Hardcover
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253355874 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/18/2011 |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Sales rank: | 707,579 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.10(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Ahmedabad
Shock City of Twentieth-Century India
By Howard Spodek
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2011 Howard SpodekAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-35587-4
CHAPTER 1
Gandhi Chooses Ahmedabad
I had a predilection for Ahmedabad. — M. K. GANDHI, Autobiography
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's father, and his father before him, served as high-ranking administrative officers in various princely states in Kathiawad, the western peninsula of Gujarat. The British ruled Kathiawad indirectly — that is, they kept the local rulers of its small states in place, but under close supervision. Mohandas's father, in the course of his career, served under several of the rulers in several of the states. Politics was the family business. In his autobiography, Gandhi credits his mother, too, for her political interests (as well as her piety): "My mother had strong commonsense. She was well informed about all matters of State, and ladies of the court thought highly of her intelligence." So two years after his father's death, when a friend of the family urged sending the eighteen-year-old Gandhi to study law in England as a means of maintaining the family's political heritage, the family reluctantly agreed. Mohandas leapt at the opportunity. He had learned his politics in the petty squabbling and intrigues of local principalities, administered under local rulers, subservient to British supervision. Suddenly, wider horizons were opening.
When Mohandas returned in 1891 from his three years of legal studies in London, the family expected that he would excel either in the politics of the princely states or in private practice, but he succeeded in neither — not in Bombay, and not in Kathiawad. Two years later, when a request for his temporary legal services came from a Muslim businessman in South Africa, Gandhi accepted. He had no idea that South Africa would become his adoptive country for twenty-one years, and that he would find his métier not in private legal services, but in leading struggles for civil rights for his fellow Indian immigrants. His personal, direct experience of racial discrimination in South Africa impelled him from the quiet, private life of a commercial lawyer to the national and international spotlight as an innovator in methods of nonviolent mass civil resistance, which he named satyagraha, or "firmness in truth."
Near Durban, he established an ashram, traditionally the residential and operative headquarters of a religious sect, but in his case the home and headquarters of a political movement. He founded his own printing press to publicize his movement. Gandhi's efforts in organizing thousands of Indians in South Africa, arguing through legal channels in court, staging public demonstrations and marches, burning identification cards, refusing to pay taxes, and astutely using the media attracted a huge following. The Indians in South Africa came from diverse backgrounds — Punjabis from the north, Tamils from the south, Gujaratis from his home region; Hindus and Muslims; indentured laborers, and prosperous businesspeople. Gandhi got to know them all, and to gain some fluency in their many languages and jargons. By the time he returned to India in the last days of 1914, at the age of forty-five, Gandhi had a national reputation in India. Political leaders there waited eagerly, and often imploringly, to see what role he would choose to play in the ongoing nationalist movement for independence.
First he had to decide where to live — to establish his new home, perhaps an ashram, as in South Africa. In many ways, it is surprising that he chose a city. He began with a sharply critical perspective on the cities of India. He felt strongly that Indian cities, in conjunction with the British government, exploited the rural population. After he had lived in Ahmedabad for a few years, he made these views explicit:
Little do town dwellers know how the semi-starved masses of India are slowly sinking into lifelessness. Little do they know that their miserable comfort represents the brokerage they get for the work they do for the foreign exploiter, that the profits and the brokerage are sucked from the masses. Little do they realize that the Government established by law in British India is carried on for this exploitation of the masses. No sophistry, no jugglery in figures can explain away the evidence that the skeletons in many villages present to the naked eye. I have no doubt whatsoever that both England and the town dwellers of India will have to answer, if there is a God above, for this crime against humanity, which is perhaps unequalled in history.
Despite this condemnation of Indian cities and their citizens, Gandhi's choice of Ahmedabad as his headquarters made him a suburbanite of a large city struggling with the problems of industrialization and urbanization compounded by colonial rule.
In choosing Ahmedabad, Gandhi weighed several alternatives. His oft-cited explanation, given in his autobiography, reveals an important part of his thinking, although not all of it. In some respects, and for no clear reason, his statement seems misleading:
When I happened to pass through Ahmedabad [in 1915], many friends pressed me to settle down there, and they volunteered to find the expenses of the Ashram, as well as a house for us to live in ...
I had a predilection for Ahmedabad. Being a Gujarati I thought I should be able to render the greatest service to the country through the Gujarati language. And then, as Ahmedabad was an ancient centre of handloom weaving, it was likely to be the most favourable field for the revival of the cottage industry of hand-spinning. There was also the hope that, the city being the capital of Gujarat, monetary help from its wealthy citizens would be more available here than elsewhere.
Several of Gandhi's stated reasons for choosing Ahmedabad seem quite realistic: the attractions of Gujarati language, culture, and wealth, with the latter helping him with expenses for his family, ashram, and movement. In South Africa, Gandhi had lived and worked among Indians from all throughout the subcontinent. (In the first group of twenty-five men and women who came from South Africa to settle in the Satagraha ashram in Ahmedabad, thirteen were Tamilians.) But now he was returning to his home. His home within India was Gujarat, and Ahmedabad was its chief city. In addition, the city's industries were growing rapidly, and its industrialists certainly possessed financial resources that might be tapped.
Early support from the city's businessmen gave him immediate encouragement. For example, despite the reluctance of many of Ahmedabad's financial leaders to receive Gandhi into their homes because of police surveillance surrounding this man who had challenged British power in South Africa, Sheth Mangaldas Girdhardas, Ahmedabad's most prominent senior mill owner of the day, received him warmly as a houseguest.
The third of Gandhi's rationales, reviving hand spinning, however, seems somewhat far-fetched. Ahmedabad was a center of industrialized machine spinning, not hand spinning. In fact, as he reveals later in his autobiography, "Even in 1915, when I returned to India from South Africa, I had not actually seen a spinning wheel." Only after two years, after Gandhi had "poured out my grief about the charkha [spinning wheel]" to Gangaben Majmundar at the Broach Educational Conference in late 1917, did "that remarkable woman" search for a spinning wheel and finally discover a few discarded ones in the lofts of some homes in Vijapur, Baroda state. Only then could Gandhi begin his campaign for spinning. So Gandhi's vision of reviving hand spinning seems somewhat quixotic as a reason for choosing Ahmedabad. Perhaps even more surprising was his later success in this mission.
Gandhi does not directly discuss alternatives that he did not choose — the roads not taken — but we may nevertheless consider three of them for a moment. Why not settle in a village? Gandhi's love for village India might have suggested a village home, and in fact, later, after he departed Ahmedabad in 1930, he chose the village of Sevagram, near Wardha, in central India. In 1915, however, Gandhi was intensely aware of the need for communication and publicity. In South Africa, he had founded his own printing press. Now, in Ahmedabad, he started his own publications, Navajivan and Young India, two years after he established his ashram. By 1930, when he was the world-famous Mahatma, Gandhi could set up in a village and the world would seek him out. But in 1915, he needed the communication facilities of a large city.
The same need for relatively easy communication probably ruled out Kathiawad, where he had been born and raised. As a land of princely states, this peninsula was far more suppressed politically than British India and infested with petty politics that Gandhi could neither tolerate nor master. He had had his fill of Kathiawad in 1892, when he returned from England with his law degree in hand and attempted to establish a private practice in Rajkot, the political capital of the region. He finally gave up because the political "atmosphere appeared to me to be poisonous, and how to remain unscathed was a perpetual problem for me." He left for South Africa. On a brief return from South Africa in 1902, Gandhi once again settled briefly in Rajkot but found it too small for his legal talents and his practice. He was in the process of moving to Bombay when he was recalled to work in Durban and left immediately.
What about Bombay, 300 miles south of Ahmedabad — the commercial capital of India, the political capital of western India under British rule, a major port city on the Arabian Sea? Although not in Gujarat, Bombay was home to many Gujaratis, many of them businessmen, some of them wealthy enough to fund Gandhi's projects. But Bombay was too cosmopolitan, too sophisticated, too professionalized for the ascetic Gandhi. When he had first returned from London in 1891, he had attempted to establish his law practice in Bombay — and failed. His autobiography gives his own account of his first professional appearance in the small causes court in Bombay. The case was simple, but Gandhi lacked the courage to stand up and properly represent his client. He felt disgraced. Believing that he would not be entrusted with any further cases, he applied for a job as an English teacher in "a famous high school," but he was turned down because he was not a college graduate. After these setbacks, he left for Rajkot, where he also failed.
Twenty-four years later, in 1915, on returning from South Africa, Gandhi found that he was much better able to cope with the sophisticated Gujarati society of Bombay. But would it be worth the effort? Could Bombay be home? He describes his experience on arriving in India, at a reception in his honor in Bombay. Everyone was speaking in English:
The receptions in Bombay gave me an occasion for offering what might be called a little Satyagraha. At the party given in my honour at Mr. Jehangir Petit's place, I did not dare to speak in Gujarati. In those palatial surroundings of dazzling splendour I, who had lived my best life among indentured labourers, felt myself a complete rustic. With my Kathiawadi cloak, turban and dhoti, I looked somewhat more civilized than I do today, but the pomp and splendour of Mr. Petit's mansion made me feel absolutely out of my element. However, I acquitted myself tolerably well, having taken shelter under Sir Pherozeshah [Mehta]'s protecting wing.
Then there was the Gujarati function. The Gujaratis would not let me go without a reception, which was organized by the late Uttamlal Trivedi. I had acquainted myself with the program beforehand. Mr. Jinnah was present, being a Gujarati, I forget whether as president or as the principal speaker. He made a short and sweet little speech in English. When my turn came, I expressed my thanks in Gujarati explaining my partiality for Gujarati and Hindustani and entering my humble protest against the use of English in a Gujarati gathering. This I did, not without some hesitation, for I was afraid lest it should be considered discourteous for an inexperienced man, returned home after a long exile, to enter his protest against established practices. But no one seemed to misunderstand my insistence on replying in Gujarati. In fact I was glad to note that everyone seemed reconciled to my protest.
The meeting thus emboldened me to think that I should not find it difficult to place my new fangled notions before my countrymen.
In sophisticated Bombay, Gandhi could cope; in Ahmedabad, he could reign.
What, then, was this city of Ahmedabad that Gandhi chose as his home in 1915? Demographically, the city was growing rapidly, by more than a quarter in just ten years, from 217,000 in 1911 to 274,000 in 1921. The textile industry, situated along the railway tracks east of the city walls, accounted for most of the city's economic and demographic growth. The number of mills held steady at about fifty, but they were expanding their internal capacity, and the number of daily workers increased during the decade from 30,013 to 43,515. Ahmedabad was earning its nickname as the Manchester of India. Its industry attracted young, single men in search of work. The ratio of women to men dropped rapidly from 888 per thousand to 796 in a single decade.
The historic city center, dating back to the city's founding in 1411, held two-thirds of the city's population within its walls. The walls still stood. They would not be torn down until the 1930s and 1940s. Afterward, the "walled city" became just a figure of speech designating this oldest part of the city; but when Gandhi first arrived, the walls were real.
Only slightly south of the geographical center of the walled city, in Maneckchowk, the central markets for gold, jewelry, financial stocks (the stock market, or share bazaar), cloth, grain, and vegetables, surrounded the central mosque and the tombs of the founder of the city, Ahmed Shah, and his wives. Khadia, adjoining the southeast edge of these institutions, remained the elite residential neighborhood. The Bhadra area, however, adjacent to the historic fort in the western sector of the walled city, was rapidly rising to prominence as another center of cultural and political life. Wealthier families immigrating to and expanding within the city's walls pushed poorer working-class residents to lower-lying areas, first inside the walls and then to the industrial suburbs outside.
To preserve open space within the crowded city, the municipality introduced some restrictions on land sales within the walled city. In 1899, it designated sixteen acres to be set aside as open-air spaces planted with trees and shrubs. Gardens were planted within the walls in the Karanj, between the Bhadra Fort and Three Gates, and outside at Kankaria. In 1902, the Victoria Memorial Garden was opened adjacent to the city side of the Ellis bridge.
A trickle of upperand middle-class residential movement to suburban locations outside and to the north of the walls, and even across the river to Ellisbridge, had also begun. The chairman of the Committee of Management of the Municipality commented favorably to the collector of Ahmedabad on this expansion in 1911: "There is a marked tendency among the well-to-do people to build residential bungalows in the open area outside the city walls and the new buildings which have been constructed in the Shahibaug and Dhulia Kot suburbs during the last decade indicate the spirit of urban life is developing." The British took credit for the move outside the walls as a tribute to the law, order, and feeling of safety that their takeover in 1818 brought to the city, and as the maps indicate, the city was steadily acquiring land outside its walls. In 1911, in addition to annexing the industrial area of Gomatipur to the east, it also turned north to annex the Shahibaug area and, for the first time, to the west, across the Sabarmati, to annex the suburban land of Ellisbridge. ("Ellis Bridge" denoted the actual bridge over the Sabarmati to the new development. The new development itself was designated "Ellisbridge.") The buildings of the Gujarat College had been constructed there in 1897, and a railway station on the Ahmedabad–Dholka line had been opened in 1911. But even in 1921, the population of Ellisbridge was only 2,044.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ahmedabad by Howard Spodek. Copyright © 2011 Howard Spodek. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Part I The Gandhian Era, 1915-1950 17
1 Gandhi Chooses Ahmedabad 21
2 Gandhi Assembles New Leadership 37
3 Vallabhbhai Patel Builds the Congress Political Machine 70
4 Anasuyaben Sarabhai Engages Ahmedabad's Working Classes 94
Part 2 The Westernizing City, 1950-1980 115
5 Ambalal Sarabhai and Kasturbhai Lalbhai Build an Industrialized, Westernized, Prosperous, Cultured, World-Class Company Town 121
6 Indulal Yagnik Challenges the Gandhian Consensus 140
Part 3 Creativity and Chaos, 1969- 165
7 Communal Violence, 1969 171
8 Chimanbhai Patel Provokes the Nav Nirman Movement, 1974 181
9 The Mills Close, the TLA Falters, and the Municipal Corporation Goes Broke 195
10 Madhavsinh Solanki Invokes the Politics of Caste and Class 207
11 Ahmedabad 2000: The Capitalist City Out of Control 227
12 Godhra, the Gujarat Pogrom, and the Consequences 248
Glossary 271
Notes 275
Bibliography 301
Index 311
What People are Saying About This
A major contribution to the history of modern India and to urban studies in general. . . . A scholar's model for future historical studies of cities, especially those in the developing nations.
Spodek (Temple Univ.) is a renowned world historian and highly respected specialist in Indian urban history, particularly that of Ahmedabad, which he first visited in 1964. It has been his second home ever since. As a 'shock city,' a term coined by Asa Briggs in 1963 about 1830s Manchester, it contains all the social, ethnic, environmental, and economic problems found in such shock cities through the decades. Based on its textile industry, Ahmedabad is the 'Manchester of India'" Between 1915, when Gandhi settled in its suburbs at his ashram at Sabarmati, until the 1970s, it has been led by a small circle of civic and political leaders, and it is this circle that Spodek focuses on while covering all the major events and movements that have arisen. Part 1 of the book is titled'"The Gandhian Era, 1915-1950,' part 2, "The Westernizing City, 1950-1980," and part 3, 'Creativity and Chaos, 1969-'. The strength of this first-rate, well-illustrated study is its thorough grounding in source material, an intimate knowledge of people and places, and its connections between Ahmedabad and such personalities as Gandhi, Vallabbhai Patel, and Anasuyaben Sarabhia, among a long list of prominent Gujeratis. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Most levels/libraries. — Choice
Brings into focus the forces of social, political, economic, and cultural change which have transformed India in the 20th century.
Spodek (Temple Univ.) is a renowned world historian and highly respected specialist in Indian urban history, particularly that of Ahmedabad, which he first visited in 1964. It has been his second home ever since. As a 'shock city,' a term coined by Asa Briggs in 1963 about 1830s Manchester, it contains all the social, ethnic, environmental, and economic problems found in such shock cities through the decades. Based on its textile industry, Ahmedabad is the 'Manchester of India'" Between 1915, when Gandhi settled in its suburbs at his ashram at Sabarmati, until the 1970s, it has been led by a small circle of civic and political leaders, and it is this circle that Spodek focuses on while covering all the major events and movements that have arisen. Part 1 of the book is titled'"The Gandhian Era, 1915-1950,' part 2, "The Westernizing City, 1950-1980," and part 3, 'Creativity and Chaos, 1969-'. The strength of this first-rate, well-illustrated study is its thorough grounding in source material, an intimate knowledge of people and places, and its connections between Ahmedabad and such personalities as Gandhi, Vallabbhai Patel, and Anasuyaben Sarabhia, among a long list of prominent Gujeratis. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Most levels/libraries. — Choice