ABSTRACT
The bureaucrat in Ahmedabad was sitting across the table, discussing relief camps, rehabilitation and the elections. It was mid-2002, the drumbeats of Narendra Modi’s election campaign were just becoming audible and the talk was about the discourse of action and reaction, violence and identity, rhetoric and reality. Personally appalled by the violence, she was musing aloud about its psychological wellsprings, ‘It is almost like they are taking revenge for Somnath, as if taking account for all those centuries of humiliation.’ 1 Muttered half-seriously, it would perhaps have sounded banal in any other setting. Yet there was something in the sentiment that captured the unique centrality of Gujarat in some of the most important debates that have defined the political iconography of modern India. In Gujarat, history, or contrasting versions of it, seeps constantly into the present at every turn; shaping identity, politics and social mobilization more deeply perhaps than anywhere else.
