The Marathi Manoos: When a Language Is Imposed, Mumbai Turns Against Itself

Bombay, Bambai, Mumbai. Aamchi Mumbai or Aapli Mumbai? Our Mumbai. Which works better? Both aamchi and aapli mean “ours”. 

We were once titling our collection of migration family histories of 12-year old Mumbaikars from across 55 schools, an interesting modular exploration through Khoj (exploration), a constitutional education programme that we conduct. The collection of writings fascinated all those whom we consulted. Notable for me was a conversation with Vijay Tendulkar, the iconic Maharashtrian playwright, Mumbaikar to the core, and the founding president of Citizens for Justice and Peace. 

He examined with gleeful interest the writings and sketches of the young expressing their entry and belonging into Mumbai. A magician with the Marathi word, expansively cosmopolitan while living in the thick of right-wing infested Vile Parle, he was clear: Aapli was inclusive, Aamchi had a trite ‘othering’ nuance. Aapli it was and has since been. Aapli Mumbai.

India’s magic metropolis – even with today’s faded allure – has also spawned Bollywood with its own peculiar brand of Bambaiya Hindi and Hinglish. Within this, there has always existed a sharp, aggressive and even resentful undercurrent of the Marathi speaker – the Marathi manoos – relegated not just to labour in the city’s erstwhile mills and docks, but often culturally ghettoized. 

While the discerning Mumbaikar over a century has always found her way to Shivaji Mandir or Chhabildas in Dadar for the finesse that was Marathi language and theatre – Shivaji Mandir used to remain open for a New Year Orchestra performance every December 31 from 1965-2016 – while also enjoying the other sub-cultures of Colaba Jazz (Louis Banks and Braz Gonsalves), and Urdu expositions of poetry and lyrics in south Mumbai neighbourhoods of Bhendi Bazar, Mominpura and Khetwadi, the flattening out of rich sub-cultures by a shrill manifestation of phillum-dom and crass money has also cost Mumbai dearly.

These past decades particularly have torn this metro apart, both physically and metamorphically. The grabbing construction bling has shot up not only the air quality index (AQI)  to unimaginable highs but done worse. The levelling out ‘bulldozer and crane development’ has flattened out our small lanes, Irani cafes, Udupi eateries – where the Kaifi Azmis, Majrooh Sultanpouris, Vijay Tendulkars and Sahir Ludhianvis – congregated. Yet, Mumbai’s roads remain shamefacedly the same, or even worse, on which a bumpy and medically hazardous ride in the auto-rickshaw is often the quickest way out of the paralysis caused by a flailing or collapsing public transport system.

And it is there on our suburban roads that a bitter battle has been raging this past week, bringing traffic to worse, almost violent, snarls. 

The Marathi manoos versus the rest

Mumbai is, once again, on edge. The Marathi Manoos versus the rest. There are many sub-texts below this overt expression of resentment or claim over Mumbai that have never been fully understood, leave alone socially or politically resolved. Jobs, representation and power are the obvious ones, while cultural impositions through monetary clout of an enforced vegetarianism by the Jain and Gujarati communities flexing money and muscle, are the other. However, for now, it is within the auto-driver working class that the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ battle rages. 

Mumbai’s streets, especially the populous and burgeoning suburbs, far away from the seat of political and financial power, are seeing street-standoffs between the Marathi and non-Marathi auto-rickshaw drivers. The reason? 

Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis’ brute majority government led by the Hindi Hindu Hindustan-driven Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been pushed to impose a Marathi-first language requirement for all auto-rickshaw drivers in Mumbai. Today, in 2026, the Marathi manoos has staged a come-back to the political centre-stage. Numerically still weak, but enough to re-fashion the political discourse. 

Early this year, in and around the local Mumbai mahanagarpalika (municipal) elections, a previously weakened Udhav Thackeray-led section of the Shiv Sena battled to retain its clout in the metropolis, securing an impressive 65 seats in the once imposing gothic City Hall. While this number fell short of a numerical majority in the BMC, its aggressive political positioning of the Marathi manoos and Marathi vote with cousin Raj Thackeray – notorious for a violent politics manifest in his Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS – in firm alliance has ensured an aggressive assertion of coercively imposed ‘Marathi must’ policy on auto-rickshaw drivers.

Rates shot up and the Mumbai commuter, already harassed by a crumbling public transport system given the brazen attempts to stifle it through privatisation, is reeling from auto-rickshaw drivers refusing to ply till the matter is settled one way or another. The northern suburbs of Dahisar, Chandivli, Kandivli and Andheri have seen protest shut downs over the past week and the stand-off continues. 

Marathi requirement clause

Official data points to approximately 2.20-2.50 lakh active auto-rickshaw drivers registered across Mumbai’s local transport offices, while the more expansive Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) accounts for around 4.62 lakh auto-rickshaw and taxi license holders. Auto-rickshaws are restricted to the northern suburbs – operating north of Bandra on the western side and Sion on the eastern side – and are banned from entering South Mumbai. 

South Mumbai and the electronic media television channels, catering to an obsessive car class, have been pointedly avoiding dealing with the competing sides and views to the contentious issue.

The State Transport Department implemented the Marathi requirement clause of the Maharashtra Motor Vehicles Rules, 1989, on May 1 through the Maharashtra Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Rules, 2026, after 37 years. However, following sharp protest and criticism from auto-rickshaw unions, drivers were given a grace period of three months to learn Marathi. 

That period ended on August 15, with the enforcement drive cracking down on drivers who failed to demonstrate a “working knowledge of Marathi” as per Rule 4(4), Rule 78, and Rule 85 of the Act. The hastily imposed ‘one month training to learn Marathi policy’, official data says, provided ‘lessons’ to only 1.65 lakh drivers, leaving 8 lakh permit holders who did not participate in any training. They have now been given a year to do so.

The Marathi manoos of the 1960s

The Marathi Manoos, previously edgy about his social and cultural clout, wary of the invasions by the ‘outsider’ had first expressed violent ire against the lungiwallah Madrasi and money-spinning Gujju. That was in the 1960s when the Shiv Sena under Bal Thackeray asserted “control” over the city’s underbelly, claiming over-representation of the south Indian in jobs and Gujaratis in business market share. 

The 1970s-1980s saw sharp worker unrest, the railway strike and the textile strike that finally saw large sections of the Maharashtrian workers driven out of jobs. The post Babri-Masjid demolition violence of 1992-1993, preceded by communal violence of 1984, saw this resentment expressed in brute targeted violence against the Muslim community. 

While the Bhiwandi-Jalgaon violence of the 1970s spawned by Thackeray’s Sena always contained its brand of the anti-Muslim – the Madon Commission Report is documented testimony to this – it was Thackeray’s subsequently loud claim to his own brand of Hindutva in the early 1980s that spawned this sharp shift from linguistic to religious fervour. 

Today, this latent Marathi manoos ire has been again trained at the Hindi-speaker northerner, the Bhaiya in Bambaiya Hindi. In 2007-2008 too, Mumbai and Maharashtra’s Hindi speaking taxi and auto-rickshaw drivers were the butt of violent political targeting. Mumbai has once again turned on itself.

Migration, all concerned know, can never really be stopped, especially as the glitzy, and now construction-heavy, show that is Mumbai has always both attracted and demanded expertise or services that cheaper labour of the construction worker, artisan and road builder fulfill. Trades and talents unavailable with the local Marathi manoos are also often outweighed by the migrant work ethic ready to sacrifice entitlements to make way in this game of no lost opportunity.  

So Mumbai has both taken and given, in disproportionate measure, from the worker, the toiler, the insider and outsider. Today, the ever-present footfall of this racy working class is visible not just in burgeoning rail compartments but in the sardine-like shanty clusters that fashion need from space and space from need. 

It is a simmering conflict that is simply not going away. With no one of any dogged commitment to the city or its people to give effective solutions, or shared representation and space, even a try. And so this stand-off will continue.

Mumbai will simply labour on through this latest fist-fight blithely in the itinerant hope that the fissures will iron out or just disappear. 

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