ABSTRACT
A series of contradictions mark the urban experience of Ahmedabad. The city is one of India’s major commercial centres and the largest in the province of Gujarat, with an official and fast-growing population of over five million residents. It is generally felt to be safer than most metropolitan Indian cities; residents are proud to point out that instances of rape, murder and robbery are much more frequent in Bombay, Bangalore or Delhi. Yet, there is something conservative and staid about its cultural scene. Notwithstanding the general perception of safety, many of its younger residents – across class divisions – aspire to move to other large urban centres in India, or even to international destinations such as London or New York. I was often asked ‘Why did you come here?’, as if the place from which I came – wherever it was – must be better.1 Despite the fact that Ahmedabad has witnessed calamitous events like floods, earthquakes, pogroms and communal riots, it is also, for many of its residents, a city of calm and prosperity. In quieter times the city busies itself with infrastructural improvements in an atmosphere of endless growth. Its entrepreneurial class has proved capable, to a large extent, of insulating the local economy from the devastating ups and downs of international capital markets. Ahmedabad consists of three distinct urban spaces, relating uneasily to one another, each one connected to a specific urban imaginary as well as to concrete facts on the ground: the walled city, the eastern periphery and new Ahmedabad on the western river shore (Nandy et al. 1995: 110-123; Yagnik and Sheth 2005: 229-230). The city is strongly divided along class, caste and communal lines, but remains integrated through community borders, the cyclical occurrence of violence and an economic division of labour (Breman 2004: 31-39, Rajagopal 2010: 529-556). Divisions of the city fall into relief during times of violence or in its aftermath, when one difference is able to bridge all others and becomes more prominent. In recent decades the Hindu-Muslim divide has been the default mode of all divisions. In periods of violence, the city behaves like a massive organism, closing the many interfaces between areas and communities as if it were a giant cell reacting against chemical intrusion: bridges become structures of confinement; permanent police posts define community borders, which in turn become spaces for provocation and violent performance; sacred structures become sites of conversion, identity assertion and injury. Thus, at such times any traversing of
urban space is fraught with immense psychological stress and incalculable risk. This chapter describes experiences of separation and how they come to be expressed with reference to two specific elements in the city’s hardware: roadside temples and the use of interstitial space for urban expiation rituals.2
