Ahmedabad, also known as Amdavad, is the seventh largest city in India. As a city, it has a reputation of having been the hotbed of Mahatma Gandhi’s struggle against British rule in the early 20th century. Today, in the 21st century too, the city maintains an important status as India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s perfectly developed model for the new India.
Ahmedabad: A City in the World is Amrita Shah’s biography of Gujarat’s former capital both before and after the communal violence of 2002 which destroyed the innate camaraderie of the city. Extensively researched, Shah takes the reader on those roads, streets, silent buildings and “frenzied consumption” which engulfed the city in February 2002. With her journey to the land of Bapu, Shah “seep[s] down through the layers of stone/ into subterranean pools/ to contemplate darkness again”. These lines from Bei Dao’s Accomplices thus prove to be the perfect epigraph to this travelogue.
Ahmedabad is named after the Muslim king Ahmed Shah who founded the city in the 15th century. Shah indulges in historical facts and details citing an example or two of the times when the BJP “mooted a proposal to change the name of the city to ‘Karnavati’, the name of the town or military outpost which may have been established by the Hindu Solanki king Karnadev on the banks of the Sabarmati, preceding the founding of Ahmedabad” in 1987. She later unveils that the shift was “intended to rid it of its Islamic associations, specifically the fact that the city had been founded by a Muslim king.”
Among the many people Shah meets are a “34-year-old Muslim embroiderer” from Asarwa-Chamanpura, the architect of the Riverfront project and the driver of her rented vehicle. These people open the doors to the interiors of Ahmedabad and provide her with first-hand experience of horrifying events of early 2002. They also help her understand the kind of life they lead after the rift tore apart the city resulting in the birth of “the ghettos that have arisen on the outskirts of Ahmedabad city to contain the flotsam and jetsam of Muslims thrust out by waves of communal violence.”
Meraj, the young embroiderer, is an epitome of the brutality of communal violence. He reiterates through the initial pages of the book, “I miss living among the Hindus... my friends... the food... all my neighbours, Hindu, Muslim”. It is here that Shah asserts, “It was the first time, through the miasma of horror, callousness, opportunism and injustice that ‘2002’ had come to represent that I had heard the thrum of love and longing”. At one point, Shah is surprised that Meraj is sitting comfortably in the presence of “the BJP lotus tacked on the wall” after all that happened with not only him but the entire Muslim community. He consciously defines Narendra Modi as “a capable man” and “a perfect CM for this State” unaware of the fact that Shah would need some clarification, at least, after having witnessed his fear, anger and frustration at the “circumstances and the people who ousted him from his home”. Through such examples, Shah successfully raises uncomfortable questions about Ahmedabad’s inconceivable acceptance of communal violence.
When Shah questions the driver regarding his whereabouts and what he witnessed on the fateful day, he doesn’t answer right away. He takes a few anxious seconds to gather courage to utter broken sentences which make him relive a long suppressed memory. He saw “all this...beating, burning.” He even begins to identify neighbourhoods for her by community: ‘Muslim area’, ‘Hindu area’.
In the chapter on the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project, Shah examines the 11km concrete walkways developed by the dynamic Ahmedabad architect Bimal Patel which led to widespread flooding in the city in 2006 as an ecological consequence of casing a river. In her reading of a city that is as unbending within its traditions as it constantly strives to construct a cosmopolitan infrastructure, Shah evokes a powerful picture of a city which yearns to move forward while still rooted in a chequered history. This makes the city both austere and exhibitionist at once.
‘2002’ is never absent from the book. Narendra Modi, who is not only a politician, but “an object of consumption”, a brand, a celebrity, is strewn throughout the book resurfacing as a shadow among the nameless many whose lives changed irrevocably.Amrita Shah’s way of ending each chapter with a poetic grace comes across as a refreshing breeze amidst “the mosques, the rauzas, the tanks and the gates”.She is a perfect flâneur who unfolds the city in front of the reader in a series of vignettes. This is a story of a kaleidoscopic city which encompasses and locates itself between crisis, recollection and obliteration.
The reviewer is a PhD Research Scholar in Comparative Indian literature in Delhi University