India: A Million Mutinies Now

  Mr Raote said his father and mother used to awaken the children at four in the morning. Between four and seven they did their exercises – running, push-ups – and they studied. They had to do it all before seven. What made it difficult after that? The crowd in the building and yard, the noise? Mr Raote said, The atmosphere.’

  As a top Shiv Sena man, Mr Raote had a reputation for roughness. And he had been a little rough with me when I was taken to his office to be introduced to him. When he understood that I wasn’t looking for material for another hostile interview, that I was more interested in his background and development, his manner changed. He was interested in his own story; his idea of himself was of a man who had struggled.

  He was now chairman of the Standing Committee of the Corporation, he said; but his first job in the Corporation had been as a clerk, in 1965, when he was twenty-one, and his salary then had been 218 rupees a month, £16. He offered that fact almost as soon as we began to talk seriously. And then he offered another: when he was a boy, he said, he used to help his father make coffins.

  I liked that detail. He liked it too. He wanted to tell the rest of the story. He asked me to come to his flat in Dadar, and he sent his Ambassador car for me early one morning. The windows of the car had the dark tinting that had become fashionable in Bombay; there were two small plastic fans that made for fair comfort; and on the dashboard there was a little picture of Hanuman, the deity who stood for strength.

  When I was taken up to the flat, Mr Raote was still doing his puja. Waiting, I went out to the terrace and looked at the view north and south, all the great length of Bombay, unexpectedly green from this height. When Mr Raote had finished his puja, I went into the sitting room, and he began to talk.

  ‘When I was born, my father was working as a mechanic in All-India Radio, AIR. This was in 1944. He was getting 300 rupees a month. It was sufficient. I grew up thinking of myself as lower middle class. We had no luxuries, but we had enough to eat. We used to have a kind of soaked-wheat cereal in the morning, satva. You become very strong if you eat that. It takes two hours to prepare.

  ‘I studied up to nth standard in Marathi. Then I joined the college. About this time my father retired from AIR, and he became a jack of all trades. There was a big drop in his earning. He used to earn 75 to 90 rupees a month as a carpenter in the film studio, working for many hours at a time.

  ‘He also used to go as a carpenter to prepare coffins. I used to go with him sometimes. Making coffins is a very specialized thing. It isn’t easy to get that bend at the shoulders. The plank has to be one; it mustn’t be cut. And you have to have a very good bottom in a coffin, because the whole pressure of the body falls on that bottom. We would get four annas, a quarter of a rupee, for a coffin for a small child. Twelve annas for a medium-size coffin. For a bigger-size coffin, six feet or six feet five inches, we used to get one rupee and a quarter. That was just for the labour. In a day we would be able to prepare five or six coffins. Normally a person wouldn’t go to make coffins. It’s a casteless occupation – not for a person of caste. But we did it for the cash.

  ‘My father wanted to see at least one of his children become a doctor. My sister was admitted to the college for science. I completed my own Inter Science studies. My first choice after this was for the military. I wanted to be an officer, but I had no one to advise me. I joined the Indian Navy training course in 1962, and went to the exams and all. But I was a month too old, so I had to come back again. Then I tried to become an engineer. It was hard to get into a school in Bombay. I got admission to the Sholapur Polytechnic – that’s far away from here. My father said he couldn’t pay the expenses, and he couldn’t. The expenses in Sholapur would have been 200 rupees a month. So I had to give that up too. That was in 1964. The next year I put my name down at the state employment exchange. We were still living in that one room. I joined St Xavier’s Technical Institute for evening classes.

  ‘So already there were these two or three failures in my life – not getting into the military, being too old for the navy training course, and not getting into an engineering school. It’s a frustration at that age. That’s the age when boys can develop ambition. If they don’t develop ambition, they start to drift.

  ‘My mother and father gave me encouragement, and my intention to do something in life was always there. I had the confidence.’

  I remembered what Mr Patil, the Shiv Sena area leader in Thane, had said about confidence, atma-vishwas: it had been given him by Ganpati. I asked Mr Raote whether he thought he had got his confidence from Ganpati.

  He said he had got his confidence from religion in the larger sense, rather than from Ganpati in particular. ‘He is not a special deity. Everything in India begins with Ganpati or Ganesh. No Hindu puja starts without him. The religion we have is from childhood. It is part and parcel of our life. No Hindu family will give up the morning puja. We have a special garment for the puja. Religion definitely gave us confidence. It built our character.

  ‘We are coming now to the most important aspect of my life. I’ve told you about my failures and frustration, and how I gave up and put my name down at the state employment exchange. In 1965 I took a job as a clerk in the Bombay Corporation. The salary was 218 rupees. Was that a good wage? To the man who has no earnings, whatever he earns is good. And my main ambition at this time was that my sister should become a doctor, as my father wanted. We did secure her admission to a medical college. And she was offered three scholarships – from the British Council, Tata’s, and somebody else. We chose Tata. They gave the complete tuition fee. The books we got from other people.’

  Mrs Raote had been in and out of the sitting room, but in a self-effacing way. Now, smiling, she came up to us with an open photograph album. She had heard us talking about religion, and the photographs she wanted to show were of a religious occasion: the thread ceremony for one of her sons. This prompted Mr Raote to go and bring out the unstitched length of cotton – mauve, with a band of another colour – which he wore when he did his puja. Mrs Raote was a pale-complexioned, handsome woman; and, as so often in Indian homes, the simple and apparently artless devotion of the wife to her husband was something that made an impression.

  Mrs Raote withdrew. The open album rested on the sofa. And Mr Raote went on with his story.

  ‘I should add something else at this point. In 1962, three years before I had taken the job with the Corporation, and at the beginning of the time of my failures and frustration, I had come across a weekly called Marmik. This was a cartoon weekly, the first in the Marathi language. It was edited by Bal Thackeray. He and his brother and his father wrote the whole paper. Marmik always had a big cartoon on the front cover. It was this that caught my eye. The circulation of the paper was about 35 or 40 thousand at that time.

  ‘And now, in 1965, with my sister in the medical college, and me in the Corporation as a clerk, and my father working as a carpenter in the film studio, Marmik really began to work on my mind. Every week the magazine spoke about the injustices done in Bombay and Maharashtra to the sons of the soil. And I found I was terribly attracted to the emotional personality of Bal Thackeray and his father, as expressed in the magazine. I even tried to meet Bal Thackeray. He was living in Shivaji Park.’

  Mr Raote waved to the west, to an area of green: Bombay from this height all clear before us, from the Gateway of India and the Fort area in the south, to the hills and suburbs of the north: the great city, from this height all its squalor lost below the green of trees, now truly Mr Raote’s own.

  There was an announcement in Marmik in May 1966 about a youth organization that was to be founded. It was to be called the Shiv Sena. I started visiting Bal Thackeray’s house. Actually, the coconut was broken on the 19th of June 1966 at his house.’ The breaking of a coconut at the start of an important venture is with Hindus a kind of puja or religious act. ‘Eighteen people were there. At 8.20 in the morning.’

  ‘Was that time chosen by a pundit?’

  ‘
No. It just happened. I was one of the 18 people there. Four of the 18 were from Bal Thackeray’s own house: Bal Sahib himself, his father, and his two brothers. The first meeting lasted about half an hour. It was in the main room of their small house. Their father occupied that room, being an old man. He wrote everything on a Marathi typewriter. It is still there in the house, as a memorial of him. It was Bal Thackeray’s father who gave the name Shiv Sena.’ Shiva’s Army. ‘It just seemed natural and right. And we pledged ourselves at that meeting to fight the injustices done to the sons of the soil.

  ‘That was how the Sena began. Bal Sahib used to hold small meetings here and there. Four months after the founding of the Sena he announced a public meeting on the issue of injustice. That meeting was to be on the 30th of October 1966. It had a tremendous response. Four to five lakhs.’ Between 400 and 500 thousand people. ‘And a number of gymnasiums in the town began to be attracted.’

  What were those gymnasiums? I had never heard of them before.

  ‘The gymnasium is a Maharashtrian institution. My father was too poor to send us to a gymnasium. But, as I told you, he made us run and exercise in the mornings. The gymnasium has been a Maharashtrian institution since the time of our great saint, Ramdas Swami. He was the guru of Shivaji.’ Shivaji, the warrior leader of the Marathas in the 17th century, the founder of Maratha military glory. ‘Ramdas was a very practical guru. His message in part was that you should exercise and keep your body fit. One of Ramdas’s famous sayings is, “Don’t talk. Act.” ’

  And now again Mrs Raote came to us, this time with a big, thick book in Marathi. It was a book of Ramdas’s verses, a well printed modern edition, with a dust jacket. This made Mr Raote go and bring out some other big Marathi books: the verses of other classical Maratha teachers, Dineshwari, Tukaram, Eknath. These names were not really known to me. The books all looked new, and were well printed and well produced; but they were too bulky to handle easily, and I felt they were sacred household objects rather than books to be physically read. They were passed to me one by one, and I held them for a little and passed them back. They were then laid out on the sofa, next to the open photograph album with the snaps of Mr Raote in his puja cloth at the thread ceremony for his son.

  I wondered how, in the conditions of Bombay, in the conditions Mr Raote had grown up in, people had kept in touch with their sacred books.

  He said there had been no problem. ‘In a traditional Maharashtrian household the elders would recite, morning and evening, slokas or verses from the writings of the famous gurus, so that a child, whether he had actually read the texts or not, would be aware of those verses. Nowadays it’s done by tapes.’

  There was a small shelf of such tapes in Mr Raote’s sitting room, in a corner which seemed, from the objects laid out in it, to be a kind of holy or sacred corner.

  He said, ‘Maharashtra is a land of saints.’ He played a part of a tape with a chanting or singing of Ramdas’s verses – and the rhythms took me back 40 years and more to the Ramayana singing I had heard in my childhood. Ramdas’s verses had endured, Mr Raote said, because of their rhythm. ‘Ramdas’s slokas have a special, simple, repetitive rhythm.’ They were not musical for the sake of being musical. ‘They are addressed to the mind. Each and every Maharashtrian, even if he lives in a hutment, has a culture.’

  He stopped the tape, and returned to the story of the early days of the Shiv Sena. The Sena, the army of the land of saints, had caught on fast. But even as the Sena grew, Mr Raote’s personal life declined. Between the founding of the Sena, in June 1966, and the big public meeting four months later which established it as a power in Bombay, Mr Raote’s father died.

  The whole family was now on my head, and I had to continue as a clerk in the Corporation. I’ve told you that my first choice was always for the military, and I applied at this time for the Air Force pilot aptitude test. I got through the preliminary test in Bombay. Out of 1500 in my centre, only 12 were selected for a further interview at Bangalore. I was one of the 12. I went to Bangalore, and I got through all the aptitude tests of the Air Force. But the most delicate test – the machine test – was the one I failed. As part of that test, 100 questions had to be answered in five minutes. The speed of the questions baffled me. I had had no guidance in these matters. You need to practise to answer 100 questions in five minutes. There are schools today training people for examinations like that. But not then. And this failure was added to my frustration at having to serve in the Corporation, although I was never interested in service.’

  I had noticed in other people this Indian use of the word ‘service’. In one way it was related to ‘civil service’; in another way it was related to the old-fashioned English use of ‘service’, meaning domestic service. The meaning of the word in India lay somewhere between the two. ‘Service’ in India stood for employment; but it also meant working for somebody else, working for wages, being dependent. (Mr Patil of Thane, for instance, speaking of his father who had worked for 40 years in the tool room of a factory, had said that his father had been ‘in service’.)

  ‘But I had to serve in the Corporation until my sister had got her M.B.S. degree. And I got married in 1968. My father-in-law and mother-in-law made me get married. I was doing the evening classes at St Xavier’s Technical Institute, and I would have preferred to get married after I had finished my studies. It was a love-match.’

  He used the English words, ‘love-match’, running them together and making ‘love’ rhyme with ‘how’, so that the words seemed to have become Marathi words.

  ‘We belonged to different castes. I used to give lessons at that time. She was one of my students. That was how this affair came up.’ This giving of lessons was unexpected, another side of the Corporation clerk. ‘She used to live over there, in that house.’

  From the top of the block where we were he waved to an area of green and roofs not far away: Bombay, from here, an immense city, but the spaces he had moved in always small, village-like.

  ‘There was opposition to our association from both sides. The castes were different, but they were not all that different. Caste wasn’t the reason for the opposition. In our family we didn’t want love-match. Our tradition is the proposed marriage.’ The arranged marriage. ‘It was the same on her side. So my in-laws, or the people who became my in-laws, compelled me to get married. And this marriage became another burden.

  ‘To reduce this burden, I asked my wife to give up her studies and go into service. She gave up her studies and became a telephone operator. This was a government job, in the state secretariat. She got between 171 and 180 rupees a month, about £9, after the rupee devaluation. This was in 1969. We had a child in 1970. But, with my wife in service, I was not much worried by this.

  ‘Then at last, in 1972, my sister got her M.D. She informed me on the phone at 12 o’clock one day that she had got through. And that same day I resigned from the Corporation. Eight years I had been in service – while my sister was becoming a doctor, as my father wanted. The day she became a doctor, I resigned. I had no job to go to, but I resigned. All that we had was my wife’s job. Her job in the state secretariat had been a temporary one, but then fortunately she got a job as a telephone operator in the Corporation. It was an accident that she joined the Corporation when I left it.’

  During the later years of service there had been Mr Raote’s parallel life with the Sena. The Sena had risen, had begun to march, had become feared. In 1968 it had won more than a third of the seats in the Corporation. It had launched an agitation about the borders of Maharashtra; it had called a strike that had brought Bombay to a standstill for four days. Immigrants from South India had grown especially to fear the Sena. And Dadar, the suburb where we were – with a view of Shivaji Park, near where Bal Thackeray’s house was, and with a view of the two-storeyed tenement where Mr Raote and his family were still living at that time in their one room – Dadar, as Mr Raote said, was ‘the epicentre’ of the Shiv Sena earthquake.

  I h
ad a memory myself of that early Sena time, from the other side. This was in 1967, a year after the Sena had been founded. I had been visiting a Parsi acquaintance. He was a ‘boxwallah’, as the word was in those days. A boxwallah was an executive in a big firm, usually a firm with foreign affiliations; and in those days, before the Indian industrial boom, to be a boxwallah was to be secure, even exalted. The man I knew had married a Hindu woman of a well known family; and it was surprising to hear now, from people who should have been far above the day-to-day stresses of Indian life, that this ‘mixed’ marriage had made them both liable to physical attack from the Sena in their area.

  It was evening; we were high up; there were lights below, some pale and yellow in the shanties. My vision of Bombay began to change: the ‘poor’, the people down there, were acquiring individuality and had begun to stake their own claim to the city; piety (or rage at their condition, or disgust) was no longer a sufficient response. The man I knew – speaking in 1967 with something of the passion I was to find this time in Papu, the young Jain stockbroker – said, of the dangers of mob attack, ‘I try not to worry about it. I tell myself that, if I find something starting to happen, I must think it’s like being in a nasty road accident.’

  Yet at that time, 1967, and for years afterwards, Mr Raote, one of the original 18 of the Sena, had been working as a clerk in the Corporation, his salary rising over eight years from 218 rupees a month to 272 rupees and 50 paise (100 paise make a rupee), travelling back and forth on those crowded suburban trains between the Victorian-Gothic building where he worked and the tenement in Dadar where he had been born and where he had continued to live, in the same one room: carrying the grief for his father, the high ambition for his sister, his own frustrations at not being an officer, then an engineer, then something in the Indian Navy, daily feeling his clerkship in the Corporation, his ‘service’, as a humiliation.