ABSTRACT
In the scholarship on Ahmedabad, there is little on the direct experiences of ordinary individuals who call this city home, and whose everyday practices shaped and was in turn shaped by the places they lived, worked, and found leisure within. It is with this idea, the chapter chronicles the minutiae of the everyday life of Vijaya baji, a young widow, who lived in a chawl in the Panjrapol neighbourhood within the medieval city of Ahmedabad. Panjrapol (literally meaning the neighbourhood [pol] of cages [panjra] in Gujarati) refers to an institution which looks after sick and abandoned animals, and in Ahmedabad, is supported primarily through the philanthropy of wealthy Jain families. Within the first few decades of the twentieth century, the Panjrapol neighbourhood began to rapidly transform. Beginning with the relocation of the animal institution to the then outskirts of the city, the chapter explores how the shift occurred and opened up the site for the building of tenements, Jain religious institutions, and subsequently other institutions as well. The tenements particularly enabled clerical and working-class families to reside in the neighbourhood, and this, in turn, brought about a shift in everyday networks and the landscape of commercial activities changed. The chapter suggests that these developments, together with the wider urban reconfiguring of the city, resulted in new constellations of communities, religious anchors, and commercial networks. This period, then, emerges as a distinct moment of rupture from the spaces and relationships of the past. It is in this shifting landscape that Vijaya baji (as her family addressed her) came to live in a single-room chawl together with her brother-in-law and his wife. Over the next two decades, the family expanded to include four sons. She spent her entire life with them and I construct the narrative of her life and experiences using the memoirs of her brother-in-law and conversations with his family. Specifically, I focus on three aspects of her life – her everyday domestic and ritual practices as part of a Jain household and neighbourhood, her mobility within the Panjrapol on account of assisting wealthier families in making papad, khakhra, pickles, and such, and her involvement with the Jyoti Sangh, Ahmedabad’s first women’s organisation, which resulted in newer networks and enabled what may be considered an unusual public life for a widow at that moment in time. The Panjrapol years of her life are particularly interesting because they reveal how historic neighbourhoods offered specific mobilities and produce networks of familiarity and patronage to women. More importantly, by weaving Vijaya baji’s story into the spatial biography of the Panjrapol, the chapter attempts to introduce the dimension of individual subjectivity as a mode of understanding the neighbourhood.
