Column

Much has been written about the double standards of the Shiv Sena leadership, specifically about how Uddhav’s Thackeray’s son goes to an English medium school and how the family surname is anglicised when it should be plain and homegrown Thakre. This is self-evidently true, but the there is more to this than meets the eye.

Bal Thackeray may be rooting for the Marathi-speaker population, but has a cosmopolitan side to him. Far from being anti-English, Thackeray has always felt comfortable in the language and in the ethos, though years of positing himself as the upholder of the rights of the sons of the soil have taken some of that sheen off.

Consider his own background.Thackeray was a cartoonist on the staff of the Free Press Journal, once upon a time Bombay’s most feisty paper, an institution where some of the best names in journalism worked. Thackeray shared the news room with the likes of RK Laxman, AFS Taleyarkhan and Behram ‘Busybee’ Contractor. The paper had a fiercely independent attitude and was known to take on the Raj.

After Independence that streak of iconoclasm continued. Young Bal sat in his corner, puffing away on his pipe and lampooning the big shots of the time. No one was spared. Legend has it that one of his cartoons so hurt SK Patil, the uncrowned king of Bombay, that the (south Indian) editor was constrained to pull up Thackeray, upon which the cartoonist stormed out, never to return. He also then decided to wage war on all south Indians, goes the apocryphal, but probably untrue story. Anyway, the point is that Thackeray was steeped in that culture and was far from being a provincial-minded nativist.

His Free Press colleagues remembered him fondly and spoke of his quips and retorts and also of his love forSir David Low of The Manchester Guardian, known for his satirical cartoons of Hitler. Once while interviewing him I mentioned I had worked there; he immediately reeled off names of common colleagues and reminiscing about the good ol' days.

Thackeray has never felt uneasy with the English-speaking world; he has always encouraged his Sainiks to learn the language. But the Shiv Sena, like any other political party wants votes and if positioning itself as an upholder of Maharashtrian culture will get those votes, so be it. All the buttons will be pressed, all symbols used. The Bombay-Mumbai battle is part of that strategy. By insisting that the city’s name be changed he has managed to sell the idea to Maharashtrians that he has upheld their identity. But is this necessarily true?

Bombay lived quite comfortably with not one but three names — Bombay, Mumbai (Maharashtrians) and Bambai (Hindi speakers.) So why bother? Because the name was a faultline between the cosmopolitans who felt distant from the ‘natives’ and lived in their own cocoon. When nostalgists say that Bombay was a lovely place at one time — and it was — they usually mean “their” Bombay, where only a certain kind of person was welcome. A vast number of others (and not only Maharashtrians) continued to live in ‘Mumbai.’ The twain were not hostile to each other; they just did not cross each other’s paths.

But ‘Mumbai’ was stronger in numbers and what’s more, went out and voted. This Thackeray recognised. So while he felt comfortable among the cosmopolitans, he knew he had to side with the Marathi-speakers. The sudden outburst against any establishment with the name Bombay is one such reminder, especially since nephew Raj has already hijacked the anti-Uttar Bharatiya platform.

Will it work? That can be answered only after the next elections. My sense is that this campaign has a very limited shelf life. The name Mumbai has been legally accepted (even though many yearn for Bombay) and the odd company that has not changed its brand name is of no consequence. The Shiv Sena will have to think of other strategies.

The biggest casualty of this frenzied sons-of-the-soil agenda has been that the cosmopolitan spirit has begun to fade. Bombay-bred Maharashtrians, as much as Gujaratis or anyone else, felt a part of a larger whole. Which is why Thackeray could be both, an admirer of Low as well as a Maharashtrian. No longer. By defacing the word Bombay, Thackeray’s battalion is trying to wipe out the last vestiges of a more civilised era.

Email: sidharth01@dnaindia.net