Mumbai Fables Read online

  Battling for Maharashtra meant going to war with the capitalists by other means, such as language and identity. During the colonial era, the strikes against mill owners had helped the Communists to mobilize Girangaon’s social and cultural ties in the interests of trade-union struggles. But during the 1950s, the working-class culture forged during these decades of trade-union struggles was deployed for Maharashtrian, not proletarian, power.

  When Saleem Sinai crashed into a procession of mill workers, he unexpectedly supplied them with a slogan ridiculing the Gujaratis. Off they went, crying “Soo ché? saru ché,” raising slogans for Marathis, not revolution. Their symbol was not the red flag but Shivaji. Communist and Socialist writers took to portraying the seventeenth-century Maratha warrior as antifeudal and secular. Experiences of inequality and exploitation were summoned and deployed to bring a community of Marathi speakers into political existence. Their efforts were successful. But it was left to the Shiv Sena to develop the implications of this linguistic identity into a full-fledged, militant populism.

  6.3. The state of Maharashtra. Courtesy: Tsering W. Shawa.

  SNARLING TIGER

  Maharashtra had come into existence. Now what? Bal Thackeray answered this question by starting a cartoon weekly. Thackeray’s father, Keshav Sitaram Thackeray, had also edited a journal and was well known by his pen name Prabodhankar, “the one who enlightens.” A prominent social reformer and writer, Prabodhankar Thackeray had played a leading part in the Samyukta Maharashtra movement. The Thackerays lived in Shivaji Park, a neighborhood of predominantly Marathi-speaking white-collar workers. The family belonged to Chandraseniya Kayastha Prabhus, a caste reputed to value education, but Bal Thackeray never matriculated from high school. Nor did he have his father’s intellectual and political reputation. But the son did inherit his father’s pungent style, which he employed in his writings, speeches, and, above all, his cartoons. An accomplished cartoonist, he worked for the English newspaper the Free Press Journal during the 1950s. Thackeray was thirty-four years old when he quit his job and started his magazine in 1960. Shrikant, his younger brother and also a cartoonist, joined him in the venture.

  The cartoon weekly was called Marmik, or “Straight from the Heart.” According to Thackeray, the magazine was intended to offer funny, heartwarming, and exciting features in contrast to the depressing stories the Sunday supplements carried.55 In keeping with this orientation were Thackeray’s signature two-page Sunday cartoon features that drew pictures of Indian politics and society with biting wit and irreverent humor. He exposed political hypocrisy and bureaucratic excesses and ridiculed the powerful. The centerpiece of his sharp and witty commentary was the depiction of what he saw as the plight of the Marathi manoos, or the Marathi people. Week after week, he showcased the oppressed state of the Marathi and railed against the “outsiders”—initially the South Indians and Communists and later the Muslims. The magazine struck a chord, and its circulation soared to forty thousand by 1966.56

  Emboldened, Thackeray founded the Shiv Sena in June 1966. The inaugural public meeting of the Shiv Sena, announced in Marmik, was held in Shivaji Park on October 30, the day of the Dushera Festival. Nearly half a million people swarmed the open ground, surprising everyone.57 Thackeray’s father spoke to the assembled crowd, exhorting them to restore Maharashtrian cultural purity. Other speakers followed. The last was Bal Thackeray, the featured speaker. He was not a great orator, but his wit and sarcasm captivated the crowd. He likened rajkaran (politics) with gajkaran (ringworm), playing on the phonetic similarity of the two words to rail against politics and politicians. He declared that the Shiv Sena was not a political party but, as the name suggested, an army inspired by Shivaji. The goal of this army, according to Thackeray, was to advance the cause of the Marathi manoos by smashing its way past the intrigue-ridden realm of politics. He uttered no deep political philosophy or complex set of principles, but only a stirring nativist appeal on behalf of the oppressed Marathi manoos. This went over well with the audience.58

  Soon, Thackeray emerged as a force to reckon with in Bombay, and his meetings, accompanied by an elaborate dramaturgy, always roused the audiences. A contemporary report describes one such meeting.59 “Thunderous cheers break out from a mammoth audience, as a slight figure, in thick-rimmed glasses, a high-collared coat and trousers and chappaled [slippered] feet, strides to an elaborate stage, bedecked with saffron flags and pennants.” Accompanied by cheers, Thackeray took his seat on the stage, at the center of which was a table with a heavily garlanded bust of Shivaji. Proceedings opened with martial songs that swelled into a “mass chorus in which the audience join with gusto, and is punctuated by blasts of the ‘tutari,’ [a buglelike instrument] to the martial notes of which Shivaji’s legions galloped to battle.” Thackeray spoke to the audience alternately in tones of affection and chiding, exhortation and indignation, dwelling on the injustice Maharashtrians suffered in their own state. Then the mood changed abruptly. Scolding them for their inertia and indifference, he thundered at them for “looking on helplessly while their ‘rights and privileges’ are ‘stolen’ from them under their very noses.” In a crescendo, he exhorted them: “Wake up, wake up, before it is too late.” By the time he ended, the audience was thoroughly riled up, and the “meeting conclude[d] with a storm of applause and ‘jais’ [cheers] for Shri Chhatrapati Shivaji and Bal Thackeray.” Roused by the leader, the snarling tiger, the Sena’s mascot imprinted on its flags, began to the stalk Bombay.

  6.4. The snarling tiger and the Sena chief. Courtesy: Indian Express, October 26, 2001.

  Despite Thackeray’s reference to the sorry state of Maharashtrians, economic distress did not drive the rise of the Marathi manoos’ sentiment. Between 1960 and 1965, Bombay attracted a significant increase in capital investment, and Indian industrial growth registered a robust 7.7 percent per year between 1951 and 1965.60 Recession hit Bombay, like the rest of the country after 1966, but office jobs rose by 28 percent between 1962 and 1967—a period of strong economic growth, when Marmik’s commentary on the plight of the Marathi manoos found a receptive audience.61 The bright employment prospects, however, coincided with an extraordinary growth in the number of qualified applicants. There was a phenomenal rise in the number of matriculating males from high school, and the enrollment in Bombay University soared.62 It was this that made Bombay’s job market tight for young educated males. With the literates constituting nearly 59 percent of the city’s population by 1961—twice as high as the state’s—the power of Marmik’s printed word found a receptive audience among the disaffected Marathis.63

  The educated and unemployed young men provided a fertile ground, but to represent their frustrations in terms of Maharashtrians versus non-Maharashtrians required political intervention. No straight correlation can be made between a tight job market and the rise of the Marathi manoos’ ideology. Expressing the discontent of the unemployed in nativist terms, and channeling their frustrations into a torrent of ethnic grievances, required a populist turn. Of course, the Samyukta Maharashtra movement had mobilized Marathi speakers as a political entity, but it was Thackeray who successfully deployed it as an anti-immigrant, populist force. There was no inherent reason for counting the unemployed in ethnic terms. Religion, class, caste, region, gender, and age could have served as equally valid classificatory categories. But Thackeray calculated employment figures in ethnic terms to claim the underrepresentation of Maharashtrians. In Thackeray’s definition of who was a Maharashtrian, domicile alone, for however long, was not enough. Nor did the ability to speak Marathi, as many immigrants did. One had to be born a Marathi speaker to be a Maharashtrian.

  Politics, not economics or culture, was in command. No socioeconomic reality, no cultural tradition, sufficiently explains the emergence of the Marathi manoos. It was Thackeray’s political creation, despite his claim that the Sena was nonpolitical. To suggest that the Sena chief merely expressed—or cynically exploited—the groundswell of discontent among the Ma
rathi youth is to underplay the radical significance of his populist intervention. Thackeray’s “postpolitical” populism transformed the political landscape of the city and the state.

  Underlying Thackeray’s populism was the claim that the Marathi manoos was a transcendental subject. The “people” were not reducible to particular demands but something altogether more general.64 Accordingly, Thackeray invoked grievances over language and unemployment not to seek their redress but to produce the Marathi manoos as a universal political subject. He referred to the injustices, real or imagined, suffered by the Marathi speakers in order to constitute them as the only legitimate “people.” The claim was that a part of society, the oppressed underdogs, was its whole; the Marathi manoos was the sum total of the community. This strategy is evident in a satirical Marmik essay depicting a writer’s visit to the guest of honor on a special day in the year 2065, when South Indians rule the roost in Bombay.

  In the calm and quiet of the night, I went to the house of Ganpati Maratham, and greeted him with Namaskar, informing him that I had come to take his interview. Ganpati looked at me with surprise and said: “Oh, after so many years the old Marathi language is again spoken today. How do you know this language?” “I took the subject ‘Old Marathi language’ for my Ph.D.,”—I replied. He said, smiling, “Nowadays this language is never heard. In my childhood, Marathi was spoken in pure form; now that pure language is heard only in a small habitation of Chambal valley. A hundred years ago in Bombay, Madrasi governors, mayors, and sheriffs were appointed. The Marathi people of the time used to call these people outsiders. Then, the Madrasi lungi [a garment worn around the waist] was a topic of fun. Today everyone wears a lungi.”65

  The Marathi speakers, oppressed and overwhelmed, were the authentic and legitimate “people” held back by the illegitimate South Indian elites. “South Indian” or “Madrasi” was how Thackeray referred generally to immigrants from southern provinces, though he had Tamil and Malayalam speakers particularly in mind, and he took pleasure in ridiculing their language and dress. The mix of envy and contempt he felt for them made their supposed dominance all the more galling. But the belief in their dominance was real. So strongly felt was the grievance and the belief in a conspiracy against the Maharashtrians that the Sena published a diatribe in English to make its case. Entitled Shiv Sena Speaks: Official Statement, it explained that the publication was necessitated by the “scurrilous attack” on its true mission. It likened the “South Indian controlled English language Press” in Bombay to the “octopus emitting black fluid” to blur the prey’s vision before tightening its grip and killing the victim.66 The publication denied that the Sena encouraged violence against non-Maharashtrians and charged that the allegation was a lie. Behind the lie were the South Indians who wished to malign the Sena because it defends the “sons of the soil.” They monopolized not only the top positions in the government and private corporations but also the clerical service. “Maharashtrian boys” were not even granted interviews, let alone hired. The Sena was a revolt against the “rabid communalism” of South Indians, who were flooding Bombay and forming slums that had become dens of bootleggers and criminals. “The dense cloud of intruders from outside has deprived the blossoming generation of Maharashtra of its ancestral zeal and enthusiasm to fight out the battles of life with determination and chivalry.”67 The Sena was founded to restore this zeal, to expose the conspiracies hatched by “outsiders” against the “people.”

  In fact, there was no sudden increase in the number of immigrants, either from South India or anywhere else. The South Indians constituted less than 9 percent of the city’s population, scarcely more than Hindi speakers and less than half of Gujaratis. Nor did the South Indian share of white-collar jobs rise abruptly; in fact, the Gujaratis had a greater share of higher-status jobs than either South Indians or Marathis.68 Yet, Thackeray seized on the South Indians’ larger representation relative to Marathis in higher-paying jobs to target them as the enemy. In identifying South Indians as responsible for the plight of the Marathi manoos, he implied that there was nothing inherently wrong with the prevailing order; it was the intrusion of the alien matter, the corruption of the system by an external agent, that accounted for the injustices and oppressions of the “people.” Once excised of these “outside” elements, justice, purity, and health would return to the social and political order, and the Marathi manoos would regain his rightful place.

  To identify the intrusion of alien elements, Thackeray compiled lists of top corporate officials—many with South Indian names—from a telephone directory and published them in Marmik. These lists served as “proofs” of the discrimination against the Marathi manoos. The captions accompanying the lists instructed the readers to “read and keep quiet” and “read this and think.”69 He derisively referred to South Indians as “lungiwallahs,” making fun of their clothing, and lampooned the phonetic patterns of their languages by calling them “yandugundu.” When Sena supporters attacked South Indian restaurants, Thackeray rewarded them with praise.70 When the theaters in Tamil-speaking Madras stopped screening Hindi films during the throes of anti-Hindi agitations in 1968, Thackeray retaliated. The Sena activists prevented the Bombay theaters from screening films produced in the south.71

  If South Indians were aliens, so were the Communists. Although Dange had been Keshav Thackeray’s associate in the Samyukta Maharashtra movement, Bal Thackeray had nothing but contempt for him. Playing on his name, Thackeray repeatedly referred to Dange as Dhonge, a hypocrite.72 In 1965 Marmik published a cartoon on its cover that showed Bharatmata, or Mother India, in a state of misery and helplessness, while Dange, the pro-Communist Acharya Atre, and the Socialist George Fernandes looked on gleefully.73 The reaction was swift. The supporters of the insulted leaders marched to Thackeray’s Shivaji Park residence, which also served as Marmik’s office. They raised slogans against Thackeray and the Sena, threw stones, and made a bonfire of the copies of the offending magazine. Thackeray’s father was forced to plead with the demonstrators to forgive his son, whom he called a donkey.74

  But Thackeray was not to be deterred. He continued to hurl insults at the Communists and their sympathizers. Ideology was part of the reason for his visceral hatred for the Communists. Thackeray saw them as antinational, and he was opposed to their language of class struggle. But the battle for the control of the city was an equally important reason for his vitriol.75 Though a shadow of their former strength, the Communists were still powerful in the mill districts. Eager to engage them in battle, the Sena got an opportunity in 1967. V. K. Krishna Menon, who had served as defense minister in Nehru’s cabinet, was denied the nomination to contest the election by the Congress, despite having won a seat in the Parliament from Bombay in 1962. Menon decided to contest the election as an independent candidate, with Communist support. The situation was tailor-made for Thackeray. Here was Menon, whom Thackeray scorned as a South Indian with “rhinoceros skin,” in alliance with the Communists. The Sena threw its support behind the Congress candidate. The election was bitterly fought. There were frequent violent clashes between the Sena and Communist activists. Atre, the legendary leader of the Samyukta Maharashtra movement, came out strongly for Menon and dared the Sena to disrupt his rally. And disrupt it they did. They hurled stones and shoes at him and made bonfires of red flags. Atre managed to escape with his life, but his car was smashed. This was the Sena’s retribution for the demonstration at Thackeray’s residence.76 To add salt to the wound, Menon lost the election to the Sena-supported Congress candidate.

  No self-respecting right-wing populist movement in India can succeed without targeting the Muslims as alien to the nation. Accordingly, the Shiv Sena spiked its nativism with an anti-Muslim Hindu nationalism. Although this was to become much more prominent in the 1980s, Thackeray was thundering against the Muslims soon after the Sena’s foundation. In 1969 he delivered an inflammatory speech, calling Muslims antinational and referring to Bhiwandi, a Bombay suburb, as a second
Pakistan. The Muslims of Bhiwandi, he said, were committing such shameful acts that he was embarrassed to mention them in the presence of ladies.77

  Bhiwandi is a small town north of Bombay, with nearly half of its population comprising Muslim immigrants from North India who worked as weavers in its thriving hand-loom and power-loom industry. As well known as it was for its industry in the 1960s, the town later became notorious for the rising Hindu-Muslim hostilities produced by municipal politics. These hostilities got mixed up with the conflict surrounding the Shiv Jayanti Festival.

  This celebration of Shivaji had been a domestic festival until 1964, when it became a public event organized by a committee that excluded Muslims. Tensions started building the following year when Hindu activists insisted on leading the celebratory procession past a mosque, playing music and throwing gulaal (colored powder). In the run-up to the 1970 celebrations, tensions mounted. Both Hindu and Muslim activists held meetings, denouncing the evil designs of each other. The Sena and right-wing Hindu activists lit the powder keg of communal violence on May 7, 1970, when the procession again marched past the mosque. They shouted provocative slogans—“Gali Gali Mein Shor Hai, Musalman Chor Hai” (In every street there is an outcry that Muslims are thieves), “Shiv Sena Zindabad” (Long Live Shiv Sena), “Musalman Murdabad” (Death to Muslims), and “Hamse Jo Koi Poochegaga, Uski Ma Ko Chodega” (Whoever questions us, we will fuck their mother). Altercations, followed by stone throwing, looting, and arson, ensued. Bhiwandi burned for the next three days. When the violence was over, fifty Muslims and seventeen Hindus lay dead.78