Writer Amrita Shah on her new book Ahmedabad: A City in the World

Amrita Shah

Shah’s new book Ahmedabad: A City in the World was prompted by the silence in civil society in the aftermath of the 2002 anti-Muslim riots. “It was eerie, as if it didn’t happen. People told me the national media had made it all up. Or it was justified, ‘they’ deserved it. Then there came a time when you could not bring it up because the reactions were so unpleasant. That was when I shut up and said: let me try and understand this,” she says. Simultaneously, she saw it being remade in the image of a “global” city of middle-class fantasy under then chief minister Narendra Modi, a place of flamboyant flyovers and luxury hotels.

Shah is provocative in suggesting that there is a connection: that the transformation of the city and the riots, which purged Muslims from the heart of the old pols and colonies, were not two separate things. “I see 2002 as a setting stage for a structural shift, for the way the city gets reshaped,” she says, as she unpacks the strands of her argument during an interview in Delhi. “The phenomenon of Hindus and Muslims moving out of mixed areas started in the 1980s. In 2002, there was a completion of that process. But also, the riots gave Modi the reputation of being strong and being able to put down dissent. It was seen as a lack of empathy towards riot victims. But it was also seen as welcome and necessary to push through economic reforms. A man who knew what he wanted to do and would not be diverted, a strong man, an authoritative man,” he says. Even in 2002, when Gujarat seemed an outlier ruled by a majoritarian chief minister with little national acceptability, Shah says she believed this state had lessons for the country. “I am saying that in 2014 we saw that local phenomenon becoming national,” she says.

The book, however, does not hammer these arguments but gently asks the reader to see the connections, through a portrait of a changing city. She writes of a new need to recast the Gujarati male in a martial role, of a once spartan community, always suspicious of flamboyance, which now is riveted by the spectacle of Modi, who is “not a leader, a politician. He is an object of desire. An object of consumption.” She writes movingly of the leaves that have overrun Gulberg Society, where Congress MP Ehsan Jafri was mutilated and burnt to death — and the consensus of silence in the majority community about such violence. “But…was as close to empathy as I was to find in Ahmedabad,” she writes, one of the most damning statements in the book.

She also finds Meraj, a 34-year-old Muslim entrepreneur who saw the riots opening up a chasm between his religion and his life in the old neighbourhood. “I miss living among Hindus,” he tells Shah — and “it was the first time … that I had heard the thrum of love and longing,” she writes. Meraj was a garment businessman making his way up by way of Gujarati thrift and hard work, when the riots destroyed his business. We meet him twice — in the first chapter, as he accompanies Shah to his old neighbourhood and in the last, at Bombay Hotel, a squalid sea of detritus and tiny hovels at the fringe of the city where many Muslims now string together lives.

That thrum of longing for the city permeates Shah’s writing, even when she is at her harshest. “There is a complete lack of pretense in Ahmedabad, a great love for the simple joys of life. Friendship is one of them, the ability to just be, laugh together, not do expensive things together. Their humour is like running water, there is just laughter bubbling all the time,” she says.

For her, it was a difficult book to write, because “to record change is not an easy thing”. She is unwilling to look into the future to see if Ahmedabad will find the path of reconciliation. “It is not only Gujarat’s guilt, and that we have to acknowledge. This is a phenomenon across the country. At the end of the book, I do see people bonding through consumption and leisure. Who knows what else will happen?”