Number of words: 523

To be an inhabitant of a chawl is to be established. But in the nooks and crannies of this area there is – as always in India – yet another, lower human level, with people for whom there is no room have made home for themselves. They have founded squatter settlements, colonies of the dispossessed. And, like the chawl dwellers, have done more: within the past 10 years, out of bits and pieces of a past simplified to legend, and out of the crumbling Hindu system, they have evolved what is in effect a new religion, and they have declared themselves affiliated to an Army, the Shiv Sena, the army of Shiva. Not Shiva the God, but Shivaji the 17th century Maratha guerilla leader, who challenged the Mughal empire and made the Marathas, from the people of the Bombay region, a power in India for a century.

The power of the Marathas was mainly destructive, part of the 18th century Indian chaos that gave the British an easy Empire. But in Bombay the matter is beyond discussion. Shivaji is now deified; he is the unlikely warrior God of the chawls. His cult, as expressed in the Shiv sena, transmutes a dream of martial glory into a feeling of belonging, gives the unaccommodated some idea of human possibility. And, through the Shiv sena, it has brought a kind of power. The newly erected equestrian statue that stands outside the Taj Mahal, who looks past the Gateway of India to the sea is of Shivaji. It is an emblem of the power of the Sena, the power of the chawls and pavements, the inhabitants of the streets who  – until the declaration of the emergency – had begun to rule the streets. All shop signs in Bombay, if not in two languages now, carry transliterations in the Indian Nagari script of that English names or styles. That happened overnight, when the Sena give the word; and the Sena’s word was more effective than any government decree.

The Sena army is xenophobic. It says that Maharashtra, the land of the Marathas, is for the Maharashtrians. It has won  a concession from the government that 80% of jobs shall be held by Maharashtrians. The government feels that anyone who has lived in Bombay or Maharashtra for 15 years ought to be considered a Maharashtrian. But the Sena says no: A Maharashtrian is someone born of Maharashtrian parents. Because of its xenophobia, its persecution in its early days of South Indian settlers in Bombay and because of the theatricality of its leader, a failed cartoonist, who is said to admire Hitler, the scene is often described as fascist.

But this is an easy, imported word. The Shiv sena has its own Indian antecedents. In this part of India, in the early, pre Gandhi days of the independence movement, there was a cult of Shivaji. After independence, among the untouchables, there were mass conversions to Buddhism. The assertion of pride, a contracting out, a regrouping: it is the pattern of such movements among the dispossessed or humiliated.

Excerpted from Pages 61-62 of ‘India: A wounded civilization’ by VS Naipaul