Bollywood shows that this is a notion of the city in corsets. Bollywood needs the genetics of difference. In fact, in many ways its original, the Bombay Talkies, embodied Hindu-Muslim unity before and after Partition. Bollywood is a salute to every outsider, migrant, stranger who seeks to come home to the city. It is a parallel vision that the Shiv Sena finds threatening and which it tries to control.

Happily myths don’t succumb as easily to the petty politician. Shiv Sena is in Mumbai but is hardly representative of it. Bollywood is in Mumbai but celebrates both the city and India. It is local, national, global and cosmopolitan. The battle at the level of myth is uneven even if the Sena digs hard into local legend and folklore.

Thackeray and Bachchan have become inadvertently competing models of the city. The first is ghettoised, farcical, threatening, and the second is generous, thoughtful, realistic and yet celebratory about the possibilities of the city. Thackeray threatens democracy through populism; the other expands democracy as script and drama even if it is a bumbling one.

One must be grateful it is an open drama being consumed by millions across the country. This binary model of the city raises a futuristic either/or. It raises the question of how a society responds to scarcity or relative deprivation. It is not the poor who create this idiot politics but a middle class seeing its part of the cake shrink. Thackeray’s is a politics of jealousy, envy playing to the politics of scarcity. It plays the idea of the sons of the soil to show it has no sense of the soil called the city. It is the idiom of security battling the metaphors of sustainability.

... contd.