Mr Thackeray - his father anglicised his surname after William Makepeace Thackeray, English author of Vanity Fair - ran the nativist Shiv Sena party which excelled in populism and xenophobia over four decades.
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63) achieved a rare harmony of caustic narrative and engraved depiction and nowhere more brilliantly than in Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero (1848).
It's a men's club comprising such diverse members as Vladimir Nabokov, Stephen King, Lionel White, Anthony Burgess and William Makepeace Thackeray -- all writers whose work has been made into films by the late Stanley Kubrick.