wanted to work with her after seeing her film Three and Half Takes, which he liked. To prepare for the role, Hussain spent several months learning non-verbal language from sign language expert Sangeeta Gala and the character's mannerism. Kashyap said that her disability in the film symbolises the lack of voice of women in her region. Ravi Kishan played the role of Sanjay Kumar, a failed boxer who teaches Shravan Kumar boxing. He was cast by casting director Mukesh Chhabra for the role. Rajesh Tailang was cast in the role of Shravan's father in the film. Jimmy Shergill was cast as the antagonist, Bhagwan Das Mishra, an upper cast don. Sadhana Singh was also cast in the film. Some real life boxers such as Neeraj Goyat and Deepak Tanwar also appear in the film.

Filming

Kashyap sent his second unit director Saqib Pandor, to record boxing tournaments on camera which were recreated as the state tournaments in the film. They witnessed a boxing tournament happening under the tent and without an audience as their own space was occupied. Kashyap also realised that after attending an actual boxing tournament in north India that there was no audience apart from "people in power who decide which boxer should represent the state, and who will not". Kashyap told him not to do the "filmi training" but to become a hardcore boxer. There are no boxing choreographers, action directors in the film. The film is set in Bareilly district of Uttar Pradesh and is inspired by several true incidents. Singh was trained for a year to play the boxer’s role by a coach, Anudeep Singh, who was coaching people for free and runs a garage. His story was also used for the research of the film. Singh did not disclose that he was preparing for a role in film to his coach. Kashyap also watched several Hollywood films that had boxing as its setting. The trainers said that Singh was learning boxing in the age when boxers retire. He was trained by several coaches including Anudeeep Singh and Harpreet Singh, who were former boxer and coach of the Indian boxing team, respectively. Singh trained for more than 700 days and was injured several times.

Singh's training began at Netaji Subhas National Institute of Sports, Patiala, a year before filming. During the training, he could not see the punches coming and took real beating everyday and also broke some ribs. Later, he learned how to counter and defend himself. In the film, he fought with real International-level boxers with no choreography and also broke a rib and his hand. Kashyap said that in sports film's the actors "expose themselves too much", whereas Singh "just disappeared" in the role. Mukkabaaz also deals with the issue of caste system and cow vigilantism in India.^[26] It was shot in Bareilly, Varanasi and Lucknow in May 2017.^[8][27] The film is singer-composer Rachita Arora's first film as a composer. She was recommended to Kashyap by Makrand Deshpande. She was doing a play with him and was standing outside a parking lot. Kashyap heard her song and asked her about its composer, to which she said that she composed it herself. Later, Kashyap signed her for the film.^[6] The film was edited by Aarti Bajaj and Ankit Bidyadhar, while Shanker Raman, Rajeev Ravi and Jayesh Nair served as the director of photography.^[10]