A look at contemporary Ahmedabad's cultural fabric, its violence, its poets, its food culture, its queer movement and the usage of religiosity by women to resist marginalisation.

Credit: YouTube

Sharik Laliwala, 22, an alumnus of King’s College London and Ahmedabad University, is an independent researcher on Gujarat’s politics and history based in Ahmedabad. He is on Twitter @sharik19.

The first part of this series dealt with broad movements in Ahmedabad’s history until India’s independence in 1947 keeping in mind and reviewing Saroop Dhruv’s recent work in Gujarati, Shahernama (Darshan, 2018). The second article outlined the post-colonial journey of Ahmedabad while continuing to examine Shahernama. This article reviews selected themes covered in Seminar magazine’s July 2018 issue titled ‘Ahmedabad: the city & her soul’.

How do women imagine a city? What are the ways in which they can claim its public spaces? Seminar magazine’s July 2018 issue titled ‘Ahmedabad: The city & her soul’ is rooted in addressing these concerns by placing perspectives by women at the centre-stage of scholarly discourse of visualising Ahmedabad, as its editor Harmony Siganporia proposes. In this piece, I review themes covered in a selected set of articles from this issue by all-women writers who have spent (at least) some period of their lives in the city.

Searching for meat in Ahmedabad

Gujarat’s chief minister Vijay Rupani expressed a bizarre desire in April 2017: to turn Gujarat into a ‘vegetarian’ society. When he made this statement in Gujarat’s legislative assembly, hundreds of Hindu priests were present to witness the passing of a law that prescribes life sentence as maximum punishment for cow slaughter. The intent of the Gujarat CM was clear: to pamper the sentiments of Hindus and Jains in an election-bound state.

Avni Sethi, an interdisciplinary artist, in her piece, staunchly contends this morality of imposed vegetarianism by narrating her personal tale of defying majoritarian norms of food culture in Ahmedabad. As a child, Sethi’s rebellious habit of taking sumptuous mutton cooked by her grandmother in school lunchbox gained her a few school friends. Simultaneously, this deviant food choice exposed Sethi to the risk of being treated as a lesser Gujarati while unsurprisingly becoming a subject of condemnatory looks when enjoying chicken in trains departing from or arriving in Ahmedabad.

Her search for meat took her to the old city of Ahmedabad. Sethi’s regular excursions to the lanes and the by-lanes of the old city have her swearing by the rich chicken and mutton delicacies available on its streets which she daringly terms as ‘essentially Gujarati food preparations’.

Something disturbing is at play in Sethi’s description of the old Ahmedabad as a ‘meat-eater’s delight’. Availability of local non-vegetarian food in the old city is a tiny feature among several ingredients which go into the making of the old city’s culture. This distorted representation of the old city which divulges little about the day to day life of its residents has become commonplace among the city’s liberal elites. These elites’ once in a while appearance in the old city from their lavish western Ahmedabad lifestyle to relish meat, or to participate in an exclusive group for heritage tour, or to celebrate the kite-flying festival of Uttarayan, has produced a ‘feel good’ cottage industry disconnected from the walled city’s culture.

Sethi’s write-up only reinforces this problematic ‘fetishisation’ of the old city accompanied with an incorrect and simplistic geographical segregation of Ahmedabad by the Sabarmati river into the eastern side (which she equates with the old city) and the western Ahmedabad. This separation, she claims, is further ‘accompanied by […] binaries such as minority-majority, poor-rich, etc’ assuming that the eastern side houses the marginalised communities. This is a reasoning not rooted in reality and carries the threat of treating the old city residents as a needy class requiring constant outside support.

A view of Ahmedabad. Credit: Chris Martino/Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0

In fact, eastern Ahmedabad has a substantial upwardly mobile population living outside its walled boundaries in Shahibaugh and Maninagar coupled with a working-class population in industrial areas such as Naroda, Rakhial, Vatva, to name a few. Inside the walled city, Hindus and Muslims live in next-door enclaves with a wealthy Parsi, and Dawoodi Bohra population in some parts of Khanpur area.

Vegetarianism of Gujarati society is a myth popularised by the ruling government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The Sample Registration System (SRS) survey in 2014 revealed that close to 40% of the population in Gujarat state eats non-vegetarian food. Many vegetarian eaters make clandestine ventures to non-vegetarian restaurants to test a rather funny hypothesis that even a child Mohandas Gandhi believed in: that eating meat provides instant masculinity.

Of late, some openness in the food culture is visible. Sethi concurs. Ahmedabad has ‘proliferating egg laris by the hundreds’ apart from luxurious hotels serving exotic dishes such as ‘sushi and sashimi’, she notes. In 2011, KFC – an international fast-food chain – was steadfastly opposed when it tried to open its first branch in an upscale locality of Ahmedabad; the scale of this resistance has somewhat reduced in the recent past discernible in the numerous new restaurants and cafés that serve meat in western Ahmedabad localities such as Prahlad Nagar, S.G. Highway, Bopal, Thaltej and Vastrapur.

Once India’s only vegetarian Subway outlet with Jain food options, the outlet in Paldi area of Ahmedabad has begun to serve meaty sandwiches. A key reason why they made this shift was reduced profitability and demand due to a limited menu. After all, the logic of capital trumps the logic of forced moral habits.

Middle-class and Ahmedabad

The beautification project of the Sabarmati riverbank that passes through Ahmedabad, known as the Riverfront, boasts an impressive flower park, a wide track for cycling and jogging, a state-of-the-art event centre with plans to privatise the vacant land to build offices, hotels, and malls. It was once a sight of slums in which Hindus (mostly Dalits) and Muslims lived side by side. When they were removed from the city’s centre and resettled to its periphery, the slum-dwellers were divided into communal lines by the state although there was a demand for self-segregation too. Despite these glaring inequities, it is not an aberration to hear lavish praises in Ahmedabad for the Riverfront.

Mona Mehta, an academic at IIT Gandhinagar, in her article recording the middle-class dominance calls the Riverfront ‘a source of unbridled Gujarati pride for the quintessential Ahmedabadi middle class person’.

Mehta examines the event of Happy Streets held every Sunday mostly at the Riverfront to gratify the middle-class sensibilities with activities like dance, yoga, Zumba amidst talks of community building and reducing environmental pollution by declaring the Riverfront as a vehicle-free zone (which it otherwise already is). She opines that the event offers nothing more than ‘tokenistic solutions to urban problems’. Instead of showing concerns for the rehabilitated slum-dwellers, she perceptively adds, Happy Streets presents the urban middle-class as the ‘victims of urbanisation’ without any concrete plan ‘to forge a genuinely inclusive community’.

At other times, Happy Streets event has been organised at the posh commercial locality of C.G. Road and the Adani Shantigram township on the outskirts of Ahmedabad. Already a private space meant for the affluent, Mehta explains that when Happy Streets is held at the Shantigram, ‘it loses all pretense of addressing the problems of urbanization’ and shifts its focus to enjoying the restricted ‘public space’ apart from, of course, marketing the real estate.

She is clear as to the cause that has solidified the middle-class hold over Ahmedabad: the neo-liberal economic arrangement arguing that the ‘Ahmedabad’s contemporary middle class has shown an acute willingness to fall in line with’ the ‘neoliberal vision’. It is unclear why she chooses not to elucidate her assertion with a discussion on the state government’s policies and programmes such as Vibrant Gujarat Summits, Special Economic Zones (SEZs), and Narendra Modi’s unique re-definition of the petite bourgeoisie as the ‘neo-middle class’.

Gujarat is one of the most urbanised states of India. As of 2011, roughly 43% of the state’s population is concentrated in urban areas vis-à-vis the national average of 31%. The party in power, BJP garners most votes from the urban zones – in the 2017 state elections, the urban constituencies of Ahmedabad, Surat, and Vadodara saved the BJP from a defeat. Class, reflected through deep divisions on rural-urban lines and through the movement for reservations by the powerful agrarian caste of Patel, has become central to Gujarat’s politics over caste in the few last decades. In that respect, Mehta’s thesis adds a fresh perspective – inside Ahmedabad, a quintessential urban space, class divisions, although not so visible on electoral lines, are as much relevant as they are to the state’s rural-urban divide.

Faithful and secular

The frequent incidents of large-scale communal violence in Ahmedabad beginning in the year 1969 reaching its gruesome climax with the 2002 riots has crippled the Muslims. In the absence of state-support and societal prejudice, Muslims became ghettoised and adopted conservative religious traditions seeking refuge in the divine – a phenomenon that quickened its pace from the mid-1980s. Yet, contrary to popular perceptions, Muslims did not turn towards extremism nor did they resort to violence. Heba Ahmed’s article voices this paradox central to the Gujarati Muslims adding substance to the existing researches on Islamic activism in post-2002 Ahmedabad conducted by Dipankar Gupta, T.K. Oommen, Rubina Jasani, and Raphael Susewind.

Indeed, as Ahmed writes, ‘Muslims began to make efforts at re-establishing communal harmony’ and sought justice relying on constitutional remedies after the 2002 riots. She explicates this by tracing the journey of Jameela Khan, an Islamic activist associated with Jamaat-e-Islami-Hind (JIH), who ‘dovetails both deen (religious creed) and duniya (the temporal world)’.

A practising Muslim, Jameela has a penchant for initiating religious and educational reforms among Muslims. She refuses to wear a burqa and also rejects being tagged as a feminist. Such practices, Jameela thinks, are possible because Islam talks about justice based on which Ahmed makes an atypical but accurate claim: Jameela’s agency to fight for justice is directly linked to her religious beliefs.

A general view of the Muslim dominated Juhapura area is pictured in Ahmedabad. Credit: Reuters/Ahmad Masood/Files

Jameela actively uses piety in two ways – firstly, as a personal and societal means of moral (re)awakening and secondly, to justify her fight for justice among Muslims by aiding the women victims of 2002 riots and through ‘intervene in local incidents of marital violence against women’.

In past, I have argued, based on my dissertation fieldwork conducted in 2017 on two Islamic activist organisations – JIH and Gujarat Sarvajanik Welfare Trust (GSWT) – in Ahmedabad that Muslims now direct their collective energies towards ‘building skills and capacity’ of the community through schools where secular syllabus co-exists with Islamic education. This is the puzzle of Muslims in Ahmedabad, whom the state has failed to take care of, that Ahmed’s work also stresses upon: the discovery of Islam in a post-riot Ahmedabad has not hindered their socio-economic mobility but actually facilitated it through faith-based organisations (FBOs).

The nationwide rise of Hindutva has necessitated Islamic activists to moderate their emphasis on duties and instead focus on a discourse of rights to develop platforms for communal harmony with secular groups, I had argued. Ahmed in her article supplements this assertion underscoring that, lately, JIH has initiated programmes of inter-faith dialogues with Dalit and Christian groups.

What is it that makes such programmes possible? Perhaps, Islamic activists like Jameela skilfully exploit upon the Indian variant of sui generis secularism, where religion is not reduced to the private sphere, to be faithful and secular at the same time. Ahmed does not explore this point which has major implications for our understanding of secularism – a task that she, perhaps deliberately, leaves to future political theorists using her astute anthropological insights.

Being queer in Ahmedabad

This year, on February 18, QueerAbad, a safe space for Ahmedabad’s LGBTQIA+ community, hosted the city’s first ever pride parade attracting more than 300 people.

The parade was a historical moment for a city often derided in the liberal circles as a conformist, orthodox, and ‘non-happening’ place: In some sense, Ahmedabad unbolted its relatively closed cultural environment through this initiative. Writing in Seminar, Shamini Kothari, co-founder of QueerAbad, insists that the parade made it possible to think that ‘Queer Ahmedabad was no longer an oxymoron’.

QueerAbad celebrating its second year anniversary in August 2018. Credit: Facebook

Her article is a story of Ahmedabad’s LGBTQIA+ community as much as it is her personal narrative. Kothari tells that her non-conformist sexual identity has complicated her bonding with her hometown, Ahmedabad. She tries to imagine that queerness has always existed in the city’s streets, in its now much-celebrated heritage, and in its everyday life. Just that no one bothered to see Ahmedabad through that inventive lens. Perhaps, the much-needed recent reading down of section 377 of Indian Penal Code (IPC) – a colonial vestige of backward Victorian morality – by the Supreme Court, may make sexual minorities more visible in Indian cities.

Kothari’s platform, QueerAbad attempts to dispel misconceptions about the LGBTQIA+ community by regularly holding ‘Ask What You Will’ session where the group takes anonymous questions. At the pride parade, which was a culmination of a two-day conference on issues of queer community, she informs, QueerAbad ‘handed out booklets in Gujarati on the ABCs of LGBTQIA+’ and explained their event to ‘curious onlookers’.

She showcases remarkable awareness of access restrictions that events such as a pride parade face – the crowd that attended the parade comprised mostly of an entitled group of upper-class, English-educated folk. Before QueerAbad began and Kothari came in contact with several other queer residents of Ahmedabad, she hardly knew about well-known cruising spots of Ahmedabad representing a world of queers outside Grindr (a dating application for LGBTQIA+). This ignorance is possibly due to her own privileged background, she recognises while posing an important question: Why is there no historical memory of the LGBTQIA+ community in Ahmedabad?

It’s a city, a home for her, where the experiences of the LGBTQIA+ community, she reasons, does not have an archive.

Counter-cultural thrust

This issue on Ahmedabad by mostly first-time women contributors to the Seminar belonging to a younger generation of researchers appears as if in an unplanned conversation with Saroop Dhruv’s Shahernama, a book by an erudite woman academic cum activist that I reviewed in the first two parts of this review series. Most write-ups deal with the contemporary themes and still emergent trends fulfilling several interpretative deficiencies of Shahernama about the present-day Ahmedabad.

Though a few commentaries suffer from the academic syndrome of ambiguous writing with unwarranted insertion of obfuscating jargons, the exhaustive list of topics covered in the issue – the city’s cultural fabric, its violence, its poets, its food culture, its queer movement, usage of religiosity by women to resist marginalisation, conservation practices in the city inter alia – takes to a task what Siganporia calls ‘the deeply entrenched masculinist epistemes of mercantile capitalism’ of Ahmedabad. This illustrative counter-cultural thrust of these writings makes them indispensable to the scholar of the city.

The author expresses gratitude to Tridip Suhrud for providing the initial push to write this review. The author’s fieldwork contained in his study titled ‘Faithful and Secular: Islamic Activists in Juhapura, Ahmedabad’ was supported by the Baillie Gifford Research Grant.

https://thewire.in/urban/a-peak-into-ahmedabads-soul-a-female-perspective

What values does Ahmedabad represent in contemporary times? This is among the questions Saroop Dhruv’s Gujarati language 'Shahernama' covers by treading the path of the city’s heritage.

City Walls of Ahmedabad, 1866. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

In 1918, a year after the world witnessed the bloody battle between capital and labour guided by an internationalist communist vision in Russia, a similar clash – albeit a bloodless one – was playing out in the textile centre of the Indian subcontinent: Ahmedabad. Led by a feminist leader Anasuya Sarabhai – pitted against her own brother, Ambalal Sarabhai – and guided by Mahatma Gandhi, Ahmedabad saw a textile strike involving more than 15,000 weavers.

The entire city came to a standstill since half of Ahmedabad’s population comprised of the working-class families concerned with textile whose plague bonus was attempted to be terminated. Gandhi, acting as a mediator on behalf of the workers, ultimately resolved the conflict through his first major fast unto death making use of the analogy of ‘parent-child’ to represent the relationship between capital and labour.

This moment was a truth experimentation of Gandhi’s to consciously alter the principle tenets of organising Ahmedabad by preventing a class schism in the nationalist movement, buying the trust of capital and labour and establishing his authority in the city.

What were those principles before Gandhi’s time in this textile hub? What values does Ahmedabad represent in contemporary times? These are some of the questions that Saroop Dhruv’s fresh, first-of-its-kind Gujarati language book on Ahmedabad titled Shahernama covers by treading the path of the city’s heritage.

A fat book of 600 pages, Shahernama is incisive in weaving a narrative around people and places in the city bespeaking of Dhruv’s several decades long personal, academic and activist engagement with Ahmedabad. Shahernama takes its readers on a 12-day long heritage tour with an exceptionally sensitive and diverse group of curious participants. This review concerned with the treatment of Ahmedabad’s history in Shahernama wilfully neglects its characters while steadfastly following their conversations and interjections about the city’s socio-politico-economic history.     

A city carved on the mercantilist ethos

Popular legend has it that Ahmed Shah I decided to found Ahmedabad, amazed after seeing the unusual sight of a hare chasing a dog on the banks of the Sabarmati river. He was convinced about the courage and boldness of the people of the land.

Ahmed Shah’s strategic decision to establish Ahmedabad in 1411 near the site of the erstwhile Karnavati and Ashaval. Closer to the seas, Ahmedabad had formal structures like the mahajans to facilitate trade evidencing the city’s business spirit – a driving factor for Ahmed Shah to shift the capital of Sultanate rule from Patan to Ahmedabad.

The mahajan is a guild-like body, headed by a sheth, devised on occupational lines typically having a decisive role regarding wages, prices, working conditions, admission rules of merchants and artisans (whose body was labelled the panch). She takes us to one of the earliest signs of the entrepreneurial spirit of Ahmedabad that still survives at the now gentrified banks of Sabarmati river: the Gujari bazaar (local flea market) held every Sunday where one will find local vendors selling goods ranging from furniture and electronics to livestock. The Gujari’s association named after Ahmed Shah pays a fine tribute to the Sultan who attempted to devise a city respecting the logic of mercantile capitalism.

The human geography of Ahmedabad depended on the mahajans. Residential societies in Ahmedabad called the pols containing a labyrinthine network of passages with a familiar but sometimes nosy sociability, reflected a few of these facets of mahajans as the pol‘s members had occupational/caste commonalities or a sheth’s patronage.

Dhruv gives justice to the marvellous architecture which developed during the Sultanate rule with a certain Islamic touch to it including numerous public spaces such as the Jama mosque, the famous Sidi Sayed ki Jali, now gentrified Kankaria lake, Sarkhej Roza, Rani Sipri’s Mosque, Bhadra fort, to name a few.

Jama Masjid of Ahmedabad with its minarets in 1809, painting by Robert Melville Grindlay. The minarets were destroyed in the 1818 earthquake. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

She makes no secret of her admiration of Ahmed Shah portraying the Sultan as a ‘just and disciplined’ ruler (pg. 89). This characterisation is fallacious. Achyut Yagnik and Suchitra Sheth in their influential book The Shaping of Modern Gujarat (Penguin, 2005) depict Ahmed Shah as ‘one of the most intolerant rulers of Gujarat’ adding that he was the first crowned head of Gujarat that ‘distinguished between its citizens along the lines of religion’.

A religious orthodox to the core, Ahmed Shah not only imposed jiziya tax on non-Muslims but also laid the foundations to persecute the non-conformist Shia Bohras. Ahmed Shah’s descendants carried forward this lamentable legacy. In Shahernama, Dhruv introduces Mahmood Begda of the Sultanate dynasty, under whose rule Ahmedabad tremendously expanded, as a figure pursuing the dream of turning Gujarat into a ‘second Mecca’, but it is puzzling that she does not conjoin it with his religious fanaticism.

When Ahmedabad was annexed by the Mughal empire, Akbar suspended the jiziya tax, beginning a process of interfaith harmony that lasted until the mid-17th century. The Mughal privileged the Jains and Vaishnavs who held the influential position of nagarsheth (head of the council of mahajans). Indeed, as Dhruv points out, Akbar toured the city to visit the Sufi Dargahs and promoted music and arts (pg. 203). However, Akbar’s son, Jahangir, had a ‘love-hate relationship’ with Ahmedabad which he called ‘Gardabaad’ and ‘Bimaristan’ (the Persian equivalent of a ‘hospital’), yet he chose not to disturb the social structure of Ahmedabad (pg. 206-207).

Her description of Mughals is packed with oversights that are hard to ignore. For instance, she calls the Mughals ‘Shias’ while referring to a Shia-Sunni conflict in 1619-1620 (pg. 213-214); Mughals were Sunni Muslims following the Sufi traditions. Consequently, her reasoning that the Mughal empire lost its hold over Gujarat because of their ‘hatred towards Sunni Muslims’ becomes questionable (pg. 216). Shahernama claims that Aurangzeb introduced jiziya tax in Gujarat (pg. 216); he, in fact, only reinstated this discriminatory tax that existed under the Sultanate rule.

Instability began in the later years of Aurangzeb’s reign as Marathas led by Shivaji began to loot Gujarat to finance their kingdom. In the early 18th century, a power-sharing formula regarding Ahmedabad was worked out between the Mughals and the Marathas.

Soon, a diarchy rule of Peshwas and Gaekwads evolved which wreaked havoc on Ahmedabad promoting corruption in governance with unreasonable taxes and depriving the wealthy Nagarsheths of their status and privilege. People of Ahmedabad pejoratively referred to the Marathas as ganim, meaning a raider. Shahernama mentions that the Marathas were particularly prejudiced against the Muslims destroying their cultural heritage and compelling many Muslims (especially the rich ones) to leave the city (pg. 225).  

‘May the Queen win’

Shahernama charts out a usual and well-accepted narrative about the British rule in Ahmedabad.

The city was in great ruins when the British flag flew over it in 1818 marking the end of Maratha rule. The British were welcomed in Ahmedabad since they patronised the Nagarsheths, like the Mughals, leading to a much-needed period of peace.

The emphasis on science and technology, education, women rights, the abolition of superstitions by the British found immediate support among the local elites: In some sense, the British began a ‘secular’ phase in Ahmedabad’s history although Dhruv equates it with the ‘Renaissance’ (pg. 290).

Ahmedabad elites’ collaboration with the British administrators was a quid pro quo of sorts. Dhruv cites a little-known gem: Dayananda Saraswati, the founder of the Arya Samaj, had urged the mahajans of Ahmedabad at the time of the 1857 revolt to fund the Indian cause but the mahajans did not agree to his demand (pg. 308). Indeed, during the revolt of 1857, the Ahmedabad elites supported the British Empire. The influential mahajans wanted stability for their business to flourish and little interference in city’s affairs while the British administration wanted the absence of nationalist passions to cement their political power.

Revolt of 1857. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Shahernama alerts its readers to the fascination of mahajans with the Western ethos and the English language. Bholanath Sarabhai and Kavi Dalpatram Travadi were the first ones to associate with the British. Dalpatram, a key figure in the city’s history and also in Shahernama, became a close friend of the colonial officer, Alexander Forbes; both of them promoted the cause of Gujarati intellectuals by forming the Gujarat Vernacular Society in 1848 which became a place to deliberate on social issues through its monthly magazine Buddhi Prakash (literally, the spread of light/knowledge). Progressive reformers like Ranchhodlal Chhotalal, founder of Ahmedabad’s first textile mill and Ramanbhai Nilkanth, the second mayor of Ahmedabad and a respected literary figure, dominated the scene of Ahmedabad.

Dhruv carefully demonstrates the dualism of reform – although caste rules became somewhat relaxed and women education was promoted during the British rule, there were no radical measures which could undermine the authority of the mahajans. The reformers were more focused on building hospitals, schools, improving the urban infrastructure and less so in promoting the cause of egalitarianism. She cites the case of Stree Bodh and Sundari Subodh – two magazines standing up for women empowerment – which had a ‘patriarchal tone’ to their writings (pg. 306). Institutes like All India Women Council, established in 1888 in Ahmedabad, and several ladies’ clubs restricted their attention to elite and urban middle-class concerns (pg. 327). By design, Ahmedabad was a place of limited emancipation.

The story of Ahmedabad under the British, who were obsessed with the creation of statistics through census, surveys and reports, is detailed out in Shahernama with minuscule use of statistical evidence or hearsay, unsubstantiated figures. For example, Shahernama wrongly exaggerates that the city had a hundred textile mills by 1871 while, in reality, there were 27 textile mills employing 15,000 workers by the end of the 19th century (pg. 362). Dhruv is erroneous in claiming that the Indian railways began in 1863 between Bombay and Baroda as the first train in India was between Bombay and Thane in 1853 (pg. 337).

The population of Ahmedabad grew concomitant with its wealth: By 1901, nearly 1,86,000 people resided in Ahmedabad – a jump of over 35% compared with the 1872 Census figures. Ellis Bridge, the first bridge in Ahmedabad over the Sabarmati river, constructed in 1892, enabled the movement of elites outside the walled boundaries of the congested eastern side to the then still infant western Ahmedabad localities such as Paldi and Navrangpura.

Dhruv rightly asserts that the local elites initiated reforms ‘from the top’ pre-empting a mass movement that would threaten the existence of the British Raj but she does not muse over the context of the nationalist struggle.

Industrialisation in Ahmedabad gave rhetorical impetus to nationalism rather than providing any real momentum. The defiance by industrialists was only economical to prevent foreign enterprises to set foot in Ahmedabad without an overtly political tone. Hence, despite events like the Congress annual session in 1902 in the city or the throwing of two bombs at Lord and Lady Minto in 1909, nationalism grew tepidly in Ahmedabad.

The arrival of Mahatma Gandhi in Ahmedabad turned this setting upside down.

Gandhi instils nationalism in Ahmedabad

‘My eyes had come to rest on Ahmedabad’, Gandhi writes, in his memoirs documenting his experiments with truth. The original version of the autobiography translated from Gujarati to English by Gandhi’s trusted confidante, Mahadev Desai (now updated by Tridip Suhrud), mentioned that Gandhi had a ‘predilection’ for the city. Gandhi attributed his decision to settle in Ahmedabad after leaving South Africa for good in 1914-15 to his cultural affinity with Gujarat and the Gujarati language (his influential text on Indian freedom struggle, Hind Swaraj was first written in Gujarati). The city was ‘an ancient centre of handloom weaving’ with a healthy culture of philanthropy that resonated well with Gandhi’s concept of trusteeship and made him confident to set his base in Ahmedabad.

Dhruv opines that Ahmedabad’s ‘moderate/middle-way’ of dealing with industrialisation, unlike, a rapidly modernising city such as Bombay, attracted Gandhi (pg. 365). It was easier for Gandhi to spread his message of communal harmony from a city that was developed on religious values of the local elites – Jains, Vaishnavs and Muslims – and had a history of few religious conflicts back then (pg. 365).

Gandhi’s initial years are lucidly outlined in Shahernama. He nurtured lifelong associations in the city and set up the Kochrab Ashram in the then expanding western Ahmedabad on a bungalow gifted by his friend Jivanlal Desai. These tasks went simultaneously with his goal of turning the Indian freedom struggle into a mass movement from being limited to an urban debating society.

A plague in 1916-17 forced Gandhi to establish another, bigger space called the Sabarmati ashram, few miles away from Kochrab ashram, in the same, western side of the city; his primary motive at this ashram was to carry out farming and husbandry activities (pg. 368). His decision to welcome untouchables at the Sabarmati ashram dried up financial support from the wealthy until a mill owner, Ambalal Sarabhai, saved him by handing Rs 13,000 – a famous incident which Shahernama mentions (although Leena Mangaldas, Ambalal Sarabhai’s daughter, has raised doubts about this claim in her Gujarati autobiography Akhand Divo.) A year later, Gandhi did not hesitate to represent workers in a strike against the mill owners led by Ambalal Sarabhai.

The 1918 strike allowed Gandhi to accumulate his power in the city. Workers gathered in thousands to ‘watch the little man in the loincloth speak’ as the celebrated psychoanalyst Erik Erikson writes in his book Gandhi’s Truth. However, Dhruv sees the 1918 textile strike with some suspicion frequently invoking the term ‘Samadhanwadi’ (believing in mediation) for Gandhi. She asserts that Gandhi’s mediation techniques with regards to class conflicts stymied the growth of the Left on the political scene of Gujarat.

By the late 1910s, Ahmedabad was properly steeped in the ethics of Gandhian thoughts. New institutions in the city that Gandhi built to instil nationalism and spread the vision of ‘Swadeshi’, all of which are detailed in Shahernama confirm his dominance over Ahmedabad: Navjivan Trust (responsible for publishing ‘Young India’ beginning 1919), Majoor Mahajan (Textile Labour Association), Gujarat Vidyapith (a university set up in 1920). Gandhi had replaced the old guard of Ahmedabad with a new leadership, as Howard Spodek writes in his book Ahmedabad: Shock City of Twentieth-Century India (Orient BlackSwan, 2012), comprising Vallabhbhai Patel, a socialist Indulal Yagnik, Anasuya Sarabhai (a labour leader) and two leading textile industrialists of the time, Ambalal Sarabhai and Kasturbhai Lalbhai.

In some sense, Ahmedabad became a city of firsts for Gandhi: his first Ashram in India, his first fast unto death in 1918 and the first major case against him accusing of sedition in 1922 under the much-criticised Article 124(a) of Indian Penal Code.

Gandhi’s historic 1922 trial resembles the trial of Socrates who willingly drank the poisonous hemlock as a punishment for promoting critical thinking. In the same way, the bona fide dissenter in Gandhi did not hesitate to plead guilty proclaiming sedition against and defiance of the British administration as ‘the highest duty of a citizen’. It is unclear why Dhruv does not explicate this memorable conversation between the Indian nationalists and the colonial power although the book has a passing reference to the well-known sketch of Gandhi’s trial in the Circuit House in Ahmedabad by the painter Ravishankar Raval (pg. 495).

Ravishankar Raval’s painting of Gandhi’s Great Trial in Ahmedabad in 1922

Dhruv aptly criticises many of Gandhi’s initiatives for failing to be sufficiently progressive. Until the late 1920s, Gandhi did not believe in dismantling the caste system (sans untouchability). She accuses the Gandhians of developing soft Hinduisation in their socio-cultural experiments (pg. 408). In fact, Gujarat Congress had conservative leaders like Vallabhbhai Patel, K. M.Munshi and Morarji Desai.

Shahernama gives the example of B.R. Ambedkar’s visit to Ahmedabad in 1931 who was vehemently opposed and shown black flags including by the Dalits (although Dhruv’s reference to Ambedkar being garlanded with sandals is an obvious untruth). If Ambedkar was opposed, V.D. Savarkar, who coined the term ‘Hindutva’, was welcomed and spoke in favour of separate nationhood in 1937 in Ahmedabad.

Gandhi, though he gave space to women in the nationalist movement, advocated a glass ceiling for women. Shahernama cites incidents of Gandhi advising women to stay at home instead of working at the mills (pg 427) – a patriarchal position that even Majoor Mahajan’s newspaper Majoor Sandesh took supported by Anasuya Sarabhai who was schooled in labour welfare at the London School of Economics (LSE).

After Gandhi left the city in 1930, the leadership that he had gathered continued to influence the city through various institutions including their positions in the municipality. But the Dalits and Muslims were conspicuous by their absence in this leadership which till date mars the public image of Gandhians.

The Ahmedabad elite remained faithful to the nationalist struggle unlike the leftists whom Jawaharlal Nehru, the then president of the Congress party, at a worker’s meeting in 1937 in Ahmedabad, sternly warned while advocating to ‘smash’ the ‘Red Flag’ if it was ‘pitched against the tri-colour flag’. In 1942, when the communists were supporting the British Empire in World War II, one of Gandhi’s trusted associate and a mill-owner, Kasturbhai Lalbhai, in an unusual move backed the Majoor Mahajan when it declared a strike to extend its support to the Quit India Movement.

There are various misrepresentations in Shahernama while the author’s assertions are weakened by the relative non-exploitation of the vast universe of quantitative data – the book would have greatly benefitted from the services of an able copy editor to fact-check a few details. For example, the Congress session in Ahmedabad was held in December 1921 and not in 1920 (pg. 381); Gujarat Vidyapith was established in 1920 and not in 1922 (pg. 382); Anasuya Sarabhai did not complete a degree course at the LSE (pg. 413). Dhruv calls the 1918 strike as ‘the first strike of textile business’ which is untrue since Ahmedabad itself had seen strikes in 1895 and 1899 in the textile sector (pg. 411).

By the time Gandhi had left Ahmedabad in 1930, the city had grown to have a population of more than three lakh people. This number kept on increasing and reached close to six lakhs by 1941. The middle-class kept on emptying the old city to reside in the western side in the first half of the 20th century as more bridges across the Sabarmati accelerated this intra-city migration.

Industrialisation reached its peak with the war-time expansion that brought more wealth to the industrialists without substantial percolation to the workers. Dhruv pays little attention to the wide prevalence of poverty among the working class which lived in proximity of the mills – close to 80 thousand workers were employed in 75 textile mills of Ahmedabad at the time of independence.  

At the cusp of independence, Ahmedabad was an industrial city par excellence – barring the awful living conditions in working-class chawls – ready to jump into the future driven by a traditionalist social structure but spirited enough to adopt the wisdom of science and technology.

28/SEP/2018

Sharik Laliwala, an alumnus of King’s College London and Ahmedabad University, is an independent researcher on the politics and history of Gujarat. He tweets @sharik19.

https://thewire.in/history/tracing-the-history-of-ahmedabad-a-city-of-limited-emancipation

Present-day Ahmedabad is a hyper-capitalist city, with more than six million residents, ever expanding in geography and wealth yet deliberately designed on religious divisions thanks to the Hindutva movement.

Violence in Ahmedabad during the 2002 riots. Credit: Reuters

The first part of this series dealt with broad movements in Ahmedabad’s history until India’s independence in 1947 keeping in mind and reviewing Saroop Dhruv’s recent work in Gujarati, Shahernama (Darshan, 2018). This article outlines the post-colonial journey of Ahmedabad while continuing to examine Shahernama.

Post-colonial modernity in Ahmedabad

Gandhi’s death – occurring almost simultaneously with India’s independence – marked a break with his ideas in Ahmedabad, like elsewhere in India. The process had begun much earlier though. By the late 1930s, it was clear that Jawaharlal Nehru was the most popular leader of the Indian masses: the industrialists, including the ones from Ahmedabad, rallied behind him.

The zeitgeist of the time was economic planning. When the Congress party formed the National Planning Committee (NPC) chaired by Nehru in 1937, textile industrialists like Ambalal Sarabhai and Kasturbhai Lalbhai were brought on the NPC which favoured industrialisation and state interventions. Industrialists prepared their own plan, too, known as the Bombay Plan (1944-45) advocating a mixed economy for a post-independent India; a young and dynamic Kasturbhai Lalbhai played a key role in its formulation.

This understanding of shifting allegiances by the textile industrialists, who were trying to balance their support between Gandhi’s idea of self-reliance based on indigenous traditions and Nehru’s vision of economic modernism, central to the politics of Ahmedabad, has been overlooked in Shahernama.

Dhruv’s claim that the ‘city was coming out of the control of mahajans [industrialists]’ after independence, which she cites in reference to the Maha Gujarat movement, is only partly true. (This process takes place much later and not in the Nehruvian period.) In fact, mahajans were building educational and research institutions in Ahmedabad in alignment with the agenda of Nehruvian high-modernism. Shahernama take note of the establishment of these institutions, most of which were headed by Vikram Sarabhai, a charming scientist and entrepreneur: Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) in 1947, Ahmedabad Textile Industry’s Research Association (ATIRA) in 1947, Ahmedabad Management Association (AMA) in 1956, National Institute of Design (NID) in 1961, Indian Institute of Management (IIM) set up in the same year as NID, which were added to the list of existing institutions such as the Ahmedabad Education Society (AES, formed in 1935). Yet, she fails to invoke this inter-connected logic of the shifting dynamics between industrialists/mahajans, political forces and the city.

In a Nehruvian fashion, like many Indian cities of that time, brutalist architecture became a mode of signifying Ahmedabad’s transformation towards scientific rationalism. Modernist architects such as Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn were brought to the city: marvels like the Millowners’ Association’s building, IIM Ahmedabad campus and Sanskar Kendra bear witness to their imprint on the city. Indigenous traditions are reflected in the works of B.V. Doshi and Charles Correa at the Sabarmati Ashram’s museum, Hussain-Doshi Gufa (although built much later and now renamed as Amdavad ni Gufa) and the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT) campus (in its undiluted, original avatar).

Non-state actors continued to play a critical role in Ahmedabad. Shahernama cites the case of Dalit Panthers, a radical group inspired by the Black Panther Party and the Maharashtra based Dalit movement, which spread its wings in Ahmedabad to awaken the Dalits; Gujarati literature by Dalit writers such as Nirav Patel, Jayant Parmar, Chandu Maheria and Sahil Parmar proliferated in the 1970s and 1980s. In that respect, a glaring exclusion in Shahernama is the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA, established in 1972) run by Ela Bhatt on Gandhian principles to support lower-class female workers.

Indulal Yagnik. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Dhruv reserves, and rightfully so, endless praises for Indulal Yagnik, a socialist leader who became a force to reckon with by leading the Maha Gujarat movement in the 1950s. Popular among the workers, Dhruv refers to Indulal Yagnik as the ‘fakir leader of a wealthy city’ who mobilised the masses to split the Gujarat state from the Bombay province on a lingual basis. Maha Gujarat reached its peak point when more people attended Indulal Yagnik’s rally in Ahmedabad held side by side with Jawaharlal Nehru’s flop rally in 1956 – an incident which Shahernama reproduces. The Nehru-led Union government initially did not budge in the face of essentially an anti-Congress (and anti-Morarji Desai) Maha Gujarat movement relenting only a few years later to carve out the Gujarat state from the erstwhile Bombay province on 1st May 1960.

It is odd that the implications of the newly-created Gujarat state do not warrant an elaborate discussion on Gujarat’s politics and society in Dhruv’s Shahernama, constricting the analytical thrust of the book.

The new regional government led by the Congress party made Gujarat a capitalist’s heaven. It rolled out pro-business measures favouring the dominant social groups – the trading communities and the Patels, an upwardly mobile peasant caste with a substantial presence in the Indian diaspora in the US. Limited corporations such as the Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation (1962), Gujarat Mineral Development Corporation (1963), Gujarat State Fertilizers & Chemicals Limited (1967), Gujarat Industrial Investment Corporation (1968) built an industry-friendly image of Gujarat. Undoubtedly, Ahmedabad being the financial centre of the state benefitted: the 1971 census reveals that the city was soon going to have two million residents. On the economic front, though, the textile sector had begun to slowly deindustrialise in favour of the small-scale power looms units while the city’s industries were diversifying into pharmaceuticals and chemicals; consequently, Majoor Mahajan and ATIRA became dysfunctional (and still remain so).

After Maha Gujarat, the Navnirman movement restructured the political imagination of Gujarat – in hindsight, as Shahernama regrets, for the worst. A further closing of the economy under Indira Gandhi and the 1971 war with Pakistan had put tremendous pressure on the Indian economy. Navnirman, born out of a price increase in the canteen of the L.D. Engineering College of Ahmedabad in 1974, captured the public frustration on inflation and corruption. The movement ultimately toppled down, in a democratic manner, the Congress-led Gujarat government giving impetus to Jayprakash Narayan’s Total Revolution.

Dhruv opines that Navnirman also marked the arrival of public intellectuals like ‘Umashankar Joshi, Darshak, Elaben Pathak, Prakash N Shah, Manishi Jani, Vishnu Pandya’. This is somewhat misleading since Umashankar Joshi and Manubhai Pancholi (Darshak) were already distinguished public figures in Gujarat before Navnirman and were senior to Manishi Jani and if I may add, Achyut Yagnik, who rose to prominence during the Navnirman. Many of these intellectuals were jailed during the Emergency – a period of suspension of civil liberties in India for almost a couple of years ending in 1977 and not in 1976 as Shahernama states. Like Maha Gujarat, Navnirman too was an anti-Congress campaign represented by a motley of otherwise ideologically incongruent political actors such as the old guard/syndicate of the Congress party led by Morarji Desai, public intellectuals (generally the Gandhians and the Leftists), and the right-wing Jan Sangh.

The unstoppable rise of Hindutva

Shahernama is unsparing of the Navnirman movement (and deservedly so) since it legitimised the existence of the Hindu right-wing on the regional and the national political stage alongside Jayprakash Narayan’s Total Revolution.

She traces the initial supporters of Hindutva in Ahmedabad to the savarna elites of Khadia-Raipur. The already existing base of conservative politics – thanks to leaders like Patel and Munshi – coupled with reformist sects with orthodox values like the Swaminarayan sect provided an easy launchpad for the Hindutva movement.

Between Maha Gujarat and Navnirman, a watershed moment in Gujarat’s history had taken place in Ahmedabad: the 1969 riots. Numbers differ, as they always do, but the official figures state close to 700 people, mostly Muslims, were killed; property worth more than Rs 40 million was vandalised. In the same year as Gandhi’s birth centenary, in the Sabarmati Ashram a Muslim family stayed was attacked. It became clear that the Gandhian institutions had lost their influence over the city and its people.

The roots of militant Hindutva in Ahmedabad hark back to the 1969 riots. The Justice Reddy Commission appointed to investigate into the violence had held various Hindu right-wing groups responsible. In that case, it is astounding that the 1969 riots, a turning point in the city’s history, is reduced to a footnote-like passing reference in Shahernama. Like many scholars and media persons, Dhruv privileges the discussion of the recent turmoils of the 1980s, early 1990s and 2002 in Ahmedabad, over the earlier wave of communal violence, ahistoricising the conversation around religious conflicts.

Moreover, Shahernama does not adequately capture the economic motivations behind the anti-reservation movement of the early 1980s, while wrongly claiming that ‘lacs of Dalits left their locality and the city’ which is unlikely since Ahmedabad’s population witnessed a decadal growth of 22% from 1981-91. Although a few measures to open up the economy to the private sector were taken in the 1980s by the Rajiv Gandhi-led Union government, the deindustrialisation of the textile sector leading to the closure of nearly two dozen mills by 1985 intensified the battles for government jobs and education in a command and control economy. Hence, riots occurred on the pretext of the anti-reservation movement by the Patels against the Congress party’s KHAM (Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi, Muslim) alliance and the policy of expanding the scope of reservations to the marginalised groups.

Where Dhruv is flawless is in her portrayal of the 1985 and the 1992-93 riots. The plank of Hindu unity was used by the Hindu right-wing – including the then recently formed Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which drew several top leaders from Gujarat – during the Ram Janmabhoomi movement to turn the working-class of Dalits against the Muslims. This strategy improved the electoral prospects of the BJP – the Congress party lost its hold over the state and the BJP formed the state government in 1995 after having come to power in Ahmedabad’s municipality in 1987. Since then, the BJP has yet not lost a single state election, signifying the hold of Hindutva ideology on Gujarat’s public imagination.

Shahernama offers an insightful commentary on the early years of Narendra Modi’s rule in Gujarat. Dhruv has no doubt in her mind that Modi was selected as the state’s chief minister in 2001 to improve the electoral performance of the BJP at a time when the state was recovering from the large-scale damages of the 2001 earthquake. Modi achieved his aim by a single formula: more Hindutva.

Credit: Reuters/Amit Dave/Files

On February 27, 2002, when a train carrying karsevaks returning from Ayodhya was allegedly burnt by a Muslim mob at the Godhra train station, anti-Muslim violence erupted in large parts of the state but most intensely in Ahmedabad. Roughly 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed and many more were injured amidst countless incidents of looting and rapes. Half of those killings took place in Ahmedabad with widespread allegations of the complicity of the state’s police and political forces. More than a lakh properties, including houses, mosques, dargahs and factories were destroyed – the economic loss of the riots was pegged at more than Rs 10,000 crore.

Ahmedabad’s elite Muslims were attacked on a massive scale for the first time. A notable example is Ehsan Jafri, former MP of Ahmedabad, who was brutally killed along with more than 60 people in the Gulberg Society massacre – an ‘injustice place’ in the words of Dhruv. Close to one lakh people shifted to relief camps in Ahmedabad.

Dhruv justly censures the Gujarati intellectuals who chose to remain silent. Some like Gunvant Shah and Chandrakant Bakshi went on to praise the state’s management of the 2002 riots. SEWA, a Gandhian institution, kept mum and helped the riot victims only in a hushed-up manner. To her credit, Dhruv, a noted poet and public intellectual, has a collection of moving poems in Gujarati called Hastakshashep (literally, ‘intervention’) about the pogrom.

Although devastating for Muslims, the 2002 riots were beneficial for the BJP. The party, with Modi as its chief ministerial candidate, won the 2002 elections held in December that year with its highest ever tally of 127 out of the state’s 182 seats, garnering most votes from the riot-affected central and northern region of the state. It is often heard that the BJP won that election not ‘despite the riots, but because of the riots’. Modi, now the prime minister of India, to date has not apologised for the 2002 carnage.

Shahernama hits its high-point when Dhruv gives an immaculate typology of the three dominant classes which the Hindutva movement coddles in Ahmedabad and Gujarat: the successive generations of a selected group of mahajans with old money, the neo-rich class, and the intellectual and professional upper-middle class. These classes to her mind make the Gujarati asmita (literally, pride in Gujarati identity) a celebratory ‘page-3’ material by acting as the state’s ‘image enhancers’; asmita, a term popularised by K.M. Munshi, has come to represent the savarna Gujarati cultural traits.

The consequences are crystal clear: The rise of Hindutva politics has destroyed the city’s indigenous capitalist traditions and merged hyper-capitalism with parochial and exclusivist notions of identity. She frustratingly and repeatedly, and to my mind slightly sensationally, equates Gujarat – because of the cultural experiments supported by these three classes – to a ‘laboratory of cultural fascism’.

Modi started to make some alterations to his image of Hindu Hridya Samrat after winning the 2007 state elections, portraying himself as a masculine developmental figure apart from being a protector of Gujarat (read Hindus). In effect, he merged otherwise contradictory ideological features also seen in his politics post-2014: Hindutva, (sub)nationalism, and developmentalism.

For these three classes, Modi-led BJP fuelled consumerism and portrayed Gujarat as an investor-friendly state. Although Gujarat was always on the front lines of industrial growth, the state began to actively attract private investments in the newly liberalised economic environment through its efficient bureaucracy, the much-hyped bi-yearly Vibrant Gujarat summits, and its Special Economic Zones (SEZs). The Gross State Domestic Product (GSDP) growth for the period of 2000-10 soared to nearly 10% per annum, roughly 2% higher than the national average and the state’s growth recorded in the preceding decade.

Shahernama talks less about events in the city’s recent history and government programmes, focusing more on subjective dialogues. It is wise to represent the recent past with some caution since it obscures a focus on long-term patterns yet for an unconventional book like Shahernama, the 21st century period demands greater attention to events. For instance, the discussion on Modi’s centralised leadership style; the state’s economic policies contributing to an abysmal record on social indicators such as rural poverty, malnutrition, educational & health outcomes; the rise of the Patidar movement due to the agrarian distress; the Dalit agitation post-Una incident – all of which are important to the context of Ahmedabad are excluded from the scope of Shahernama.

A disturbed city

Dhruv directs Shahernama’s readers to view the changing spatial order of Ahmedabad on Hindu-Muslim lines in relation with the Hindutva movement.

The middle-class Hindu-dominated localities of Ahmedabad kept on expanding in the eastern and the western side in Ahmedabad with the emergence of areas like Motera, Bopal, Ambli, S. G. Highway, Thaltej, Sola, inter alia. A Dalit middle-class was accommodated in Chandkheda while the Chharas, a denotified tribe, regularly harassed by the police, have not been allowed to stay outside Chharanager on the outskirts of Ahmedabad.

Post the 1969 riots, Hindus and Muslims slowly began to have segregated residential spaces due to an environment of fear and insecurity. This segregation steadily gathered pace with each incident of communal violence. The state played an active role in this process through the Disturbed Areas Act which opposite to its intended goals has exacerbated the situation. Hence, Muslims of Ahmedabad have moved from the once-occupied centre to the margins, reflective of their status in the city, to industrial localities such as Vatva, Bapunagar, Rakhial and neglected zones like Bombay Hotel and Juhapura, which is probably India’s biggest Muslim ghetto in the western periphery of Ahmedabad with more than three lakh Muslim residents.

A lane in Juhapura. Credit: Facebook/Welfare Association of Youth

Juhapura gets the derogatory label of ‘mini Pakistan’, apart from nonsensically being tagged as an area of under-class criminals which the Hindus usually do not visit. In reality Juhapura accommodates Muslims regardless of their economic class and sect (including the BJP supporting Dawoodi Bohras) since they have little choice but to reside in Juhapura.

Shahernama presents a thought-provoking and not so well-known sociology of the Muslim community in Juhapura. The ghetto does not have an adequate public infrastructure of roads, education, healthcare, banking services, to name a few services. This gap has been bridged by wealthy Muslims and Muslim charitable institutions which are sometimes linked to religious orthodox groups.

One often forgets it is the emergence of Hindutva leading to insecurity among Muslims that has fuelled the rise of conservatism within the Muslim community (apart from other global political factors). Shahernama shows awareness of this logic of the vulnerability that has driven Muslims to seek refuge in religion evidenced by the proliferation of mosques in Juhapura. After gangster Abdul Latif’s decline in his hold over the Muslims of Ahmedabad and his eventual encounter in 1997, conservative religious movements like the Tabligh jamaat have become mainstream among the Muslims. She points to the relief colonies constructed after 2002 riots where the religious charities enforce some form of moral policing. At a women’s hostel in Juhapura, wearing a burkha is compulsory coupled with strict restrictions on entry and exit. Quite correctly, she calls the emergence of Juhapura a ‘tragedy’ for Ahmedabad’s society.

Present-day Ahmedabad is a hyper-capitalist city, with more than six million residents, ever expanding in geography and wealth yet deliberately designed on religious divisions thanks to the Hindutva movement. Its physical violence may have disappeared, but structural violence and injustices of the kind visible in Juhapura continue. That is Ahmedabad for you: where continuous growth in wealth has not liberated the city from the shackles of political illiberalism. In Dhruv’s words, Ahmedabad is a ‘bundle of contradictions’, a place of idiosyncrasies, which despite all its violence, feels homely.

Between amnesia and nostalgia

Shahernama is filled with numerous factual inconsistencies, thoroughly opinionated conversations with a stereotypical use of Hindi when most Muslim characters speak (an overwhelming majority of Gujarati Muslims can comfortably speak Gujarati and do so also at home). The deficiency in the argumentative rigour of Shahernama reflects its lack of engagement with recent works on Ahmedabad and Gujarat by researchers such as Megha Kumar, Thomas Babbio, Renu Desai, Navdeep Mathur, Ipsita Chatterjee, Kunjalata Shah, Charlotte Thomas, to name a few – unsurprisingly, the bibliography of Shahernama becomes thinner when it comes to English language scholarship. While the book fails to make a substantial analytical contribution to the already existing body of knowledge about Ahmedabad, there are reasons why the book deserves the attention of at least the popular audience.

Firstly, Dhruv’s sincere and well-meaning attempt has led to the first, multidisciplinary account of Ahmedabad in vernacular Gujarati in the recent past. This trait coupled with the book’s conversational language and its simplified writing style makes Shahernama intelligible for the lay readers.

Secondly, Shahernama fittingly criticises the often unrooted and absurdist ideas of conservation and gentrification of Ahmedabad’s heritage made up of its pols, religious monuments, and several local markets. In that respect, Shahernama is a timely contribution at a time when the old, walled city’s recognition as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO has fuelled an elitist representation of Ahmedabad detached from the residents of the old city and their culture.

Ahmedabad’s residents, especially its youngsters, are oblivious to its past of violence. At its heart, Shahernama carries a remorse for this historical amnesia. On the other hand, the liberal-secular class has a certain nostalgia for the city’s history – its Gandhian conventions, its philanthropic traditions with indigenous capitalism, and its past of peaceful co-existence with cultural synthesis. Constantly traversing these two sides, Dhruv does not lose sight of a rarely seen optimism in Shahernama, which is the third and to my mind, the most noteworthy marker of her book. It is this optimism which makes Shahernama an attractive read.

29/SEP/2018

The author wishes to thank Urvish Kothari for reviewing an initial draft of the first two parts of the series. For this series, the author makes use of his submissions during his time as a student at King’s College London.

Sharik Laliwala, 22, an alumnus of King’s College London and Ahmedabad University, is an independent researcher on Gujarat’s politics and history based in Ahmedabad. He is on Twitter @sharik19.

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