Whose City? Migrants, the Marathi Manoos and Multicultural Mumbai
Simon Harding
The high rise skyline of Mumbai's Cuffe Parade is the face of an economic powerhouse. For the global businessman, this metropolis of fifteen million people, which sprawls miles along the Maharashtra coast, is the gateway to business in India. The Indian Stock Exchange, some of India's biggest corporations like Reliance and Tata and five Fortune Global 500 companies call the city home. But on the streets on Mumbai, far from the glass towers and the five star hotels, a political battle has been raging for over forty years. It has seen demonstrations, riots and terrifying outbreaks of communal violence.
Mumbai is a city of migrants. Every week thousands of people arrive in the city from poor rural areas on north and south India. These newcomers take whatever work they can find, toiling long hours for low wages. Taxi driving, construction labour, hawking and rag picking are sustained by migrant labour. It is tough work, but an improvement on working land holdings in their home states, which grow smaller and less able to feed families with every generation. Around 30% of the city's workforce are from the distant northern states of UP and Bihar and southern states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, which gives the city the feel of a multicultural mosaic. The visitor is just as likely to hear Hindi, Tamil or Malayalam on the street as the local language, Marathi.
In 1981 Mumbai had a population of around 8 million. By 2005 it had ballooned to over 15 million. Civic infrastructure could not and cannot cope with the pressure. There are major shortages of housing, health care provision, employment opportunities and basic amenities. Newcomers swell the notorious slums, living in the squalid conditions made famous and notorious by the film Slumdog Millionaire. These conditions are the sad reality for 60% of the city, most of whom are first or second generation Mumbaikers.
Pitched against the migrants and the idea of Mumbai as a microcosm of India is the Shiv Sena. Founded in 1966 by journalist Bal Thackeray, as a political party, Shiv Sena (Army of Shiva) set about mobilising disaffected Marathi youth against the 'influx' of northern and southern migrants in Mumbai. Thackeray whipped up local resentment, convincing Marathi youths that the newcomers were taking their jobs and making them outsiders in 'their own' city. Migrant businesses were attacked, non-Marathi businessmen intimidated and several left wing activists assassinated.
The Sena promotes an unapologetically regionalist bhoomiputr (sons of the soil) ideology, which mixes old fashioned conservative values with a fervent belief that Mumbai is for Marathi speakers only. Bihari taxi drivers, workers from UP and Tamil cooks have no place in Sena's Mumbai. Likewise 'corrupting western cultural influences such as Valentine's Day.
Unlike the racist right in the UK, Shiv Sena is a viable political force. The party has been involved in the running of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) for over twenty years, maintaining its position in the 2007 elections through an alliance with the national conservative party, the BJP. Through the BMC and the political power afforded by the Corporation, Shiv Sena influences local politics and policies. In January the Congress party, in charge of Maharashtra state, bowed to Sena pressure and announced that new taxi licenses would only be granted to Marathi speakers. The army of Hindi speaking drivers from UP and Bihar were given forty days to learn Marathi or face not being able to renew their license. Despite the occasional superficial policy, critics say that Shiv Sena has done little in its twenty year in power to help the ordinary marathi manoos (the common Marathi man), instead it has concentrated on amassing funds through shady land deals and the opportunities which come with the trappings of power. The sincerity of its ideology is also in question: In spite of its emphasis on Marathi language education, the Sena-run BMC has closed 37 Marathi medium schools in the past decade.
A divisive and vocal figure, Bal Thackeray regularly appears in the national media, which revels in the controversy created by his barbed comments and the fights he picks with national politicians, sportsmen and film stars.
Recent comments by cricketer and national icon, Sachin Tendulkar, invoked the ire of the Marathi brigade. Tendulkar, a Marathi-speaking Mumbaiker himself, remarked that he was an Indian first and a Marathi second. Mumbai, he said, was a city for all Indians, not just Marathis. Thackeray responded by accusing the batsman of “ripping the hearts of Maharashtrians” and of knowing and caring little about the “influx of people from UP, Bihar and of Bangladeshi Muslims”. Similar treatment was dished out to actor Shah Rukh Khan, who crossed the party by commenting, like Tendulkar, that Mumbai was for all Indians. Shiv Sena threatened to ban his latest blockbuster in Mumbai.
But Shiv Sena is playing a dangerous game. Rabid regionalism goes counter to the pan-Indian ideology of their larger national partner, the BJP. Sena's cry of “Mumbai for Marathis” fractures the BJP's nationalist vision of an India for all Indians. As such powerful BJP figures have joined Tendulkar, Khan and the ruling Congress Party in chastening Shiv Sena.
Not only are Shiv Sena's parochial pronouncements politically unpopular (beyond its working class Marathi base), the historical and economic foundations of its ideology are deeply suspect.
Mumbai has never been a solely Marathi city. The roots of the modern metropolis go back to the C18th, when the British East India Company saw the sparsely inhabited group of islands, on which the modern city now rests, as the perfect location for a port. By the mid C19th migrants from all over India were arriving at the growing settlement. Its position amongst the world's global cities was seized during the late C19th when the American Civil War disrupted US trade, meaning that Bombay (as it was then known) became the world's largest exporter of cotton. Without non-Marathi intervention, be it British or Indian, Mumbai might still be a collection of sleepy fishing villages.
Modern Mumbai makes its money through finance and films. The major Indian players in business and finance have a national and international outlook, trading around the globe. They employ highly skilled international staff, speaking Hindi, English, Japanese and German. Narrow regionalism means little to them. Some of the city's biggest corporate names originated elsewhere: Life Insurance Corporation of India started in Calcutta, Jamshetji Tata was a Gujarati as was Reliance founder Dhirubhai Ambani. Bollywood, the catch-all term for the city's $1.3 billion film industry, is also an India-wide industry and global cultural phenomenon. The film industry is fuelled by talent from across the country. Its output is in Hindustani, a mix of Hindi and Urdu, which is designed to be accessible to the widest possible audience across the nation. The industry would not survive by churning out Marathi productions.
But the ordinary migrants should not be forgotten. They are building the city, cleaning up after it, feeding it, ferrying it around and ultimately becoming the city itself. Such is the cosmopolitan character of Mumbai, claiming the place solely for the Marathi half of the population is not only unpractical, it also fails to understand the history and economy of this expanding metropolitan city.