Ahmedabad: walking through the uncertainties of ‘heritage’

“Heritage Week” in Ahmedabad. I have been thinking about how we understand a community’s “heritage,” and those things associated with heritage, like history, social and personal remembering, the layers of meaning in those places where we stand right now, who gets to ascribe “meaning,” how is the “past” alive today for people in this place?

                                                                                            

Today we joined a superbly guided “Heritage Walk,” led by a woman volunteer, through threads of lanes linking the pols (centuries-old self-contained neighbourhoods) of old Ahmedabad. Most of the people on the walk are from other parts of metropolitan Ahmedabad, a first visit for many, and we hear in their responses that this feels to them no less “foreign” than it does to us.

The pols are the oldest quarters of a city founded in 1411, but likely much older. We move along deep, narrow lanes between shadows and bright dappled sunlight under the arching silhouetted lines of balconies, wooden screens, carved roof brackets, stairways, walls and towers of the surrounding wood-carved havelis and stone temples. 

For centuries each pol was like a self-contained village based on trades, crafts and caste. Merchants, weavers, woodworkers, washerwomen, printers, tailors, jewellers, families with their milk cows – everyone needed in the larger city. Each pol’s winding lanes met in a common courtyard or square, each had their own wells and chabutaras, great stone bird feeders sitting on tall columns. Each also had great wooden gates and security systems, cul-de-sacs and secret passages, suggesting periods of conflict, or at least fear of such, within the larger city.

This particular morning women and a few men wash clothes in plastic buckets and worn stone basins; a pol of farmers feeds their big-horned cattle (deep inside this city of six million); a stout elderly women in pink sari, silver trim sparkling, sits framed between her second-storey shutters watching the passing neighbourhood; a 15 or so year old girl pulls up a bucket of water from a large barrel. Suddenly drums and horns sound, the canyon lanes erupt and a procession emerges from another street, high-stepping camels pulling decorated chariots carrying effigies, dancing drummers, banners, colourful wagons pulled by great-horned bulls, more drumming, more men in festive dance – the celebration, we are told, of a senior Jain nun’s birthday.

Further along, a man, hands seamed black, sits surrounded by polish pots, hammers, needles, and a squat work bench, stitching soles on a pair of shoes. On temple steps, a woman weaves garlands of red and yellow marigolds. Teenage boys play cricket using someone’s rusty bike as a wicket.

This is a lively, living place, the people unself-consciously welcoming, the lanes brushed clean. All this in a physical environment that feels so worn by use and weather, derelict even … bleached pastel walls, pink, yellow, blue, covered in dripping screens of black mold, the once-varnished wood carved porticos and brackets now cracked and worn dull grey. Rusted signs, sagging roof overhangs, a late 20thC cat’s cradle of wires running every which way overhead. Time’s jumble of portico’s decorated with flowers and elephants carved by 15thC stone masons alongside the plain surfaces of modernity’s squared functionality.

Back out on main street it’s “heritage” everywhere. The local newspapers can’t use the word enough. The India PO has launched a new Heritage Ahmedabad cancellation mark. The city’s “glitterati” has attended the launch of a new fabric collection. The contributions of African and Chinese residents are celebrated.

But today’s headlines, “Banking on Heritage,” belong entirely to New India. Described are someone’s plans for a “giant heritage park” straddling a section of the banks of the mighty Sabarmati River into which our rickshaw driver yesterday tossed a large bag of garbage. From the illustrations, the “giant heritage park” will feature smart new buildings celebrating Gandhi’s ashram, “a recreation of the aesthetical essence of  the Mughal age, a “wall of fame” for city heroes and heroines, a “cluster of life-scale replicas of pol architecture” and much much more – a kind of well-scrubbed, all-inclusive “heritage” for the age of bankers, B.Comms., developers, engineers and lawyers. (Deeper into the same paper I read that last night, the police moved in with clubs and bulldozers and tore down 2,000 “shanties” of the poor along the banks of the same Sabarmati.)

Later in the day, our thoughts still on heritage, we talk with Anis, the desk clerk at our hotel, and a Muslim, about the politicized sectarian violence this city and Gujarat state have experienced during the past 60 or so years, much of his life-time. A man with a quick, kindly smile and gentle voice, he found the conversation increasingly painful. It turns out that his nephew was killed in 2002, along with up to 2,000 other people, the majority Muslims. Subsequent inquiries (where bribes, lies and threats against witnesses have been commonplace) point to how Gujarati Hindu politicians inflamed anti-Muslim feeling at the time, with some Hindu leaders inciting violence and the police seemingly under orders to do nothing. A number of these politicians have more public power today than they did in 2002.

Anis says that Hindu-Muslim tension is still high across the state and here in the capital, that it can feel frightening to be a Muslim here (about 35% of residents, including many shop keepers) and that most people fear to talk openly about 2002 – a point possibly echoed by the absence in our “heritage” walk of any reference to the repeated waves of violence. Relying on today’s Ahmedabad edition of the Times of India, with its opening pages given over to Heritage Week and its front page “Banking on Heritage” headline, a visitor would be ignorant of what brings Anis to tears when we ask him about his city.

The very little of the “heritage” I have learned about in Ahmedabad is full of claimed certainties (for example, the self-interested certainties of BJP leaders’ who claim some pure Hindu tradition and India as the land of Hindus) and so much evidence that question and undercut the power of these certainties … as, for example, the stone and woodwork of temples and mosques across India and here in Ahmedabad. Notice inside Sidi Sayyid’s Mosque the carved heroes, heroines and animals from Hindu myths, the accepted contributions of Jain and Hindu craftsmen in the building of this mosque in the late 16thC. Or the 260 elegant stone pillars supporting the prayer hall of the grand Jama Masjid, each unmistakably covered with Hindu carvings. Or similar work in the elegant 1514 mosque of Rani Sipri.

One-dimensional hateful certainties or the physical evidence of these places – I wonder with what “heritage” the people of Ahmedabad will make their future? They’d be wise to listen to people like Anis, his belief in importance of patient understanding, his kindly smile, his sadness … the living dimensions of his own felt-heritage.

FOOTNOTE - On the 2002 Gujarat massacres and continuing denials and violence, see the following:

Pankaj Mishra, “The Gujarat massacre: New India’s blood rite”

BBC report, “India court orders probe into Gujarat 'fake encounters',” January 2012

Ward Berenschot, “Riot Politics: India’s Communal Violence and the Everyday Meditation of the State.”