On August 15, 1965, Bal Thackeray published an article in Marmik, the journal he ran. In it, he imagined a 2065 Bombay where Marathi speakers had all but disappeared; the ‘Madrasi lungi,’ a trope he peddled, had become the garment everybody wore, and the dhoti, which he portrayed as a quintessential Maharashtrian garment, had become a ‘fancy-dress’ of sorts.
Later in the sixties, Thackeray’s Shiv Sena, the organisation he founded in June 1966, was at the forefront of a campaign to oust South Indians from Bombay; Shiv Sainiks went on the rampage vandalising South Indian-owned businesses. Their war-cry: Bajao Pungi, Hatao Lungi!
The lungi, in Thackeray’s view, was a South Indian garment; those who wore it were deemed fair game for his Sainiks. At the same time, Hindi cinema was also pushing the stereotype that the lungi is essentially a South Indian garment. In the 1965 thriller, Gumnaam, where the comedian, Mehmood, speaking his unique brand of Dakhani Urdu, is clad in a lungi throughout the film. Later, in the late eighties, Mithun Chakraborty in his role as ‘Krishnan Iyer, M.A., Nariyal Paaniwaala’ in Agneepath was also seen in a lungi, albeit a pure white one. In recent times, Chennai Express and ‘Lungi Dance’ have consecrated the lungi as a South Indian garment
So, is the lungi exclusively South Indian? Kaiser Haq, the Bangladeshi writer, in his ‘Ode to the Lungi’ has this to say about the garment:
-30-
Copyright©Madras Courier, All Rights Reserved. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from madrascourier.com and redistribute by email, post to the web, mobile phone or social media.Please send in your feed back and comments to editor@madrascourier.com
