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Journalism of Courage
In his introduction to Bhuj, Azhar Tyabji, recalls the 8220;violence and calm8221; of a certain morning in 2003: Bulldozer operators complaining loudly while carting away rubble from the city devastated by the 2001 Gujarat earthquake, while Tyabji sits quietly contemplating a 19th century panorama through photographs that depict the sweep of Bhuj8217;s lakefront against a late morning sun. The suggestion of distance and insensitivity is misleading. Tyabji cares, evidently very deeply, for Bhuj. And his foray into the past is not a hankering after nostalgia but his perception of a way forward.
Natural disasters demand urgent solutions. But after the bare essentials of food, water, and immediate shelter have been taken care of, what comes next? How are people to live? How should their future environments be designed? With the resource mobilisation that now takes place on a global scale, it has become both necessary and possible to discuss rehabilitation and planning efforts. And in a volume sponsored in part by agencies such as the Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre, Bangkok, and the UN-International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, Geneva, Tyabji proposes that planners post-disaster and indeed, city planners in general, should look towards ethnography for answers.
A sharper focus might have served his purpose better for where he score high is in his skills as an archivist. For this book he has tracked down rare and evocative photographs, and arranged, captioned and cross-referenced them with remarkable clarity. He has put together a lively and detailed narrative of the city8217;s evolution interspersed with vivid first person accounts from local writers, historians, politicians and others.
Through his efforts we see the idiosyncratic growth of this frontier town from its origin8212; legend has it that the city came up around a small pond built by a shepherd8212;five centuries ago. The various clans, communities, the aesthetics, the diseases, natural disasters, the changing needs and fortunes of the populace and the shifts in relationships with the world that shaped the city are dealt with in detail. Within the larger picture, Tyabji also manages to focus attention, through visuals and text, on micro-elements such as the changing significance of city landmarks, folklore regarding street names and events such as the migration of Kutchis from Pakistan on the expanding neighbourhood.
By breathing life into a colourful, broken city, almost a work of loving restoration, Tyabji makes his case for the virtues of ethnography more convincingly than advocacy could do. There is much in this book for urban planners and sociologists to learn from. But it is also a book for the tourist and the general reader.
