Marathi Manus

Recently a friend of mine sent me a presentation titled “Marathi Manus Jaga ho”. This presentation is an extremely nice presentation about how Marathi people are un represented in the bureaucracy and even in our own state we have a bureaucracy which is from other states. Though no views, comments were not expected, I sent him the following answer.

I agree with your proposition and the proposition made in the presentation. However we cannot calculate the success of Marathi Manus by just seeing the number of positions in Public Service. Let us remember that Maharashtra has been at the forefront of industrial revolution since decades. Other states just started to catch up. As a result the jobs were available aplenty in Maharashtra which people took up. They never looked towards sarkari naukri as being their only option. Reserve is true for people from other states. For them as there are no jobs in the private sector, the only option for them is to try for Sarkari Naukri and hence they apply for UPSC exams. Purely by law of population and them applying for it, they are there more in numbers. This is one of the explanations. There are several more reasons. Marathi manus has succeeded in areas which the people from other states cannot even dream off.

Marathi manus has also been more of an intellectual. Most of the social movements, freedom movements had marathi manus as their originator. It is in Maharashtra that the semblance of culture is alive, be it Classical music, classical dances, literature, etc. There are writers, creators, and so is the audiences and readers. Let us not forget our intellectual, cultural heritage is the most important thing. Let us not compare ourselves with people from other states because I think we Maharashtrians are much better off than them in more ways than one of our representation in civil services.

He wrote back with new concerns. His concerns were
“However, if our rulers are not from our state, we loose to great extent. But the population of Industry owners in Maharashtra are no Marathi, a fact should not be forgotten”. I again wrote to him as follows:

I do not mean that we should not progress. Wherever we as Marathi people have short falls, weaknesses, the answer lies within us. It is up to all of us to teach our children to read Marathi Sahitya, to listen to Marathi music (not Ashwini ye na only, but the rich natya sangeet that we have), to see Marathi films (good ones from today and yester years). We should not see a paradox of sending children to learn in English schools and insisting on Marathi. We should rather do both. Send our children to the best schools and also conduct sanskar on them of our Marathi heritage. I am one example of that. I studied in Uttar Pradesh all my life. To be precise at Jhansi where my father was posted. Yet it is due to him that I still retained my taste in everything of our grand heritage. Same is true about entrepreneurship and civil service occupations. We need to educate our children on these options and provide them the framework for the same.

Let us understand that the negativity can bring together some people together for some time, but not all the people, forever. We need to build a positive message for all people to come on board and for it to have an ever lasting effect.

My comments on your point on Industry owners in Maharashtra being non Marathi is as follows:

# In the entire country, the majority of businesses starting with Kolkata (Calcutta) to now Maharashtra are owned by a Marwari community. The other community which has been business savvy has been Gujarati’s, Punjabis and Sindhis. Except these three communities in the entire country, you will find that representation of businessmen is very less, miniscule. One you can credit the genes of these community members and second you can attribute this to their tradition. The son follows the father and so on and so forth. Hence we cannot say that only we as Maharashtrians lack in owning businesses.

# If you trace the genesis of at least the Marwari community you will realize that they originally belong to a region which is very tough. Nothing grows, no water, no industry, nothing. Everyday survival is an issue. They came out of that region in search of other sources of livelihood and scattered in different parts of the country. As they had no qualifications / education to get into a job they started businesses, in a small way. The conserved in a way which we cannot imagine. The built their wealth. The reinvested it. And here they are. There are other explanations for other communities.

# Compare this to our situation. Thanks to the social reformers Maharashtra has seen, most of us had decent education. Except for some regions of Maharashtra the land is cultivatable. Mumbai was there always with its Mills. So for us the going was not as tough. The easy options were available. As it is in human nature, we all tend to take an easy approach, provided it is available.

# We need to learn from these communities and try and sow seeds of the same DNA in our future generations. We need to learn from a Marwari family running a Kirana store. They stay in the shop. They invest the money they have in the shop and not for the house. They start business, flourish. We should try and see the hardship they go through and learn from them that things are easy if we are to build our businesses.

As regards your point of us being ruled by people who are not from our state and because of that we loose, I disagree. I think in the quest of our regional identity we should not overlook nationality. All these people are after all Indians. Hence the notion of we being ruled by outsiders is not agreeable. Regionalism is good enough for preserving heritage and identity. It is like the region being our mother from whom we learn everything and the country being our father through whom we get our surname, the umbrella of security and being a part of something. We cannot ignore anyone. We cannot displease anyone. We cannot disobey anyone. Both are equally sacrosanct and sacred.

In a democracy the true rulers are the people we elect. Again choosing our rulers is in our hands. If we choose an outsider through an electoral process, the person to blame is not the one got elected. The blame is on the people who elected him / her.

Let us also not forget Maharashtra is the only land which fought the maximum against aggression. It is not only because we are courageous but because we are intelligent. We could understand the difference between freedom and slavery and hence came out the need to fight against it. So we fought. We not only, fought, we fought to win. Shivaji Maharaj fought and won against Mughals. Peshwe fought and won against Mughals and British. Lately people like Tilak, Savarkar fought against British. We have this history. So why can we not fight against an aggression, the new aggression. Fight to win. Only the tools of warfare will have to be different.