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:
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