In June 1993, when a court was about to admit a case against him for his writings in Saamna, Mr. Thackeray responded, “I piss on the court’s judgments. Most judges are like plague-ridden rats against whom direct action must be taken.”

After the riots, Muslims were pushed to or sought out their own ghettos. Muslim dons of the Bombay underworld retaliated by exploding 13 bombs across the city, which killed 257 people, Hindu and Muslim alike. Mr. Thackeray had destroyed the cosmopolitan, secular Bombay of my adolescence. The violence consolidated the Hindu vote behind Mr. Thackeray and propelled his party into power, in Bombay and in Maharashtra.

On assuming office, Mr. Thackeray’s party got into bed with the very elites it had scorned. Mr. Thackeray and big business loved each other. Trade unions controlled by his men were much more malleable than the left-controlled ones. On a return to Bombay in 2008, I met the Shiv Sena street fighters I had known in the 1990s, and the Muslims gangsters they had battled. They were all in real estate now. They had been hired by developers to extort slum dwellers into consenting to their houses being razed, in exchange for shabby tower blocks under a government program. The alligators in the Bombay swamp had never feasted better.

Mr. Thackeray never held a political office. He had to appear bigger than politics. “I hate politics,” he said, and bragged that he ran the state by “remote control.” I went to interview him in his bungalow, which had a perennial line of favor seekers waiting in the antechamber. They could be Bollywood stars, the chairman of Enron, gangsters or clerks. At one point during the interview, he burst into an unprompted, extended soliloquy about rats in Bombay. His answers had no relationship to my questions; they were simply stray thoughts that seemed to occur at that particular moment. It was a mismatch of scale: this small-minded man controlling this enormous city.

Mr. Thackeray had no use for theories or data; he was all about action, or the illusion of action. “I like people who can get the things done!” a sign in his office proclaimed. His solutions to the city’s vast problems were precise and petty: rename Bombay as Mumbai; increase water flow in the city’s hydrants to enable the flushing out of rats.

Mr. Thackeray was the most powerful man in the city because, like Mr. Trump, he knew how to tell a good story. Mr. Trump’s victory was the triumph of stories over numbers. Hillary Clinton had the research, the voter data. Mr. Trump went with his gut, told stories, ripping yarns. The audience laughed, cried — and voted.