Counterposing this at the popular, populist, folk and mass media levels is the vision of Amitabh Bachchan. I am not interested in Bachchan and his personal forays into politics. I am interested in the Bachchan of folklore, the man and his sense of the city. The image of Bachchan evokes the alternative politics of the city as plural, diverse, violent, mobile, hardheaded, hardhearted, sentimental and creative.

Mumbai inspires and invites the migrant and the stranger but no one will deny it is a hard city. But as Bachchan and others show repeatedly, it is not the hardness of granite or of the heart, it is a demand for toughness, for survival, an initiation rite that demands that you survive the city. It is not the hardness of closure, denial, and refusal. It is a generous city which thinks dogs in the manger are not genuinely city-bred.

Raj Thackeray presents the vision of the nukkad strongman in a designer kurta offering safety in return for a policing contract. It is a Hobbesian world which offers city life as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, short and brutish’ if one does not accept their vision. It is a ghettoised imagination. The sadness is that the Shiv Sena has the same traumatic emptiness of McCarthyism. Put it on television, expose it on media as a documentary, and it seems hollow. No bit actor is less convincing that Raj Thackeray. In fact, some of his followers carry on as if they could enact his part better.

... contd.