BackAhmedabad, the frayed city of Gandhi and Modi
In this biography of the city, the 2002 riots cast a long shadow
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What sort of a city is Ahmedabad? Is it the city built on the wealth generated from textiles, now residing in the bungalows of seths who once owned those mills? Or the city of labourers whose jobs vanished when those mills closed, and who had to figure out new ways of making a living? The city from where Mohandas Gandhi left on his March to Dandi to lift salt from the sea and defy an unjust British tax in pre-independence India? Or the city that erupted with fury that the state could not, or did not, control in 2002, after the burning of a train compartment in Godhra in which 58 Hindu activists died, and in the retaliatory violence that followed, at least 900 people died?
Is it only the city of old mosques, or the place of the remarkable modernist architecture of Louis Kahn and Buckminster Fuller, which the city’s wealthy elite wanted to patronize after independence because the monument-hungry city had no British heritage? Is it that older town of labyrinthine lanes that form pols, the intricate network in the old city in which communities live where everyone knows everyone else, providing both familiarity and an absence of privacy? Or the post-2002 city, where dividing lines are known as “border", where Hindus and Muslims find safety and comfort living with their own kind? And where, amidst all this, is the city by the river, the thread that united Ahmedabad?
The late poet Adil Mansuri comes to mind. He wrote once:
Nadi-ni ret-ma ramtu nagar male na male
Fari aa drayshya smruti-pat upar male na male
(We may not meet again this city playing on the sands of this river;
The sight on the screen of our memories, we may not see again, never)
Mansuri was nostalgically longing for an Ahmedabad that he was leaving permanently, but there was a menacing undercurrent to his verse; he was writing about the city whose fabric had frayed after a riot. And in her biography of Ahmedabad, Amrita Shah’s journeys inside the city’s mind keep bringing her back, again and again, to the horrendous violence of 2002. When Shah began working on the book, she may not have intended those riots to form the organizing principle, but so vivid were those memories, and so deep the impact on the city’s psyche, that 2002 forms a leitmotif, like a plaintive ghazal’s qaafiyaa and radif.
Shah is an accomplished reporter. Disclosure: I have known her since we started out as journalists almost around the same time in the early 1980s, and I have long admired her brave reporting of crime and her astute understanding of the law. She has been a correspondent for Time magazine, has written for and edited several magazines across genres, and written an engrossing biography of Vikram Sarabhai, one of the pioneers of India’s space programme.
Shah reveals her keen eye for detail. Instead of expressing her frustration with creeping fundamentalism, Shah offers a poignant anecdote of meeting an officer at the Textile Labour Association who blasts the office with a religious mantra constantly playing in the background. She reveals the official’s lack of regard for the past when she describes how uninterested she is in preserving archival photographs; she is willing to give these away to Shah, otherwise they are to be trashed. When Shah asks about Narendra Modi, the officer reels off the then chief minister’s achievements “like a child reciting a multiplication table".
Shah has the poetic gift of discovering metaphors while describing something prosaic, such as when the city spreads “like an inkblot", or the river turns “murky like the dipping water in an artistic bowl". Shah also captures the city’s sounds, bringing out its onomatopoeic qualities (the “ratatat" of a wooden post and the “putter putter" of a van) as well as its eerie silences broken by the rustle of leaves, as she describes her visit to the sepulchral Gulbarg Society, where the former Congress MP and poet Ehsan Jafri was murdered in the 2002 riots.
Divided into seven chapters (and a coda, on kite-flying), Ahmedabad begins with the story of Meraj, who came from elsewhere to the city, slowly built a minor fortune and dreamt of building his business till the riots of 2002 destroyed those dreams. She returns to Meraj’s home towards the end of the book, and sees him rebuilding his life, now without any employees, and working with his wife, admitting, “Who would want to leave Ahmedabad?"
The second chapter, “The River", introduces the reader to the city’s syncretic culture and hybridity, through its history and architecture. It broadens the setting to introduce the state and its coastline, and the role of various communities and religions in forging a Gujarati identity. In “Old City", she introduces the reader to the Gujarat Vidyapith, a university founded on Gandhian principles, where, she laconically observes, there appear to be more foreign students than locals keen to understand Gandhian ethos.
In “Working Class", Shah writes about Dalit writing in Gujarati which, unlike its Marathi counterpart, is more restrained in tone, revealing anguish, not anger, because, as Chandubhai, a poet, tells her, “It was very hard to rub out Gandhi." She also offers a poignant portrait of yet another Gujarati tragedy—the people who die drinking illicit liquor. She describes how the trade proliferates, and how the police finally arrest “scrawny boys" with “fashionable haircuts and sulky expressions", whose scooters are seized. She notes the solution Amit Shah (no relation of the author), a minister in Gujarat at the time (and now the president of the Bharatiya Janata Party) offers: death penalty for manufacturers or sellers of illicit liquor, and mandatory jail terms for the complicit police.
In “Highway Dreams", Shah writes about the new roads and malls, and offers an insight into the way the Modi administration thinks about the contentious issue of land acquisition, which explains the government’s stubbornness in attempting to pass a law that disregards so many rights. A government official candidly tells her how he manages to convince farmers to part with their land—sweet negotiations followed by force; the notion of informed consent is absent.
In “New York Tower", we encounter overseas Gujaratis who rue that the state is not able to fulfil its destiny because of the minor matter of “2002", which continues to besmirch its reputation; in “Bombay Hotel", Shah brings us back to the harsh reality in which many Muslims live.
As the book reaches its end, it becomes less about Ahmedabad or Gujarat, and more about how Modi sought to shape the state, and fashion his own image. She offers a comical portrait of Modi’s image consciousness, and sardonically observes the directory-sized government publicity materials produced on expensive art paper extolling Modi’s achievements. It sounds like a colossal waste, except that it worked—not only in Gujarat, thrice, but last year, all over India.
Salil Tripathi is contributing editor at Mint, author of The Colonel Who Would Not Repent, and winner of the Red Ink Award for human rights journalism. He is researching his next book, about Gujaratis.
For an excerpt from the book, visit www.livemint.com/bookexcerpts
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