Dhaval Kulkarni - The Cousins Thackeray: Uddhav, Raj and the Shadow of their Senas

Though a battles to fight ere the guerdon be gained,

The reward of it all.

I was ever a fighter, soone fight more,

The best and the last!

Robert Browning, Prospice

The modest Kadam Mansion at 77-A, Ranade Road, Dadar West, Mumbai, has been demolished and a new structure takes shape at the sitean inevitable result of the old making way for the new. But the political legacy that was born in this building, located in a by-lane off the historic Shivaji Park precincts, continues to endure.

It was here that Prabodhankar Keshav Sitaram Thackeray resided with his large brood, including his sons Bal and Shrikant. It was in this ground-floor flat that the Shiv Sena was born in 1966.

Prabodhankars contribution to Maharashtras social reform and anti-caste movements remains seminal. Born on 17 September 1885 at Panvel in Kulaba (todays Raigad district) near Mumbai, Prabodhankar launched the weekly Prabodhan (Enlightenment) in 1921. Though it ran for just five years, Prabodhankar was permanently prefixed to his name.

In his autobiography, Majhi Jeevangatha (The Story of My Life), the Thackeray patriarch notes that his family, which belonged to the Chandraseniya Kayastha Prabhu (CKP) caste, originally hailed from Pali village in the small principality of Bhor. The state was ruled by the Pantsachiv dynasty.

He recounts that the Thackeray familys ancestors added Dhodapkar to their surname as one of them was the killedar (chief) of the Dhodap Fort near Nashik, but this was dropped by Prabodhankars father.

Shaped like a lingam, the fort was ceded to the Marathas by the Nizam of Hyderabad in 1752 by the Treaty of Bhalki.

After the British besieged the fort, perhaps in the later period of the Peshwa rule, this Thackeray family ancestor fought bravely despite running out of provisions and was ultimately killed.

Though Prabodhankar was a leading light of the Bramhanetar (non-Brahmin) movement, which sought to counter the overarching influence of Brahmins in Maharashtra, his autobiography notes a family fable. When Dhodap Fort was about to fall, his ancestor was saved by a Brahmin who mysteriously appeared before him, lauded his bravery and teleported him to his village at Pali! To commemorate this incident, the Thackeray family worshiped two silver imagesone of a warrior, another of a Brahmin.

After his brothers insisted on dividing the family property at Pali, Prabodhankars great-grandfather Krishnaji Madhav Appasaheb relinquished his claim over it and left for Thane where he worked as a lawyer, making his reputation as an upright, helpful man.

His son, Ramchandra aka Bhikoba Dhodapkar, a devotee of the Goddess, found employment in the courts and was transferred to the small causes court at Panvel where he lived until his death. His wife (Prabodhankars grandmother) Sitabai, called Bay, worked as a pro bono midwife who did not discriminate on the basis of caste and religion in the line of duty. Bay was a woman ahead of her time and was disgusted by the practice of untouchability.

... our Thackeray family was very poor. In three to four generations preceding me, there was no information of anyone owning even an inch of property. However, we had a hutment-like dwelling in Panvel village, where I was born, says Prabodhankar, while describing himself as a self-made man.

The year 1818 saw the fall of the Chitpavan Brahmin Peshwas, whose twilight years were marked by moral turpitude and caste-based excesses. The Peshwa reign was supplanted by the East India Company (1818) and later the British Crown (1858), and Brahmins eased themselves into the new order by virtue of their access to education and centres of power.