The 61oth anniversary of the founding of Ahmedabad is being celebrated today. That is as good a time as any for me to revive a biography of my hometown that I was commissioned to write by a publisher ten years ago but did not finish. I have been immersed in finishing it for a while now and the plan is to put it out sometime sooner rather than later this year. I had already written over 40,000 words a decade ago but then let the manuscript languish in my computer. I am now determined to finish it.
Let me offer a couple of teasers from Chapter 1 that I had written a decade ago when the city was in the midst of celebrating 600 years of its founding.
Chapter 1
Lothal to Ahemadabad
The white summer light bleaches the flat brown ground and gives it a frosted look. Hot gases that rise from the ground refract everything—people, cows, dogs, peacocks, monkeys, buildings, scooters, rickshaws. At noon, when the sun is at its zenith the city looks misaligned. It is from this misaligned city of Ahmedabad that I begin my journey to the perfectly aligned Indus Valley town of Lothal, to an ancient but finely structured past with little or no bearing on the current but chaotic present.
The steady drone of the Bajaj auto rickshaw engine mixed with the rancid heat touching 45 degree Celsius can lull anyone into a slow death. It is a good thing I am not driving. I am not sure it is a good thing for anyone else to drive either in this debilitating heat. But Jasubhai is different.
Jasubhai, the rickshaw driver, has not heard of an invention called sunglasses. His eyes are wide open as if locked in a who-blinks-first-contest with the sun. The jaggedly, post-apocalyptic glare, which can singe the lesser mortals’ retina, is no match for him. I thought I saw the sun dim its light a bit as if in defeat but quickly attributed it to the disorientation caused by the infernal heat. Before he agrees to drive me to Lothal he is not so much excited about traveling back 4500 years in history to the ancient Indus town as he is at the prospects of earning 450 rupees that he said he would charge me.
“Normally I would have charged 600 rupees—one rupee for every year of Ahmedabad’s history—but since you are writing about my city I am giving you a discount,” he says part in jest, part seriously. It is just as well that I am not writing a history of Lothal because if the antiquity of the city determined Jasubhai’s rickshaw fares, it would have been one expensive ride. Also, he does not realize that if we are going to a place which is 4,500 years old, he has charged me just ten paise for every year. Only in Ahmedabad would you find a rickshaw driver who could price history in actual hard cash.
During the summer, the route from Ahmedabad to Lothal on the National Highway number 8 is predominantly tawny, broken by an occasional green bush. There is no relief from the relentless heat even though we pass through what looks like a series of tiny pools of water; all of them mini mirages formed on the pitch-black tar of the road.
They appear and disappear in such rapid succession like an illusionist’s trick that I cannot decide whether they are real or imaginary. The best is to imagine them to be real. In the door-less rickshaw the smell is a mixture of an overcooked earth and wafts of Ahmedabad’s pollution. Sweat evaporates almost as soon as it forms because of the dry heat and wind in one’s face. But somehow it seems appropriate to ride in a rickshaw to the antiquities. It seems like a form of transport closer to that period.
Lothal and Ahmedabad are separated by 80 kilometers in geographical terms and nearly 4500 years in historical terms. What joins them is the Sabarmati River, an estuary of which coursed past Lothal in ancient times as the main river does through Ahmedabad today. In each case the river spawned two remarkable urban settlements and both emphatically defined by its people’s innate industriousness.
Once one of the most important cities of the Indus Valley Civilization in 2350 BCE, Lothal now looks like a brick kiln fallen on bad days. Its millennial ruins do not do justice to its glory days when it was a thriving town boasting of marvelous town planning and engineering skills as well as remarkable expertise in metallurgy, weights and measures as well as jewelry making. Although the opinion is divided on whether Lothal did indeed have a dry dock and hence suggesting of some form of shipbuilding industry or merely a structure that looks like it was a large water storage tank, it is clear that the Harppans who founded and lived here were quite advanced in their technological knowledge and entrepreneurial prowess.
In their book ‘Harappan civilization and Rojdi’, Gregory L. Possehl, M. H. Raval and Y. M. Chitalwala point out that given the relatively small size of Lothal (about 5.5 hectares) all of its “manufacturing and commercial activity far outstripped any reasonable estimate for the needs of the Lothal inhabitants. This fits well with the proposed outpost function of the site.” In other words, they produced goods far in excess of their own needs and demands with a clear intent to send them beyond their own settlement.
*****
The transition from the ancient to the medieval and eventually to the modern as it unfolds along the Lothal-Ahmedabad drive does so quite uneventfully. To think that a mere 80 kilometers can run through over four and a half millennia of civilization can be hard to grasp at first, but one begins to understand the mindset of the people of the region here that history is nothing but a story past its expiry. As Jasubhai puts it, “Bhootkal to samjya havey pan vartman nu shun? (The past is fine but what about the present?)”
Indeed, what about it? To find out I tell him to drop me at Manek Chowk which can be justifiably called the heart of the historical Ahmedabad. The barely one-kilometer long walk from the Bhadra Fort, the principal entrance to the royal complex of the sultan, to Manek Chowk, so named after Maneknath Baba, an ascetic who became the most effective countervailing presence against the ruler, is redolent of an astonishing variety of scents, sounds and sights. A heady mixture of jasmine attar, turmeric powder, roasted cumin seeds, rose oil, Darjeeling tea, sandalwood incense, cow dung and pungent human body odors awaits one.
Add to the odors, both pleasant and putrescent, the unfiltered cacophony of honking rickshaws, ringing bicycle bells, howling hawkers, mooing cows, squawking parrots and occasional hooting monkeys and you have a surreal mixture of the olfactory and auditory. What completes the scene are thousands of people randomly bouncing around in Brownian motion that seems impossible to decipher from outside but is tackled effortlessly once you are inside the throng. It is as if the laws of motion here are unique to this place and work only inside the one-kilometer radius around Manek Chowk.
Ahmed Shah and Maneknath were said to be adversaries, one the padshah of all that was physical in Ahmedabad and the other the master of the metaphysical. The cause behind the animus between the sultan and saint is not clear but that has not prevented mythologies from rising out of the mists of history. One holds that Maneknath, who disapproved of all the fortifications being created by Ahmed Shah around the city, decided to invoke his miraculous powers to stop the king. He would stitch a quilt all day and unravel it at night. Every time he unraveled the quilt fiber by fiber the walls of the fortification would crumble brick by brick.
Eventually the two reached a truce under which the sultan agreed to name the square in the middle of the fort as Manek Chowk. In return, the ascetic lifted the curse. Or so goes one of the fables. The purpose of this fable is quite like the purpose of any fable—it is to mythologize banal realities to make them worthier for posterity.
Under Ahmed Shah the city quickly began to acquire its impressive physical features. He imported alabaster, marble and expensive woods from different parts of India to build royal mansions and mosques. A network of narrow streets scratching their way through principal streets began to take shape. The principal streets were “broad enough for ten bullock carts to drive abreast”, according to some of the chroniclers of the time.
Think the 15th century version of a four-lane highway. The infrastructure building boom inevitably brought in craftsmen. The construction economy also led to the influx of weavers and merchants who began shaping the city’s identity.
The streets that now seem stiflingly narrow were more than adequate in Ahmed Shah’s time as traders set up an impromptu bazaar, spreading out their goods on the two sides. There were fine silks, ornaments, attars, brassware, along with spices and dry fruits on sale. The sustained generation of wealth reflected in mansions that were constructed by merchants in the immediate vicinity of the business district. Intricately carved doors, finely chiseled cornices, windows that looked like ornate oversized picture frames and balconies that seemed like protruding thrones were all common features in buildings in and around Manek Chowk. Many of them still exist in the forlorn hope of a rescue by connoisseurs. There is one but his story later in the book.
