The rumours started on Wednesday evening, and spread through the city of 20 million in quiet messages and hushed asides: Balasaheb Thackeray, the leader of the Shiv Sena, was dying. By night, a crowd had gathered outside his house, Matoshree, in Mumbai’s Bandra East, and was spilling over onto the surrounding roads. TV cameras and OB vans arrived, and were quickly likened to vultures. Some of the cameramen displayed too great an enthusiasm for footage, and had their cameras broken for their pains.
By next morning, the entire city seemed to have heard of Thackeray’s illness. Roads that are normally jammed with teeming people and vehicles stretched bare. Shops were shut. It looked like a bandh had been called by a really powerful political organization.but in fact, no word had gone out from the Sena. The mere thought of what might happen if Balasaheb died had closed down Mumbai, a city that never sleeps.
By Saturday, it was all over. Thackeray, who died on Saturday afternoon, was more than a mere politician to his followers. He is an icon. In the chawls and slums of Mumbai, he and his family members represent Maharashtrian Hindu pride and power in a gritty, sometimes brutal, way. His party’s symbol is the tiger, and his followers paint him as the only tiger in Mumbai’s urban jungle. It is a claim that cannot easily be disputed.
Back in 2007, Tehelka, a magazine not known for its fondness of Right-wing politicians, conducted a survey with polling agency TNS to find “the biggest icon of Mumbai”. Thackeray came in first. Bollywood’s biggest-ever superstar, Amitabh Bachchan, ranked second. Cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, a local Maharashtrian lad, was third. Shah Rukh Khan managed a distant fourth.
Thackeray also made the top three in the list of most hated figures in Mumbai, coming in at third behind gangsters Dawood Ibrahim and Arun Gawli. It is rare to find someone with a neutral view on him; he evokes either devotion or hatred.
Old timers who knew him down the years can offer some clues to why. P.K. Ravidranath, a former colleague of Thackeray’s from his days as a cartoonist at the Free Press Journal in 1952, says, “He was the one who gave the Maharashtrian an identity of his own in his own capital city”.
Mumbai came to be capital of Maharashtra only by and by. It started life during the Raj as a British city, capital of Bombay Presidency, which included the present states of Gujarat and Maharashtra, parts of Karnataka, and Sindh in Pakistan. The city then was truly cosmopolitan, and its leading lights other than the British were mainly Parsis, though there were exceptions like M.A. Jinnah and B.R. Ambedkar.
When linguistic states were formed after independence, Bombay was not intended to be a part of Maharashtra by then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. He declared it a Union Territory in 1956. It took years of agitations by the Samyukta Maharashtra movement to reverse that.
The identity of the city, therefore, was a mixed and contested one. There was a sizeable Gujarati population, a Sindhi population, a Tamil population, and people from along the Konkan coast down to Udupi and Mangalore, among others. People from the hinterlands of Maharashtra who migrated to the city often found themselves at the lower end of the social ladder, battling for jobs with migrants from elsewhere.
Thackeray the cartoonist created a character out of these people. While his senior R.K. Laxman created the Common Man in his cartoons, Thackeray created the Marathi manoos as an identity in Bombay politics. It was this demographic that he came to represent.
Back in the 1950s and 60s, Bombay was an industrial city, with textile mills dominating. The politics of the city was a contest between the Congress and the communists. Workers’ union leaders were powers to reckon with; even in 1982, Datta Samant, who led the textile unions with their lakhs of workers, could easily bring the city to a halt, and did. Samant was shot dead in 1997.
Bal Thackeray won his following, some say with tacit support from the ruling classes in the early days, from among the same people who might otherwise have become communists. The creation of a political space based on his ‘sons of the soil’ slogan was the singular political achievement of Thackeray, and explains in some part why many among the Maharashtrian masses see him as a demigod of sorts.
It is because he championed their cause. He empowered them and gave them dignity; they may have remained poor, but they were no longer powerless. They had to be given respect, even if it was only out of fear.
In his person, and by creating a larger-than-life image, Thackeray also came to symbolize the collective power and pride of these masses. He was therefore an icon in the purest sense of the word.
His politics were both fractious and divisive. His many attacks — on South Indians, Biharis, Muslims — are infamous. His legacy in the shape of a changed identity for Bombay, which he renamed Mumbai, is unpalatable to many. But it is no small surprise that Mumbai held its breath when Thackeray had trouble breathing. The lives of this man and the metropolis were that closely entwined with one another.