With the coming of the British Raj, however, Ahmedabad as it existed was no longer sufficient. It lacked avenues for military parades and shady tracts for officers’ bungalows. Accordingly, the logic of Ahmedabad’s native quarter flouted the British panache for legibility and order. How does one govern a city one cannot fully understand? Faced with the challenge of working Ahmedabad into something more pliant, colonial authorities chose to escape. Around the turn of the century, under the direction of Sir Barrow Herbert Ellis, a steel bridge was constructed across the Sabarmati and a new development planned to compete with the walled city as the center of public life. The neighborhood was dubbed Ellisbridge, a name which conjures up stronger feelings of bucolic England than urban India.
Through independence, Ellisbridge remained Ahmedabad’s most sought-after district. The British left, but the choicest strata of indigenous society slipped into their shoes without so much as a reflective pause. These were the mill-owners putting distance between themselves and their sweltering factories further east, the civil servants and intelligentsia determined to recreate the successes of American dynamism and Soviet secularism, the high-caste Brahmins, Banias, and Rajputs, among others, who seized the chance to escape living cheek by jowl with the unclean and unbelieving masses. Thus, Ahmedabad divided itself in two in a sort of urban mitosis.
How does one govern a city one cannot fully understand?
This stage didn’t last long. In the 1960s, the textile industry began to contract. The Indian economy entered a prolonged period of stagnation, degrading the fortunes of those who had gained so much from the country’s infancy. In the 1980s, when the IMF and World Bank imposed structural adjustments in the name of “liberalization,” the Ellisbridge set sensed an opportunity. In previous decades, the top-heavy rule of the Indian National Congress had limited industrialists’ venues for investment and reinvestment. Capital accumulated relentlessly, spurred by Gujaratis’ stereotypically spendthrift character. But with liberalization, the proceeds from manufacturing could suddenly be transmuted into a new, even more lucrative asset: land. There were many benefits to buying land. There was a lot of it in close proximity to desirable areas, liberalized agricultural markets had ejected millions of Indian workers from the countryside, and the lack of clarity surrounding ownership and taxation made property the perfect cache for under-the-table (that is, “black”) funds. The scion of every well-to-do family in Ahmedabad became a real estate developer.
Over the course of the 1990s, Ahmedabad’s western limit sprinted ever further into the hinterlands, leaving in its wake palatial homes, broad highways, and ample parking. One feels while walking (or more likely driving) through West Ahmedabad the eerie sense of Los Angeles or Houston copy-and-pasted into an otherwise unremarkable slice of rural India. Just like the British a century ago, elite Ahmedabad has once again chosen to escape itself and start anew.
From an American perspective, the sensation of familiarity is compounded by the fact that, in 2002, Ahmedabad was the site of one of modern India’s bloodiest episodes of sectarian violence, when Hindu mobs killed thousands of Muslims in poorer sections of the city while the state government (led by Narendra Modi) looked on. They are usually referred to as riots, but the duration and intensity of the violence more accurately qualifies the events as a pogrom. The lasting legacy of 2002, in addition to assisting Modi’s rise to national prominence and thus power, is the abrupt ghettoization of the Muslim community in Ahmedabad within older and less desirable neighborhoods. The desire to abandon the city and reestablish the heart of economic and social life within the controlled and air-conditioned confines of the suburbs bears striking parallels to the hollowing-out of American city centers which occurred against the backdrop of real or perceived racial strife more than half a century ago.
Just like the British a century ago, elite Ahmedabad has once again chosen to escape itself and start anew.
The trend ever westwards shows no signs of stopping. In recent years, high-end development in the region has focused on a highway (also inaugurated in 2002) which bridges the satellite cities of Sarkhej and Gandhinagar, thus bypassing Ahmedabad itself. Most of the large developers’ offices tower over this dusty, eight-lane monstrosity of a road. From the top floors of skyscrapers overlooking scrubland and half-built lots, they extol the prospect of westward drift. Even though land values in Ahmedabad have quintupled in the past decade, few will even consider the prospect of redeveloping the existing fabric of the city. “People simply do not want to live in central Ahmedabad,” is a consistent refrain, “they’d rather drive further than accept an apartment in an area that’s more than a couple decades old.”
Expansion of the urban frontier is facilitated by planning authorities who aim to cash in on the rise of land values. The Ahmedabad Urban Development Authority (AUDA), cognizant of the considerable endowments amassed by “new town” consortiums on the edge of Mumbai and Delhi, has fostered a symbiotic relationship with property developers and speculators. The process is simple and reproducible: AUDA announces their intention to open agricultural land on the margins of the city for development, developers flood in to buy tracts off farmers, the municipal government provisions roads, water, sewage, and the price of land explodes almost overnight. The arbitrage generated by this arbitrary decision is captured both by developers and AUDA itself, which retains a 40% share of the land. While one would hope this windfall is directed towards making the city more livable and equitable, the results are often disappointing. Ahmedabad boils in fields of asphalt where parks were supposed to bloom while public schools and hospitals remain scarce in far-flung neighborhoods.
The pace of change in India is generally a thing to be celebrated. A GDP growth rate of 7% or more annually translates into millions of families exiting dire poverty every year. The quality of construction is improving, and the government’s capacity to enforce the rule of law is expanding. The inversion of Ahmedabad, however, gives cause for concern. How can India confront 21st century challenges (climate change most glaringly) while seeming intent on pursuing 20th century blunders? How is this country supposed to translate economic growth into holistic development when, as urban scholar Darshini Mahadevia observes, the concept of “public goods” has been extricated almost surgically from political discourse? How can a city improve itself when the kneejerk reaction among its ruling class is flight?