The Uses of Heritage in Ahmedabad's Global Sefl-Fashioning

• Main Author: Thomas, Pooja Susan
• Other Authors: Kothari, Rita, Humanities
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar 2015
• Subjects: Cultural Heritage; Ahmedabad; Self-Fashioning; Gandhi Ashram; Bhadra Fort; Sarkhej Roza; Global Transformation; Archeological Survey
• Online Access: https://repository.iitgn.ac.in/handle/123456789/2125

In the last decade and a half, increased consciousness around Ahmedabad, commercial capital of Gujarat and the region’s largest city, has centered on its projection as an important node in the network of global capital. To bolster its claim as an aspiring global city, the discourse around the city’s heritage has been deployed to increase Ahmedabad’s cultural attractiveness and indicate its global capability. However heritage sites also of the accretion of history. Even has heritage sites are used to mediate the image of the city. They are points of intersection of symbolic and cultural reuse, narratives of belonging and identity, discursive sites, they enable an unravelling of Ahmedabad’s aspirational self-fashioning and a deconstruction of is projected global city image. Within this framework, I look at Ahmedabad’s self-fashioning as a global city from three sites of heritage. These three sites of heritage. These locations or sites of heritages are Gandhi Ashram at Sabaramati, Bhadra Fort precincts and Sarkhej Roza. They connote the centers and peripheries of Ahmedabad’s global city projection and spell out is symbolic spatial bounds. The Ashram reminds of Mahatma Gandhi’s choice of Ahmedabad as his political headquarters thereby naming Ahmedabad to world. Through the Gandhi Ashram, I examine the ways the imagination of Ahmedabad’s urban future draws legitimacy from an interpretation of Gandhian mythopoesis. I show how through spatial gestures of proximity of Gandhi’s ideals, the aesthetics of Ahmedabad’s contemporary transformation is sought to be validated. The redevelopment of Bhadra Fort precincts represents such transformation. The Bhadra Fort precincts is the city’s symbolic and historical core. However, over the years, the in and around the Bharda Fort, known as the walled city, have come to be marked by congestion and residential decline. The transformation and development of the Bhadra precincts have been envisaged in a redevelopment project monitored by Ahmedabad’s municipal corporation and the Archeological Survey of India. I explore how its produces norms of belonging through the figure of the desired pedestrian. These norms of belonging are intuitively recognized by those that the spatial histories of Ahmedabad have forced to its peripheries. Sarkhej Roza, the mausoleum complex of Ganj Baksh Khattu, signifies those peripheries of Ahmedabad that many Muslims fled to in the wake of communal violence. At the same time, it signifies the centrality of Sarkhej to the foundational history of Ahmedabad that is not forgotten. I examine narratives of revival and rediscovery of the Sarkej Roza that argue for the monument’s relevance to the city coultural and syncretic memory. I show that in the intersection with recent interest in developing these sub-urban areas, such narratives of revival and rediscovery mediate norms of claiming rightful presence in Ahmedabad’s global city-space. Thus, even as these sites of heritage are used to fashion Ahmedabad for a global audience, I use these sites to unravel and deconstruct the processes of the city’s self-fashioning, the implications of norms of belonging and the aesthetics of its global transformation. by Pooja Susan Thomas Ph.D.