Non-Marathi-speaking migrants, Muslims and foreign cricketers, Pakistani and Australian, have all been targets of his tirades.

ECONOMIST: Banyan

That fuelled the rise of Shiv Sena, which, with the MNS, wins the urban Marathi-speaking vote.

ECONOMIST: Cleaning up Mumbai and Maharashtra: The degeneration game | The

The room has several placards of basic greetings in English, all spelt phonetically alongside translations in Marathi.

BBC: Mumbai tiffin carriers become multi-skilled

Shamshad Begum was a versatile artist, singing in Hindi and the Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil and Punjabi languages.

BBC: India singing legend Shamshad Begum dies

It led to a reorganisation of the state's provinces into linguistically more homogeneous units: including, in 1960, the creation of mainly Marathi-speaking Maharashtra.

ECONOMIST: Banyan

With an army of ethnic-Marathi hooligans, known as Shiv Sainiks, at his disposal, Mr Thackeray has terrorised Mumbai's teeming streets for four decades.

ECONOMIST: Banyan

U.S.-based computer professional Avinash Chopde has created ITRANS, a program that transcribes words into Indian scripts, including Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Telugu and Sanskrit.

CNN: COMMUNICATION

The result, says Kumar Ketkar, editor of Dainik Divya Marathi, a newspaper, is that most parties do not care enough about the swelling cities.

ECONOMIST: Cleaning up Mumbai and Maharashtra: The degeneration game | The

Never mind that Mumbai was barely a Marathi-speaking city at all.

ECONOMIST: Banyan

In response, Shiv Sena has resumed its pro-Marathi attack.

ECONOMIST: Banyan

In the film Shabnam, there was the first multi-lingual film song with stanzas in Bengali, Marathi and Tamil, telling the audience that they were all part of India while poking gentle fun at the stereotypes it created.

BBC: How Bollywood mirrors Indian realities