Ahmedabad

Abstract

With a population of 7.2 million, Gujarat's largest city, Ahmedabad, is often mistaken as the state capital. This could either be for its size or the ‘shocks’— as Spodek (2011) terms its paradoxes—it portends. Ahmedabad abounds in paradoxes. A city that Gandhi chose to make his home from 1915 to 1930 had attained notoriety for its frequent and brutal episodes of violent ethnic conflict by the turn of the twenty-first century. In the period from 1950 to 1995, Ahmedabad and its neighbour Vadodara accounted for nearly 80 per cent of the total deaths in Hindu–Muslim violence in Gujarat (Varshney, 2002). Notwithstanding the series of violent conflict and natural calamities in the new millennium, such as the devastating earthquake in 2001, and floods in 2000 and 2006, Ahmedabad has withstood economic and industrial retrogression over the years. It could be because of what many call ‘resilience’—a word almost synonymous for enterprising Gujarati merchants known for ‘their ability of “bending with the wind”’ (Maloni, 2008: 193; also Frontline, 12–25 March 2005).