Samrat : How the Shiv Sena Changed Mumbai Forever

Samrat : How the Shiv Sena Changed Mumbai Forever

FPJ BureauUpdated: Saturday, June 01, 2019, 08:39 AM IST
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Full of anecdotes and pulling no punches, Samrat explores the life and times of Bal Thackeray, giving insights into how a rather timid man from the working classes was shaped by his circumstances.

Samrat: How the Shiv Sena Changed Mumbai Forever<br /> Sujata Anandan<br /> Publisher: Harper Collins<br /> Pages: 278; Price: 499

Samrat: How the Shiv Sena Changed Mumbai Forever
Sujata Anandan
Publisher: Harper Collins
Pages: 278; Price: 499 |

l Thackeray. Nor, she adds, is it definitive history of the Shiv Sena. And by way of explaining what this book, then, is all about, she says: “It is merely a labour of love that hopes to explain to readers unfamiliar with his life and times, and those who have only a narrow view of his parochial politics, the phenomenon that was Bal Thackeray, and why and how he succeeded when others, his peers and those better equipped may have tried and fallen by the wayside.”

The book carries a Foreword by Vir Sanghvi who, in his own way, explains what the book is. As he put it “the book is not a straight but is, instead, an attempt to understand the milieu that Thackeray operated in and to capture the essence in his style amidst the shifting stands and the politics of pragmatism”. To which he adds: “There is just no point in just attacking – or even praising a man like Thackeray.  We need to recognise that in a city full of actors, his was the greatest performance of them all.”

Anandan puts it in another way: “There is no gain saying the fact that Bombay – or Mumbai as it is now known – would not have been what it is today has it not been for Bal Thackeray”. As she sees the milieu in which Thackeray operated, he “was the most feared and hated Indian in Pakistan and also the most well-known politician from India”.

One feels like quoting Anandan endlessly because over the years she had met Thackeray and had occasions to interview him off and on. Her net feeling is that “you either loved Bal Thackeray or you hated him to the core. There were no half measures about the Hindu Hriday Samrat”.

Throughout the pages she throws in her comments recklessly. On one occasion she says, “Thackeray was always a victim of his own image. I would extend that to say he had no qualms about making false claims if it suited his political interests to do so.”

Thackeray ‘befriended’ people he had no reason to admire like Sharad Pawar or the Communist leader Shripad Anant Dange. 0f Thackeray and Dange, Anandan writes: “Despite their hatred for each other, Thackeray and the Communist lender Dange were not beyond exploiting an opportunistic alliance”. She quotes Vijay Tendulkar, a friend of Thackeray, as saying that the Sena Tiger “was a man without a twinge of conscience”. What mattered “was always personal gains, prejudices or current biases that dictated Thackeray’s choices; no larger political philosophy governed his leaning”

Quoted unconsciously are instances after instances to show how true these statements are. To achieve short-term gains, for instance, Thackeray “drove the Sena and Madhu Dandavate’s Praja Socialist Party into each other’s arms during the 1968 civic elections. In another election, despite a long and bitter campaign against Muslims which helped Shiv Sena get in the lead, Thackeray, according to Anandan “had no hesitation in seeking the help of the Indian Union Muslim League to have the Sena protégé Sudhir Joshi elected to the post of Mayor of Bombay. That, Anandan says was a “marriage of convenience”.

The book quotes incidents by the dozens of how Thackeray used, or sought to use, even his enemies to his own purpose. He began his career as a cartoonist in The Free Press Journal on the recommendation of the then General Manager of the paper, Mr Nadkarni who was a great admirer of Thackeray’s father, a social reformer of high repute.

I was then editor of The Free Press Bulletin, an eveninger and whenever the Journal’s editor was out-of-town (as happened frequently) I was in charge of the paper’s editorial content and frequently had to advise Thackeray of the paper’s editorial policy.

He was a good cartoonist but his biting humour ‘desi’ in essence – was sometimes needlessly offensive. Anandan says it tended to be “scatological” – a word best left undefined. Of course the Free Press Journal had a few “south Indians” but not all that large in numbers for Bal to get angry over. And there was certainly no “south Indian bon homie” as among the so-called ‘madrasis’ were people from Madras Presidency that included people speaking Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannda and Konkani. Bal couldn’t distinguish the differences among them; they were all ‘yundugundus’ for him, a sick way of describing fellow-citizens.

As Anandan says Thackeray cared “little for the sensibilities of others and has absolutely no pretensions about anything, even if what he said made him look rather brutal at times foolish at others”. And yet Thackeray had some respect for R.K. Laxman, one of the finest cartoonists India has seen and even went to call on him at Pune on hearing of his senior colleague’s illness, taking with him a basketful of gifts.

What upset Thackeray was that unemployment among lower and middle class Maharashtrians was because of competition from Madrasis who were good at typing and shorthand. When I once asked Thackeray what has stopped his own linguistic kinsmen from learning shorthand, he had no answer. For some months he targeted Udupi restaurants on the grounds that they were not employing Maharashtrians. Again when I asked him who has stopped Maharashtrians from opening their own restaurants he had no answer. It was a socio-ethnic problem that Thackeray couldn’t understand.

However, to cut a long story short I must confess that Anandan has written a brilliant study of one of the most discussed politicians of our times. Summarising  Thackeray she says “there were never any half measures about Bal Thackeray – it was either all or nothing for the man who always knew what he wanted, called a spade a spade…”

Her immense research commands instant attention. Indeed no biography written in recent times will measure up to this classical study, even if it is highly controversial and often painfully revealing. But then she was writing about Bal Thackeray following whose passing away his Shiv Sena has become rudderless.

M.V. KAMATH

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