Abstract
Founded in 1411 AD, Ahmedabad is now more than six hundred years old. Throughout its long history, the city has attracted a great deal of attention for its physical appearance and socio-economic environment from native as well as foreign observers. Scholarly, analytical works, however, have been few and far between. To be precise, only three books with some pretensions to historical scholarship—apart from an official gazetteer compiled by the colonial government for administrative convenience—have preceded Spodek’s volume under review.
Two of these works are in Gujarati, while the third is in English. To Maganlal Vakhatchand, a well known Gujarati writer of his times, goes the credit of writing the first ever history of Ahmedabad, published in 1851 under the title Amdavadno Itihas. This was followed by Ratnamanirao Bhimrao Jhote’s Gujaratnun Patnagar: Ahmedabad more than seventy-five years later in 1929. Reflecting the prevailing attitude to historical research and the state of historical scholarship in their times, these works, notwithstanding their pioneering character, offered nothing better than a general description of the city and its past. Kenneth L. Gillion’s Ahmedabad: A Study in Indian Urban History, published in 1968, was the first work in the English language. Although it made some use of archival and literary sources, it was too limited in scope and coverage. The author himself conceded as much by saying that the book was a ‘preliminary excursion into Indian urban history’. Perhaps conscious of the limitations of his work, he told this reviewer sometime during the mid-1960s in a personal communication that he was reluctant to publish his study.
The importance of Gillion’s work, however, goes much beyond its scholarly quality. It opened up a new vista of research for historians in India for whom, until then, a city as a subject of historical enquiry had held little attraction. In fact, the phrase ‘urban history’ was seldom heard in professional gatherings or private discussions. Admittedly, volumes focusing on descriptive accounts of a few large cities like Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta were available. But most of them were more like tourist literature than vigorous historical treatises. Serious scholarly works focusing on specific cities or aspects of urban life began to appear only after the publication of Gillion’s work. And by now there is a sizeable corpus of urban history literature in India, though the field is yet to emerge as a significant area of historical enquiry in the country.
The publication of Spodek’s Ahmedabad (originally published by the Indiana University Press in 2011) should be seen against this backdrop. Despite the city’s rich, varied and complicated past and Gillion’s somewhat simplistic account of it, no historian took up the challenge of looking at it more critically and comprehensively. The city caught Spodek’s attention in his very first visit in 1964 when he was still a research student. His preliminary research yielded two papers focusing on some limited aspects of the city’s industrial history. He, however, continued to remain engaged with Ahmedabad reflected, among other things, in his frequent and numerous visits to it on long leave from his employers, the Temple University in the United States. Few persons, Indian or foreign, can claim to have more personal friends and acquaintances in the city. His love for Ahmedabad, however, has not beclouded the author’s analysis or interpretation.
Spodek’s account starts with Gandhi’s decision to make Ahmedabad his home in 1915 soon after returning from South Africa, and ends with the communal holocaust of 2002. Ahmedabad had developed a uniquely commercial culture with an accent on social peace and an abhorrence of conflict when Gandhi arrived on the scene. In fact, the commercial character of the city was an important factor in Gandhi’s choice, as the author has rightly suggested. A comprehensive account of how the city had developed this character would have placed the happenings during the Gandhian era (which, according to the author covered the period between 1915 and 1950) and Gandhi’s impact in a proper perspective. To be fair to the author, however, it must be added that by way of introduction to the first part of the book, he has given a brief but enlightening account of social, economic and cultural milieu of the city as it had developed by the beginning of the twentieth century.
The remaining chapters in Part One critically examine and elaborately discuss how Gandhi enlisted the support of a group of influential persons, belonging to different walks of life, to bring about a gradual but, in many ways, radical change in the environment of the city. Prominent among Gandhi’s associates were a highly westernized leader of mill owners Ambalal Sarabhai, a consensus builder and deeply religious mill owner Kasturbhai Lalbhai, a political maverick with irrepressible nature Indulal Yagnik, a political organizer par excellence Vallabhbhai Patel known for his administrative acumen, and a mill owner’s (Ambalal’s) sister Ansuyaben working among mill workers and fighting for their cause. They did not always see eye to eye with Gandhi or with one another. But they somehow managed to work together perhaps because all of them were products of Jain–Vaishnava ethos of which Gandhi himself was an illustrious representative. And practically all spheres of urban life—economic, social and political—were greatly influenced by this ethos. So deeply ingrained was this influence that it continued to permeate through the urban environment even after Gandhi left Ahmedabad in 1930, never to return.
Ironically enough, things began to change after India gained Independence. Throughout its history until then, business leadership had exerted considerable influence in the management of urban affairs. In fact, it will be no exaggeration to state that business leadership and urban leadership were in many ways coterminous. Soon after Independence, however, organised political parties operating on national levels captured the municipal leadership. The pressures of electoral politics, a fast rising population and the decline of the mill industry, coupled with the absence of the moderating influence of a widely respected figure like Gandhi brought to the fore a host of intractable problems the like of which had seldom vitiated the urban atmosphere before. While a broad measure of consensus characterised the city life almost up to 1960, the following decades were marked by economic distress, social conflict and moral degradation. Frequent communal disturbances since the mid-1960s culminating in the communal carnage of 2002 were a cruel reflection of how much the city had changed within a short span of just fifty years. The post-Independence developments are discussed in Parts Two and Three of the book.
Based on diverse sources—for example, the writings of some of the major figures who shaped the events during this period, secondary works, newspapers, etc.—Spodek’s Ahmedabad provides a systematic and comprehensive account of the process through which a provincial town well until the mid-twentieth century became virtually a metropolis with all the concomitant urban problems. His personality-linked chapter headings may lead one to believe that he has given undue importance to individuals in the historical processes. The fact, however, is that the names of individuals in chapter headings simply provide an umbrella to discuss relevant developments in various spheres in urban life during the periods they were the most influential figures.
Spodek’s characterisation of Ahmedabad as a ‘shock city’ however, seems to be a bit overdrawn. British historian Asa Briggs coined the epithet to signify the chaotic conditions in the fast-industrialising town of Manchester during the 1840s, provoking ‘sharply different reactions from the visitors’. In this sense Ahmedabad has been a shock city only during the post-Independence phase of its history. Applying the appellation to the earlier phases, as the author has done, is not borne out by his own account. A shock city is not always a shock city. This, however, is a minor quibble. His Ahmedabad unquestionably is a significant addition to the limited but growing literature in Indian urban history.