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South Asian History and Culture

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Gujarat beyond Gandhi: notes on identity, conflict and society

Nalin Mehtaa; Mona G. Mehtab
a
Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, Singapore b Department of Politics
and International Relations, Scripps College, Claremont, CA, USA

Online publication date: 15 October 2010

To cite this Article Mehta, Nalin and Mehta, Mona G.(2010) 'Gujarat beyond Gandhi: notes on identity, conflict and
society', South Asian History and Culture, 1: 4, 467 — 479
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/19472498.2010.507019
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 South Asian History and Culture
Vol. 1, No. 4, October 2010, 467–479

Gujarat beyond Gandhi: notes on identity, conflict and society

Nalin Mehtaa * and Mona G. Mehtab
a
Institute 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, reha-
bilitation 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
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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

*Corresponding author. Email: nalinnikki@gmail.com

ISSN 1947-2498 print/ISSN 1947-2501 online

© 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/19472498.2010.507019
http://www.informaworld.com
 468 N. Mehta and M.G. Mehta

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 tur-
moil 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.
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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 ram-
ifications 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 reserva-
tion, 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 evo-
lution 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 evolu-
tion 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
 South Asian History and Culture 469

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.
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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 moder-
nity 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.
 470 N. Mehta and M.G. Mehta

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 was to become a central tenet of the idea of Gujarat and though it heralded an
inclusive vision based on language and land as binding forces, it also held within it the
divide of ‘Arydharma’ and ‘Paradharma’.

It [Gujarat] belongs to all those who speak Gujarati; to those who observe Aryadharma of all
varieties; and also to those who are foreigners but nurtured by this land; and to those who
follow other religions (Paradharma) but are well wishers of Mother Gujarat and therefore our
brothers.16

The notion of Gujarati asmita, familiar to anyone following the state’s recent politics, found
a ready audience and gained further momentum with the formation of the Gujarat Sahitya
Parishad in 1905.17 This was also a theme that animated much of the Congress politician
K.M. Munshi’s work who was to later become a pivotal figure in the reconstruction of
the Somnath temple, along with Sardar Patel, and writings on Indian history through his
Bhartiya Vidya Bhawan.
Much of the work in this period dwelt on the splendour of Gujarat before the advent
of Muslim rule. Riho Isaka has shown that Gujarati scholars in the nineteenth century
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depended on British works on the history of India and Gujarat, and therefore accepted the
simplistic British periodization of history into Hindu, Islamic and British period. If Hindu
rule was seen as one of great prosperity, Muslim rule came to be seen as synonymous with
decline, whereas the British rule was seen as ramrajya.18 As Romila Thapar argues, this
wider trope of ‘tyrannical’ Muslim rule went back to James Stuart Mill and overlay most
historiography in this period, from William Jones to Max Mueller.19 Many of the histories
of Gujarat drew from the same style sheet.20
One consequence was the reconstruction of the Marathas in the Gujarati consciousness.
There was a history of antagonism in Gujarat with Marathis ever since Maratha armies
had rampaged Gujarati cities in the eighteenth century. Achyut Yagnik and Suchitra Sheth
pointed out that the Gujarati word for Maratha, ganim, had negative connotations21 and
such was the antagonism that when Baroda was sacked, an unknown poet wrote

The city of Baroda was burnt to ashes . . .

Such is the terror of Ganim
Not a rag nor a penny was spared
Oh Mother Goddess Ambika! Protect Gujarat
...
If you kill the Ganim
The world will be saved
And you will be called Life-giver.22

By the nineteenth century though, in the new construction of Gujarati-ness, Shivaji and the
Marathas were reconstructed as heroes who fought Muslim rule.
Gujarati nationalism was not built in opposition to any other regional identity but schol-
ars have pointed out patterns in the literary works of this period to show how the distinction
between Hindus and Muslims as foreigners came to be built into dominant discourses. Both
Narmadashankar Lalshankar and Dalpatram Dahyabhai attributed the decline of Gujarati
culture and knowledge to Muslim rule.23 Narmad had indeed talked of an inclusive iden-
tity in his seminal poem on Gujarat but generally wrote with Hindus in mind. His essay
 South Asian History and Culture 471

Swadeshbhiman, in 1856, for example, largely referred to swadesh as a Hindu entity.24

This perception of greatness and subsequent decline is even more pronounced in the works
of K.M. Munshi, such as his novel, Gujaratno Nath (Master of Gujarat), and his historical
work, The Glory that was Gurjaradesa.25
The same sensibility is inherent in the first Gujarati novel by Nandashankar Mehta,
Karan Ghelo: Gujaratno Chhello Rajput Raja [The Last Rajput King of Gujarat] in 1868.26
It puts the conflict in Hindu and Muslim terms, like the later British categorization and
equates the post-Rajput period with degradation. Later inscribed in the education cur-
riculum, this popular text came to inform ideas about images of Muslims and Hindus.
It concludes with a telling emotional lament:

Readers! Shed some tears over the body of Karan. Gujarat has been widowed after his death;
it has passed into the hands of mlechha people of foreign countries; it has been oppressed by
barbaric foreigners. Muhammad Begada and other Sultans of Ahmedabad have much degraded
it.27

Similar sentiments would inform the discourse on the Somnath temple whose reconstruc-
tion would lead to the first major dispute between an Indian prime minister and president.
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The destruction of Somnath came to be one of the foundational motifs of the Hindu–
Muslim problem. As K.M. Munshi put it, ‘for a thousand years Mahmud’s destruction of
the shrine has been burnt into the collective sub-consciousness of the [Hindu] race, as
an unforgettable national disaster . . . .’28 Yet Romila Thapar has shown that contempo-
rary Indian accounts do not support this line of thinking. They refer to the invaders as
turushkas, not as Muslims, and Chalukya inscriptions on the subject never highlighted reli-
gious identity. In fact, the evidence from the years 1000–1400 shows a resurgent prosperity
among Jain traders and if anything, amicable social relations among both communities.29
According to Thapar, ‘none of the sources provide evidence of a starkly hostile reaction or
a trauma among those that are viewed as the victimized.’30 The history of the history of
Somnath is one of later embellishments, including by Muslim chroniclers from the four-
teenth century onwards. The blanking out of all other factors except religious antagonism
was arguably a manifestation in that sense of later communal politics.
Nehru, ever mindful of history, understood the emotive power of Somnath. This is why
he refused to get the Indian state officially involved in its reconstruction in the 1950s. The
Ministry of External Affairs was refused permission to collect waters from foreign rivers
for the ceremony and an angry Rajendra Prasad was forced to attend the rebuilt temple’s
opening as a private citizen rather than as president.31

Creating Mahagujarat
Writing about Gujarat in 1935, K.M. Munshi described it as the ‘land of Mahatma Gandhi,
as once it was of Sri Krishna.’32 Gandhi’s imagery and his Gujarati-ness had already come
to define Gujarat. Yet, his overarching personae hid the political reality that until 1947, less
than 15% of modern Gujarat was directly under British rule.33 Baroda and more than 300
princely states and estates of the Western India and Gujarat states Agencies covered nearly
four-fifths of present-day Gujarat.34
After independence, the Saurashtra states were integrated into United States of
Kathiawad in February 1948, the Gujarat states and Baroda into Bombay in March
1948 and Kutch was made a Chief Commissioner’s province. The dream of a greater
 472 N. Mehta and M.G. Mehta

Gujarat always lurked in the background as Sardar Patel articulated in a 1948 speech in
Jamnagar:

One dream has been realized, namely the United States of Kathiawad. The next objective
would be to attract the neighbouring States, including Kutch, and pave the way for the ultimate
realization of a greater dream – a Mahagujarat – which you can achieve by being strong and
self-reliant.35

A separate Gujarati-speaking state would have been a logical outcome of the policy of
creating linguistically divided provincial Congress units adopted by Gandhi in 1921. In
practice though, the leaders of independent India, beset by Partition and social strife chose
initially to keep the idea of re-carving states based on language in abeyance. Patel sup-
ported Nehru on this and worked hard within the Constituent Assembly to reverse the
official Congress policy on linguistic provinces. The idea was duly rejected first by a com-
mittee of jurists within the Assembly and then by the JVP committee specially set up to
examine linguistic provinces.36
Marathi- and Gujarati-speaking members protested but the larger question was put
aside until the fast and death of the activist Potti Sriramulu in Andhra Pradesh unleashed
such passions that the new state of Andhra was carved out in 1953. From then on, the cre-
ation of other linguistic states was only a matter of time. As Nehru wrote to a colleague,
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‘we have disturbed the hornet’s nest and I believe most of us are likely to be stung’.37
The demand for creating a Mahagujarat grew in tandem with the moves of the Samyukt
Maharashtra Parishad. The real turning point came in 1956 when five students died in
police firing during protests about the future of the state and the Mahagujarat Janata
Parishad united all opposition groups – Praja Socialists, Communists, Jan Sangh and dis-
sident Congressmen – under the leadership of Indulal Yagnik, who had earlier opposed
Nehru on the question of Kisan Sabhas in Gujarat38 and resigned as Congress state
secretary in 1921 after a dispute with Patel.
One of the key issues was the status of Bombay. In the early 1950s, under the influence
of Morarji Desai, the Gujarat Congress remained opposed to changing the status quo on
Bombay’s links with Gujarat.39 There were broadly two arguments. One view, led by the
city’s leading industrialists and the Gujarati-dominated Bombay Citizens Committee was
to keep it autonomous, cosmopolitan and outside of a proposed Marathi state. For the
proponents of Maharashtra though, the city, surrounded by Marathi-speaking districts, had
to be the capital of a new Maharashtra.40
Bombay was the most difficult of issues before the States Reorganization Commission
set up to redraw the map of India and it recommended a bilingual Bombay state, which
would add Saurashtra, Kutch and Marathwada to the existing state, while four Kannada-
speaking districts were to be hived off and added to Mysore. Marathi speakers in the old
Central Provinces-Berar region were to be awarded their own state of Vidarbha. This did
not go down well with Marathi speakers who wanted their own Maharashtra with Vidarbha
added to it.
In response to their protests, the Gujarat Congress in 1956 announced that if Vidarbha
was to be included in Bombay then Gujarat would demand a three state formula: Gujarat,
Maharashtra and Bombay City as separate states. In the face of mass-scale organiza-
tional dissent in the Maharashtra unit, the Congress Working Committee rejected the
Gujarat unit’s proposal on 2 August 1956. Within a week, protesters were out in force in
Ahmedabad and the killing of five students outside Congress Bhawan on August 8 became
a point of no return. Within a month, another 15 lives were lost and by now it was clear
that the experiment of a bigger bilingual Bombay was a failure.41 Gujarati and Marathi
 South Asian History and Culture 473

politicians both favoured bifurcation and separate unilingual states. After a series of nego-
tiations, the Bombay Reorganisation Act of 1960 was introduced in the Lok Sabha and the
two new states of Gujarat and Maharashtra were created on 1 May 1960.

1960–2010: politics, conflict and society

The social scientist Ghanshyam Shah has argued that with the creation of Gujarat and
the panchayati raj in 1963, the public life of Gujarat entered ‘a new phase in its political
style – a gradual progression from elitist to mass politics. Till the mid-1960s, the Baniya–
Brahman styles of politics with its vague Gandhian concepts of propriety in public life
dominated’. But this was to change.42 One measure of the new style of politics was the
relative instability, for one reason or another, of the regimes that came to power. Between
1960 and 1990, Gujarat had eight vidhan sabhas and 20 ministries. Leaving aside the time
under President’s rule, this gives an average of one and half years per ministry.43 This
period included nine chief ministers and only one, Madhavsinh Solanki, completed his
full tenure of 5 years between 1980 and 1985. The telling fact is that only once did a
government fall because it was defeated on the floor of the house – the rest was all due to
unstable factionalism or due to politics from the Centre. In 1974, for instance, the assembly
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was dissolved under mob fury, which led to the 33rd constitutional amendment empowering
speakers to not accept resignations submitted by legislators under duress.44
Broadly speaking, in political terms, the 1960s was a time of relative political stability
in the state, but the 1970s were mired in political unrest, the 1980s witnessed political indis-
cipline, communal and caste disturbances45 and since the 1990s, the state has been identi-
fied with the Hindutva resurgence, giving the BJP its strongest electoral citadel in India.
If the 1970s produced the Navnirman movement, they also produced one of the ubiq-
uitous acronyms that Indian politics often produces: KHAM, or the Kshatriya, Harijan,
Adivasi, Muslim coalition. It was the cynical pursuit of this caste arithmetic that kept the
Congress firmly in power until the mid-1980s, but it also led to the anti-reservation riots
of 1985. Both were seminal events in the political history of the state and both had major
all-India ramifications. The Navnirman movement, which started with rising food prices
and turned into a directionless student’s rebellion, presaged the Emergency in 1975 and the
1985 anti-reservation riots were a precursor to the upper caste protests across north India
when V.P. Singh announced the implementation of the recommendations of the Mandal
Commission in 1989. Gujarat’s anti-reservation violence ultimately turned into commu-
nal rioting and became an important chapter in the gradual saffronization of the state that
gathered apace thereafter.
The veteran political scientist Nagindas Sanghavi examines Gujarat’s political trajec-
tory from Navnirman to the anti-reservation riots in this collection and argues that although
the legacies of Navnirman fizzled out, the 1985 riots and the fallout of KHAM greatly
eroded the Congress. It turned the upper castes away, created a political vacuum and
‘thereby has handed over Gujarat, once a bastion of Congress party, to the BJP’. The identi-
fication of Gujarat with Gandhi, in his view, served to create an image of Gujarati-ness that
was at odds with everyday reality and he studies the social strife that came to characterize
the state from the 1970s within this context.
Gujarat’s anti-reservation violence in – in 1981 and 1985 – took place in the context of
a state that had a rising middle class. Between 1961 and 1981, literacy increased from 31 to
44%; high schools from 1099 to 3153, and college students from 50,000 to 180,000. At the
same time unemployment rose threefold between 1971 and 1982, growing from 150,000 to
 474 N. Mehta and M.G. Mehta

521,000.46 In tandem with this, reservations were introduced into engineering and medical
colleges only in the 1970s. By 1980, the Baxi Commission’s recommendations had taken
total reservations up to 31% in education and state service, but in an echo of the recent
Gurjar agitation in Haryana, many castes, including the kshatriyas, were now demanding a
greater share in the pie.
In 1981, Madhavsinh Solanki set up another Commission under Justice C.V. Rane in
1981 to consider further reservations. The Rane Commission’s report rejected caste as a
principle of backwardness and focusing on economic criteria instead, identified 63 occu-
pations as backward. Locked in a power tussle with Jinabhai Daraji, Solanki rejected the
economic criteria argument but with elections just 2 months away, he used the report to woo
backward castes and increased backward quotas from 10 to 28% in January 1985.47 The
move was seen with cynical eyes in every quarter. It received little vocal support from its
intended beneficiaries, engendered heavy protests from the middle classes and as a spiral
of violence began, Rajiv Gandhi called for a review from Delhi.
Solanki was forced to withdraw his decision but soon thereafter the violence turned
communal and continued for 2 months. Solanki lost his chief ministership, Amarsinh
Chowdhary became the first tribal chief minister of the state, and a compromise for-
mula was worked out with the agitators. What started as a ‘half-hearted political measure’
changed the political dynamics of Gandhinagar. More tellingly perhaps, for a state that had
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always prided itself for its governance, the violence revealed a state where the police and
the bureaucracy had played a blatantly partisan role. The Electricity Board, the munici-
pality and state government employees all at various points went on strike as Gujarat was
engulfed by a conflict between the old and the new entrants to the middle classes.48
The earlier anti-reservation agitation of 1981 when savarnas fought with dalits in
Ahmedabad had already exploded the myth of peaceful, non-violent Gujarat. The 1985
agitation, targeted the Mandal communities. The Sangh parivar had supported the upper
castes in the violence. Yet by the end of the 1980s, Hindutva had supplanted suvarna and
the Sangh parivar had systematically co-opted adivasis and dalits through a number of
course corrections.49 As Ashis Nandy, Achyut Yagnik and Shikha Trivedy put it:

At last the Gujarati middle class – spread out over large cities like Ahmedabad, Baroda and
Surat and more than 40 large towns, and consisting mainly of Savarna and also Dalit and
Adivasi government servants, teachers and petty contractors – had begun to find security
within the ideology of Hindutva . . . learnt to use this ideology as a ready cure for rootlessness
and as a substitute for traditions. Hindutva had become for this class a new purana to validate
their pre-eminence.50

But how did the state machinery get compromised over time and become complicit in these
divisive processes? Ornit Shani picks up on these threads to draw the linkages between
entrenched forms of corruption experienced by ordinary people in their everyday lives and
communal violence in the 1980s. Gandhi’s Gujarat has always been known for its prohibi-
tion, and she picks up on the illicit trade in bootlegging – focusing primarily on the period
in which the Congress was in power – to discuss the political economy of corruption that
developed at the local level and how it surfaced in the context of communal riots, especially
in 1985. In a fascinating exploration, that includes accounts of the underworld don Abdul
Latif and the patronage he enjoyed, she probes how the system of corruption around illicit
alcohol permeated into socio-political arenas far beyond the transactions around liquor, the
effect this had on compromising the state law enforcement mechanisms in ordinary times,
and its overall impact in implicating the system of law and order in a manner that it could
 South Asian History and Culture 475

later be harnessed for other means, such as in the 2002 violence. Communal violence is
not an automatic by-product of routine patterns of corruption – it is one among many pos-
sibilities – but Shani makes the interesting observation that once a governance system is
compromised in everyday life, it becomes subservient; it cannot be expected to function
impartially in times of strife and can therefore be misdirected for any purpose.
Coming to 2002, much has been written about the gradual penetration of Hindutva
in the social DNA of Gujarat. Going beyond the immediate spark of Godhra and looking
at deeper reasons, scholars have pointed for instance to the collapse of the Ahmedabad
textile industry in the 1980s, which rendered 50,000 workers jobless, mostly Dalits and
Muslims.51 Others have pointed to the break-up of traditional social linkages and a
systemic penetration by Sangh parivar outfits among adivasi and dalit communities.
Two of the contributors in this collection focus specifically on deeper issues related
to 2002. Arvind Rajagopal studies urban geographies of violence in Ahmedabad to
understand how historical patterns of spatial ordering may have contributed to a given
socio-political imagination. Examining the urban development of the city, Rajagopal
argues that historically ‘urban growth, economic development and ghettoization appear
to have worked in tandem in Ahmedabad, with the patterns of spatial expansion and capital
accumulation working to force Muslims more closely together while rendering the rest of
the city as a canvas for Hindu aspirations. These aspirations were not merely economic
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or spatial, but also perceptual’. These patterns have assisted in the conduct as well as the
denial of violence.
This must be seen in tandem with the role of the media and mediated structures of pub-
licity in forging social imaginaries. By the 1980s, for instance, Gujarati newspapers were
‘thought to be capable of bringing down state governments’52 and the vibrant Gujarati press
has played a pivotal role in public violence since the 1980s. Rajagopal who has written
extensively elsewhere on the divides inherent in the press draws attention here to the phys-
ical divisions in the city itself to understand the psychological divisions that contributed to
fuelling the violence.
In contrast, Parvis Ghassem-Fachandy takes an ethnographic approach. Looking at vio-
lence through the fascinating prism of vegetarianism and researching its street discourse,
he investigates processes of stereotyping in Hindu nationalist mobilization and the rela-
tionship between imageries of Muslim meat consumption, concepts of diet and worship
and Hindu notions of disgust. Arguing that the affect of disgust for meat became an impor-
tant cultural relay for the vegetarian politics in the state, he delves into the realm of the
symbolic and the psychological to show how the insistence on an identity formulated in
the language of non-violence, may paradoxically render a permissive identification with
violence. This may well help explain the utter lack of reflection in Gujarat about 2002,
despite its strong Jain and Bhakti traditions, and the paucity of an internal public debate
beyond the usual binaries of us versus them.53
One of the central prongs of the BJP’s mobilization in Gujarat since 2002 has revolved
around the rhetorical device of Gujarati asmita. During the 2002 campaign, Sonia Gandhi
harked backed to Gandhi in Porbandar, telling Gujaratis that they had a choice between
the ideas of the Mahatma and Godse. This argument resoundingly lost out to Narendra
Modi’s brandishing of a hurt regional pride and asmita, mixed with clever usage of the
double meaning political entendre. As Upendra Baxi put it, in Modi’s recourse to asmita,
we witness ‘a most profound enactment of what Pierre Bourdieu named as the language of
power and the power of language’.54
But the asmita argument did not emerge out of blank social context. It has a long history
in Gujarat and even Shankarsinh Vaghela in the 1990s had sought to exploit this theme
 476 N. Mehta and M.G. Mehta

through his Asmita Rath and Gujarat Asmita Rath.55 At its heart is a discourse of nativism
and mobilization around a narrative that had long seen Gujaratis as victims of outside
meddlers. Mona Mehta explores the narratives of the Narmada movement in Gujarat to
show how the movement engaged the instruments and rhetoric of democracy to forge a
popular consensus around a coercive Gujarati nativism marked by ideas of victimhood and
an adversarial ‘Other’. This nativist consensus became the touchstone of political action
and played a catalytic role in consolidating a politics of Hindutva in the state at the turn of
the twenty-first century. The Narmada movement has usually only been given prominence
from the point of view of the dispossessed. Mona Mehta’s account looks at it from a new
angle and provides an important context to how its discourse foregrounded processes of
identity formation in the state over the decades.
But what after 2002? And what of Narendra Modi, the architect of the BJP’s post-
2002 citadel in Gujarat? And the potential for Modi’s possibilities outside of Gujarat?
Nalin Mehta puts the spotlight on the chief minister’s brand of personality politics and
uses the legal battle between the eminent sociologist Ashis Nandy and the Government of
Gujarat, which unfolded in 2008, as a case study to illustrate the dominant impulses of what
has been termed ‘Moditva’ or the Modi model. The state-sanctioned prosecution of Ashis
Nandy over a newspaper article that criticized the Gujarati middle classes was ultimately
struck down by the Supreme Court of India, but it is a useful prism to unpack the author-
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itarian model of governmental developmentalism that has come to characterize Gujarat

in recent years. The legal battle erupted just a few months before a galaxy of India’s top
industrialists publicly backed Modi as a future prime minister, hailing his excellent devel-
opmental record post-2002 and the creation of an investment-friendly climate in Gujarat.56
A significant constituency within the BJP clearly saw Modi as the first among equals in
a post-Advani age and he enjoyed – as he still does – the backing of capitalist elites and
large swathes of the middle classes for delivering a corruption-free administration, good
roads, fast-track clearances and what is seen as a no-nonsense rule of law, with dollops of
muscular ‘terrorist’-bashing thrown in.
In this context, Ashis Nandy’s legal battle, and the public discourse around it, serve as a
useful prism to understand the deeper processes at work within Moditva and the particular
brand of authoritarian developmentalism it offers, with little scope for dissent. At one level,
it can be read as a straight narrative of an iconic battle for freedom of speech, one in which
Gujarat and its politics were once again at the centre of the debate. But in many ways,
the debate about Moditva is also a metaphor for alternative visions for India. Its future
trajectory will be decisive not only for the future of Gujarat but equally for the future of
the BJP and for the idea of India itself.
One of the biggest social themes in Gujarat in the past two decades has been the rise
of religious movements. On seemingly opposite sides of the spectrum, movements like
Swadhyay and Tablighi Jamaat have been critiqued as being symbolic of the inroads made
by religion into the secular fabric of the state. Anindita Chakrabarty focuses the anthro-
pological gaze on both movements and argues that this may be too simplistic a reading.
Her ethnographic research over nearly a decade with followers of both movements leads
her to question the notion of necessarily politicized religious movements. Problematizing
the concept of ‘apolitical’ movements, she has an interesting insight: ‘Whether a move-
ment is political or apolitical is not necessarily a question of choice that religious groups
make but they acquire political significance under certain circumstances. Therefore, the
question is not how these groups perceive their own project but how they are perceived
by the others’. Her exploration of the everyday practices of both sects and their mobi-
lization tactics sits on the contentious junction of religion, politics and secularism. She
 South Asian History and Culture 477

argues that religious movements should not automatically be seen as tautologically cul-
minating into ‘Hinduization’ and ‘Islamization’. Rather they negotiate complex internal
ideological/metaphysical conflicts as well as larger socio-political conditions and the
transformation of religious movements into political actors follows multiple trajectories.
‘Communalism’ is just one of those possibilities.
No discussion of Gujarat can be complete without a discussion of its powerful diaspora.
In East Africa there were once so many Gujaratis in the East African railways that at one
point it was commonly referred to as the Patel railways. Famine and social customs both
played a part in Gujarati emigration from the nineteenth century, long before the term NRI
became famous.57 Nowhere was the Gujarati imprint more visible than in South Africa.
Mohandas K. Gandhi learnt his trade as a political reformer here, and South Africa has
been home to one of the larger concentrations of Gujaratis in the diaspora for over a century.
The year 2010 marks not only the 50th year of the institution of the linguistic state of
Gujarat, but also the 150th year since the first-indentured Indians set foot in Natal. Goolam
Vahed highlights the distinct migratory history of Gujarati South Africans and the impor-
tance these histories have in perceptions of community identity. His personalized account,
as a Gujarati South African himself, uses ethnography and history to trace key features of
the early Gujarati migratory process. It puts specific focus on Gujarati Muslims while also
analysing the relationship between Gujarati Hindus and Muslims in South Africa. Through
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a rich narrative history of transnational Gujarati mobility, Vahed’s essay offers insights
into the ways in which diasporic Gujarati identities have been reconfigured over the past
century, and how the Gujarati homeland is imagined in the diaspora today.
Taken together, these contributions highlight key facets of the evolution of Gujarat
since 1960. Fifty years ago, on the occasion of Gujarat’s founding, the poet Sundaram
lauded its role as the traditional entry point to India and as a melting pot of cultures.

To the threshold of this land came the entire world, from north and west, from east and south
. . . like gems in a treasure trove were the people, who blossomed from this confluence in the
world.58

Gujarat’s reputation as a tolerant society and its mercantile ethos has been cardinal pillars of
its self-image over the centuries. Even as it remains an industrial powerhouse, the important
question is can it produce a novel and inclusive politics in the present era to recover this
glorious image?

Notes
1. This conversation took place while on a TV reporting assignment and in the presence of
Sanjeev Singh, then NDTV’s Ahmedabad’s correspondent.
2. In this context, see Thapar, Somanatha.
3. Spodek. ‘On the Origins of Gandhi’s Political Methodology’, 361–72.
4. Thapar, ‘Gujarat’, 713.
5. Yagnik and Sheth, The Shaping of Modern Gujarat, xi.
6. Yashachandra, ‘Towards Hind Svaraj’, 42.
7. Isaka, ‘Language and Dominance’, 2.
8. Ibid., 1–19.
9. Ibid., 5.
10. Yashachandra, ‘Towards Hind Svaraj’, 43.
11. Yagnik and Sheth, The Shaping of Modern Gujarat, 77.
12. Chandra, ‘Regional Consciousness in 19th Century India’, 1278–85.
13. Yashachandra, ‘Towards Hind Svaraj’, 43.
14. Isaka, ‘Language and Dominance’, 8.
 478 N. Mehta and M.G. Mehta

15. Yagnik and Sheth, The Shaping of Modern Gujarat, 80.

16. Ibid., 201.
17. Ibid., 80.
18. Isaka, ‘Gujarati Intellectuals and History Writing in the Colonial Period’, 4869.
19. Thapar, Somanatha, 13. See for instance, Nazim, The Life and Times of Sultan Mahmud of
Ghazna; Munshi, Somanatha.
20. Isaka, ‘Gujarati Intellectuals and History Writing in the Colonial Period’, 4867–72.
21. Yagnik and Sheth, The Shaping of Modern Gujarat, 57–8.
22. Ibid.
23. Isaka, ‘Gujarati Intellectuals and History Writing in the Colonial Period’, 4868.
24. Chandra, ‘Regional Consciousness in 19th Century India’, 1282–3.
25. Isaka, ‘Gujarati Intellectuals and History Writing in the Colonial Period’, 4868.
26. Yashachandra, ‘Towards Hind Svaraj’, 43.
27. Yagnik and Sheth, The Shaping of Modern Gujarat, 202.
28. Thapar, Somanatha, 16.
29. For instance, despite the confrontation between Muhammad Ghuri and local rulers in twelfth
century, he refrained from confiscating the property of a wealthy Hindu merchant in Ghazni.
Similarly, a Jaina merchant, Jagadu had a mosque constructed for trading partners in the
fourteenth century. Thapar, Somanatha, 31.
30. Ibid., 171.
31. Ibid., 200.
32. KM Munshi. Gujarata and its Literature: A Survey from the Earliest Times. Longmans, Greens
and Co. Bombay. Quoted in Isaka, ‘Gujarati Intellectuals and History Writing in the Colonial
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Period’, 4871.
33. Yagnik and Sheth, The Shaping of Modern Gujarat, xiv.
34. Wood, ‘British Versus Princely Legacies and the Political Integration of Gujarat’, 67.
35. Ibid., 75.
36. Guha, India After Gandhi, 182–3.
37. Ibid., 189.
38. Vishwanath, ‘Gujarat Kisan Sabha, 1936–56’, 1197–200.
39. Wood, ‘British Versus Princely Legacies and the Political Integration of Gujarat’, 77.
40. Guha, India After Gandhi, 191–3.
41. Wood, ‘British Versus Princely Legacies and the Political Integration of Gujarat’, 79–85.
42. Shah, ‘The Upsurge in Gujarat’, 1437.
43. The nine chief ministers in this period were: Jivraj Mehta, Balwantrai Mehta, Hitendra Desai,
Ghanshyam Oza, Madhavsinh Solanki, Amarsinh Chowdhary, Chimanbhai Patel, Babubhai
Jashbhai Patel and Chhabildas Mehta.
44. Thakkar, ‘Review – Politics of Gujarat’, 2201.
45. Sanghavi, Gujarat: Political Analysis.
46. Shah, ‘Middle Class Politics’, AN 162, AN 158.
47. Ibid., AN 160–1.
48. Ibid., AN 167–72.
49. Nandy et al., Creating a Nationality, 103–4, 106–10.
50. Ibid., 104.
51. Ibid., 12.
52. Jeffrey, ‘Gujarati’, 321–2.
53. On this point see Suchitra Sheth: the Rediff interview, ‘In Turbulent Times Incredible Gujaratis
have Raised a Voice’, November 29, 2005, http://www.rediff.com/news/2005/nov/29inter1.
htm (accessed November 30, 2009).
54. Baxi, ‘The Second Gujarat Catastrophe’, 3521.
55. Patel, ‘Mobilisation, Factionalism and Voting in Gujarat’, 2426–31.
56. Naqvi et al., ‘Catch the Influenza’.
57. Patel and Rutten, ‘Patels of Central Gujarat in Greater London’, 952–4.
58. Quoted in Yagnik and Sheth, The Shaping of Modern Gujarat, 1.
 South Asian History and Culture 479

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