My curiosity was whetted by the posters I saw last week of a new Marathi film, provocatively titled as Mee Shivaji Raje Bhosale Boltoy—Himmat Asel Tar Adawa’ (I am Shivaji Raje Bhosale speaking—Stop me if you have the guts). A friend told me that the film, by far the most important political movie in Maharashtra’s 50-year-old history, made a major contribution to Raj Thackeray’s electoral strength in the Lok Sabha polls. As I came out of the movie hall after a three-hour riveting cinematic experience, it wasn’t difficult to see why. And if Raj Thackeray re-orients his politics according to the film’s positive and progressive message, it is also not difficult to see him soon emerge as the leader Maharashtra is waiting for.

The film has two heroes. One of them, Dinakarrao Bhosale, is an ordinary middle-class Marathi Manoos, whose job as a bank clerk condemns him to a life of relative deprivation and humiliation, both economic and cultural. His son, despite securing more than 90 per cent marks, cannot get admission in an engineering college because he cannot pay hefty donation that wealthy non-Marathi business families can for their non-meritorious children. His talented daughter cannot realise her dream of becoming a Bollywood actress because her name (Chandrakala Bhosale) is considered too “downmarket” by a director, who, it later transpires, has changed his own name from ‘Gaikwad’ to ‘Gidwani’ in order to gain a foothold in the film industry. Bhosale lives in an old part of Mumbai in a decrepit hundred-year-old chawl, which he owns, but a rich Gujarati builder has his eye on the property. The builder, well-connected with the city’s corrupt political class and the underworld, has plans to construct two spanking skyscrapers in its place, and offers to give Bhosale a lumpsum amount and a small apartment in a far-off suburb. Much of old Mumbai has seen such migration of middle-class and poor Marathi families, and the new commercial and residential towers that have changed the landscape of the erstwhile working-class areas of Lower Parel, Parel, Lalbaug and Worli have a distinctly non-Marathi character. Bhosale’s character typifies the angst of the Marathi-speaking population of Mumbai, which feels that it is being squeezed out of the city, both at the top and the bottom. More hurtful than economic marginalisation is the Marathi people’s realisation that the “outsiders” coming into the city look down upon Marathi language and ethos. In a moving scene in the film, Bhosale bemoans the current helplessness of Marathi people, in spite of being inheritors of the proud legacy of a galaxy of great men and women such as Raja Shivaji, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, Lokamanya Tilak, Jyotiba and Savitri Phule and many poet-saints.

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