Gujarat Beyond Gandhi

Identity, Society and Conflict

Nalin Mehta, Mona G. Mehta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317988342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

The birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi and the land that produced Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, Gujarat has been at the centre-stage of South Asia's political iconography for more than a century. As Gujarat, created as a separate state in 1960, celebrates its golden jubilee this collection of essays critically explores the many paradoxes and complexities of modernity and politics in the state. The contributors provide much-needed insights into the dominant impulses of identity formation, cultural change, political mobilisation, religious movements and modes of communication that define modern Gujarat.

This book touches upon a fascinating range of topics – the identity debates at the heart of the idea of modern Gujarat; the trajectory of Gujarati politics from the 1950s to the present day; bootlegging, the practice of corruption and public power; vegetarianism and violence; urban planning and the enabling infrastructure of antagonism; global diasporas and provincial politics – providing new insights into understanding the enigma of Gujarat. Going well beyond the boundaries of Gujarat and engaging with larger questions about democracy and diversity in India, this book will appeal to those interested in South Asian Studies, politics, sociology, history as well as the general reader.

This book was published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

Gujarat beyond Gandhi: Notes on identity, conflict and society

Nalin Mehta^a and Mona G. Mehta^b

^aInstitute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, Singapore; ^b Department of Politics and International Relations, Scripps College, Claremont, CA, USA

Introduction

The bureaucrat in Ahmedabad was sitting across the table, discussing relief camps, rehabilitation and the elections. It was mid-2002, the drumbeats of Narendra Modi’s election campaign were just becoming audible and the talk was about the discourse of action and reaction, violence and identity, rhetoric and reality. Personally appalled by the violence, she was musing aloud about its psychological wellsprings, ‘It is almost like they are taking revenge for Somnath, as if taking account for all those centuries of humiliation.’¹ Muttered half-seriously, it would perhaps have sounded banal in any other setting. Yet there was something in the sentiment that captured the unique centrality of Gujarat in some of the most important debates that have defined the political iconography of modern India. In Gujarat, history, or contrasting versions of it, seeps constantly into the present at every turn; shaping identity, politics and social mobilization more deeply perhaps than anywhere else.

The region now known as Gujarat has always been a crucible for ideas of India. Gujarat, in many ways, is a land of firsts. It is the land where the British encounter first began in 1608 when William Hawkins docked his ship in Surat. It is the land of Somnath, of the invasions from Ghazni which, seen through the jaundiced lenses of colonial-era history, turned into a defining leitmotif in the hagiography of twentieth-century Hindu revivalism.² It is also, of course, the land of the Mahatma. It was on the Sabarmati that he first set up home when he returned from South Africa and began turning Indian nationalism from an elite debating club to a mass movement, his creative methods of passive protest arguably drawing as much from the colonial experience as they drew from indigenous Kathiawadi and vaniya traditions.³ The iconic Sardar Patel, next only to Nehru in the Congress trinity, first mastered the mechanics of creating a party machinery on his home turf in Gujarat. Even earlier, Gujarat’s soil gave Indian nationalism some of its earliest torch bearers – Dadabhai Naoroji, Badruddin Tyabji, Pherozeshah Mehta, Dinshaw Wacha, Rahimtulla Sayani – all of whom presided over the annual sessions of the Congress in its early decades. It also produced Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Westernized no doubt, but also a Gujarati Khoja who would change the sub-continent’s destiny.

Gujarat saw independent India’s first police action in Junagarh; in Navnirman, it arguably produced India’s largest public protest movement since the anti-British agitations; and in the early 1980s, it saw the first large-scale anti-reservation violence long before Mandal would eventually divide up the north Indian heartland. When the BJP adopted the politics of Ram, it was from Somnath that L.K. Advani chose to start his Rath Yatra in 1990 and for over two decades now the state has consistently been denoted by a cliché, ‘laboratory of Hindutva’.

Time and time again, Gujarat has held up questions that are intertwined with larger trajectories of change reshaping India. India’s first televised riots in 2002 and the rise of Narendra Modi are obvious recent milestones. As far back as 1975, Romesh Thapar, for instance, presciently noted in the pages of the Economic and Political Weekly that the turmoil of Gujarat may well be a precursor of larger things to come, including the political drift that led to the upheavals of the Emergency and the turmoils of the Janata era:

The old questions form again. Have the repeated crises in Gujarat thrown up a qualitatively different leadership and if not why not? Is Indira Gandhi too tied up with the old political gangsters to make a break …? When will the opposition parties learn that the ruling Congress Party cannot be toppled with ex-Congressmen or creatures closely resembling them?… Yes, today Gujarat is on the political agenda. Tomorrow, Bihar. And the day after, perhaps the whole of India. The deadly political drift continues.⁴

The politics and narratives of Gujarat have changed drastically in the three and a half decades since Thapar’s observation but the underlying concerns remain as important as ever as it celebrates 50 years of its existence as a state in the Indian Union.

Gujarat was carved out of the erstwhile Bombay state in 1960. The complexities and paradoxes of Gujarat’s politics, identity and modernity have always had important ramifications far beyond its borders. What are the key ideas and concerns that have shaped this state over the decades? What have been the dominant modes of political mobilization? What has it meant for the politics and culture of the state and for the rest of India? These are the questions that animate this collection and, using a variety of scholarly perspectives, it critically explores some of the defining aspects of the making of modern Gujarat since its inception.

It is not, by any means, an exhaustive catalogue of events or a comprehensive revisionist history. Rather it brings together a number of interesting scholars from various disciplines – history, political science, anthropology, sociology and media studies – to take a new look at some of the major issues of the past five decades. It seeks to explore key trends and events with fresh eyes, to shed new light on hidden corners and to discern new meanings.

It cuts a broad sweep: Navnirman and its legacies in the 1970s; the politics of reservation, bootlegging, corruption and public power in the early 1980s; the Narmada movement and its pervasive influence on Gujarati nativism and the overall political discourse; the evolution of new religious movements like Swadhya and Tablighi Jamaat and their impact on cultural change; the rise of Hindutva and the paradoxical linkages between vegetarianism and violence; mass media and historical trajectories of rioting in Ahmedabad; the evolution of what has been called the Modi model and the questions it raises about notions of development; global diasporas and Gujarat’s centrality in their evolution. Taken together, they provide a flavour of Gujarat’s historical trajectory, its society and its politics, one that remains crucial for anyone interested in the larger story of India.

Ideas of Gujarat: identity and self in the nineteenth century

Most scholars agree that the colonial period proved a seminal turning point in coalescing modern ideas of Gujarat as we understand it today. There are faint echoes here, of course, of the old academic chestnut about whether British colonialism created India as we know it: the nationalist answer is always a resounding no; a pan-Indian political ideal always existed, it is argued, stretching back at least to the Mauryas. But this is a notion that would be dismissed as pure romanticism by the traditionalists, schooled in British notions of history. In the end, the answers always depend on who is asked the questions and on how we define our modern categories of community and nation. But, there can be little question about the cultural continuities, common patterns and enduring legacies between the past and the present.

A recent history points out that the earliest reference to the land now known as Gujarat probably goes back to the eighth-century work Kuvalayamala, which refers to Gurjardesh. The fifteenth-century poet Padmanabh used the term ‘Gujarati’ in Kanhadde Prabandh and by the seventeenth century, Premanand Bhatt in Nalakhyan could proclaim ‘Garvo desh Gujaratji’ – Gujarat is majestic.⁵ The Gujarati language itself derives from Gurjar Apabhramsa, and literary scholars point out that from Bharatesvara Bahubali Ghor in 1185 there has been an unbroken tradition of oral and written literature in Gujarat.⁶ At the same time, as Riho Isaka has shown, the first clear notions of a Gujarati language are believed to have developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the works of Premanand.⁷

The British experience had a profound impact in as much it created the conditions for the evolution of modern notions of Gujarati-ness. New regimes often lead to a new politics of languages and novel cultural landscapes. In Gujarat, for instance, the modern Gujarati script itself seems to have established dominance only during the British period. This stands out when we compare it with Maharashtra where the Modi script developed under the Marathas, only to be replaced later by Devnagari.⁸ British rule had significant cultural consequences.

The game changer in the colonial experience was the introduction of colonial education in the big centres and the subsequent creation of a new literati and a new middle class:

Those involved in the language debate of this period were essentially people educated in high schools and colleges in cities such as Ahmedabad, Surat and Bombay. They began to develop a sense of fellowship based on their common experience of ‘new education’ under the colonial system…. These educated elites, thus claiming to represent the region, began to identify Gujarat and the Gujaratis, and to define regional culture and history.⁹

The numbers tell an important story. By 1841, 27 schools were functioning in Gujarat. In tandem with school education, came printing with its potential for cultural churning. As many as 78 new printing presses started between 1817 and 1867 and 94 newspapers and socio-literary journals began publishing between 1831 and 1886.¹⁰ Language and identity are intrinsically linked. The newly formed Gujarat Vernacular Society’s winning essay in 1850, for instance, focused on the history of Ahmadabad.¹¹

For many of the reforming elites, linguistic development, cultural assertion and modernity went hand in hand. This was a time when figures like Narmadashankar Lalshankar, Mahipatram Rupram and Karsandas Mulji emerged as the leaders of a new literary and social consciousness. Narmadashankar Lalshankar, in particular, was a pivotal figure in the nineteenth-century ferment, as a linguist, as a writer and as an ideologue for the idea of Gujarat. He is credited with expounding the idea of Gujarati asmita and with Dalpatram heralded the modern age of Gujarati literature.¹² He composed the first Gujarati essay (tellingly on the advantages of forming forums) in 1851;¹³ finalized the Narmakosh, the first systematic Gujarati lexicon, and coined the slogan, Jai Jai garvi Gujarat [hail hail proud Gujarat] to preface his dictionary. His lexicon followed a number of other such works¹⁴ but his slogan was to become a virtual Gujarati national anthem.¹⁵ The origins of what is now called Gujarati asmita, in that sense, can be traced back to Narmad’s writings.

At a time when the idea of an Aryan identity took root among the middle classes, Narmad penned his seminal poem, Koni Koni Chhe Gujarat?, [Whose is Gujarat?]. This poem wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Gujarat beyond Gandhi: notes on identity, conflict and society
• 2. From Navnirman to the anti-Mandal riots: the political trajectory of Gujarat (1974–1985)
• 3. Bootlegging, politics and corruption: state violence and the routine practices of public power in Gujarat (1985–2002)
• 4. A river of no dissent: Narmada Movement and coercive Gujarati nativism
• 5. Special political zone: urban planning, spatial segregation and the infrastructure of violence in Ahmedabad
• 6. On the political use of disgust in Gujarat
• 7. Ashis Nandy vs. the state of Gujarat: authoritarian developmentalism, democracy and the politics of Narendra Modi
• 8. Soteriological journeys and discourses of self-transformation: the Tablighi Jamaat and Svadhyaya in Gujarat
• 9. An ‘Imagined Community’ in diaspora: Gujaratis in South Africa
• Index