Ahmedabad: A City In The World
Amrita Shah
Bloomsbury
Rs 499
Pp 201
BIOGRAPHIES OF cities are internationally an accepted genre, but in India, the trend has caught on only of late. In fact, Aleph recently published a series featuring the likes of Patna, Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata. Amrita Shah’s slim book, Ahmedabad: A City In The World, is a welcome addition to these texts, which interpret a city more than narrate its story.
Because the book steers clear of an encyclopaedic approach, one gets to look at the city through the eyes of the author, and not as a chronology of events and description of places. Places are portrayed, for instance the Sabarmati riverfront, but they are contextualised.
Ahmedabad, in any case, carries an albatross and it will be a while before the city stops being viewed from the prism of 2002. Similarly, the riverfront has a ‘problem’, in that it became a metaphor for claiming kudos for tasks not done. To explain, the run-up to the parliamentary election of 2014 and the rise of Prime Minister Narendra Modi from a satrap to his present position were greatly the results of the marketing of his Vikas Purush or ‘Development Man’ image.
In the list of ‘achievements’ of Modi, the development of the Sabarmati riverfront was placed prominently. Modi played little role in conceiving the project because it was initiated by previous regimes. Yet it was projected as the ‘product’ of a development visionary.
The book details what the river has meant for generations of Amdavadis down the ages. Yet, we do not get to know how people relate to it now and what purpose it serves them. It is one matter if it becomes a cosmetic symbol of a leader’s ability to ‘deliver’, but another issue if it is of no use except to serenade the likes of China President Xi Jinping. A few years down the line, one can visualise a similar response at the site of the Sardar Patel statue—or Statue of Unity—on the Narmada.
Ahmedabad is a city of disparities. This is nothing new in any setting, urban or rural. Yet when the difference in living standards of people gets intertwined with the belief that different levels exist because of different entitlements, it is a major issue. The post-Godhra riots in Ahmedabad weren’t the first instance of sectarian violence in the city.
Previous episodes, however, did not cause permanent cleavages and couldn’t uproot people the way the eruption in 2002 did. The city in Juhapura, for instance, has the ignominy of being the largest ghetto in Asia, and this colony has only burgeoned since 2002. These insights are discernible throughout the book, not by use of an over-the-top style, but by a consistent undertone.
There are mini-Juhapuras, too, and in one of these, the author convinces a Muslim youth to allow her to tag along on visits to where he lived previously. In a poignant scene, the past comes to confront Meraj and, using that as a tool, the author brings the reader face to face with the sad realisation that life was torn asunder and people uprooted by these episodes of violence—orchestrated for political benefit—in a battle that was not theirs. One can simply sense Meraj’s remorse at the realisation regarding the contradiction of his existence. He left his old home for ghettos that provided safety, yet after finding a cocoon, he yearns for the old colonies. The author etches that Meraj is not alone in his sentiment, and that his one-time neighbours, who were once powerless to prevent his moving away, rue their incapacity too.
Every city has ‘zones’ and Ahmedabad is no different. Often, in a country rent with religious conflict, the schism is wider and the city changes within a few metres. Muslim-dominated parts of Ahmedabad—new and old—are characterised by the absence, or marginal presence, of the state, save in the form of police. The book carries this message as a subtext, and the past of Ahmedabad, when it was a major industrial city, is a distant memory.
Kites are central to the construction of officially-backed gaiety in post-2002 Gujarat. The author uses the exclamation ‘kai po che’ (‘bo kata’ outside Gujarat), meaning ‘I cut it’, as a literary trope while narrating a common sight she espies: a boy struggles to resuscitate a fallen kite while the city moves on relentlessly. No one but the boy mourns when a car drives over the kite. The tragedy of Ahmedabad is that the powerful have become oblivious of the hurt they cause to the ‘other’. The story is the same in several other cities, but since this is ‘happening’ in Gujarat’s capital, it is also all the more tragic. This is not a book to be seen through the words of a review, as readers will be best served by picking up a copy.
By Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay is a writer, journalist and the author of Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times
