Mumbai's Shattered Mirror

The incorporation of Mumbai into Maharashtra, a monolingual political unit, is an aberration in the historical evolution of the city since parts of it did not grow in overwhelmingly Marathi environs and in others the Marathi populace cohabited with other sociolinguistic groups. Marathi is not the lingua franca of a multilingual Mumbai, it has two competing languages, Hindi and English. It is against this backdrop that the alternative model of cultural exclusivism of the Shiv Sena and the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena variety appeals to wide sections of the Marathi-speaking population.