In one of the many blood-soaked scenes in Sanjay Gupta’s latest gangster movie Mumbai Saga, which released in theatres on 19 March, gangster Amartya Rao (John Abraham) kills an industrialist called Khaitan (Sameer Soni) at the behest of his political overlord, Bhau (Mahesh Manjrekar), a Bal Thackeray-like character, complete with the rudraksh necklace. Khaitan was about to shut down Khaitan Mills (which his father started) and had deployed local mob boss Gaitonde (Amol Gupte, full of Falstaffian glee) to break the protesting mill workers’ resolve and evict them from their nearby basti. Mumbai Saga is the latest film to depict the Great Bombay Textile Strike of 1982 in which almost 250,000 mill workers from 65 textile mills participated. The movement was led by the trade unionist Datta Samant. By the time it ended, about 150,000 workers were out of jobs and the vast majority of textile mills in Mumbai had been shut down. In the aftermath, labour laws were diluted across the country, reducing the power of unions and indirectly promoting contractual arrangements and migration of labour (after all, if labour is non-local, it reduces the scope for organisation/lobbying).
