Tall Tales and Half-Truths: Negotiating Anxiety and Precarity in Contemporary Ahmedabad

ABSTRACT

This article explores the import of tall tales, half-truths, and fantastical narratives in historical scholarship. I draw from oral historical and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad. In the recent decades, Ahmedabad has been the site of widespread industrial restructuring and religious violence, to a large extent targeting the Muslim community. Both of these historical processes have had far-reaching consequences on the lives and spaces of the city’s working poor. This article follows one precarious worker, M. R. Sayyad, and his elliptical, fragmented, and fabulous life story, presenting it alongside the context in which it was told. Through the focus on Sayyad’s stories, it offers a way of engaging with and analyzing narratives that may be false and fictitious. My aims are twofold: first, to consider the possibilities contained in fantastic and fabulous tales, and second, to tease out the structures of everyday anxieties and dispossession that are embedded in these stories. I show that Sayyad’s narratives reveal as much as they conceal and suggest that they present ways of understanding self-fashioning and creative forms of claim-making at a time of insecurity and anxiety.

KEYWORDS:

• Ahmedabad
• emotions
• precarity
• working-class

Acknowledgments

Research for the article was supported by the Erasmus Mundus PhD Scholarship. Much of the writing was undertaken at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies at the University of Göttingen and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, and I am thankful to colleagues and friends at both institutions for their generous engagement. Thanks especially to Devika Dua for her editorial support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

^1. Names of all individuals and most landmarks have been changed. Informed consent was obtained verbally from all participants in this research.

^2. An old-age home established in the late 1960s.

^3. Muhammad Rafiq (M. R.) Sayyad, interviewed by author, Ahmedabad, IN, November 28, 2011.

^4. For an exploration of these dimensions of life stories, see David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn, Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and Life History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).

^5. Alessandro Portelli, “The Peculiarities of Oral History,” History Workshop Journal 12, no. 1 (1981).

^6. Sandy Polishuk, “Secrets, Lies, and Misremembering: The Perils of Oral History Interviewing,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 19, no. 3 (1998).

^7. This means that he failed his undergraduate degree in commerce.

^8. Times of India (ToI), July 27, 1973, October 3, 1975; see also Pravinbhai Jashbhai Patel v. the State of Gujarat, Gujarat High Court, August 5, 1995, https://indiankanoon.org/doc/783573/.

^9. The Prohibition of Transfer of Immovable Properties and Provision for Protection of Tenants from Eviction from Premises in Disturbed Areas (colloquially known as the Disturbed Areas Act, or Ashant Dhara in Gujarati) was enacted in view of curtailing the rising distress sales of property in eastern Ahmedabad, following the communal violence of 1985. The act imposed stricter controls on property transfers in designated disturbed areas of the city. Contrary to its professed intentions, this piece of government legislation eventually formed the basis for the communalization of the city’s real estate and became the legal instrument through which ghettoization was normalized.

^10. Juhapura has the dubious distinction of being the largest Muslim ghetto in Asia. One of the first housing initiatives in the area was a resettlement colony built to accommodate slum dwellers from the banks of the Sabarmati, who had been affected by the heavy floods of 1973. By the 1980s, Muslims formed the dominant religious group in the area, and in the episodes of violence that followed, Juhapura expanded to house those displaced from the core of the city. Gradually, with greater investments in real estate in the area, enclaves of affluence were built. Juhapura is then represented, as one news report called it, as a “dystopian sprawl,” where luxurious gated living coexisted with slums. In mainstream representations, the area is routinely branded as “mini-Pakistan,” stigmatized as a space of dirt and more recently, as a breeding ground for terrorism. For more detailed discussions on Juhapura, see Christophe Jaffrelot and Charlotte Thomas, “Facing Ghettoisation in ‘Riot City’: Old Ahmedabad and Juhapura between Victimisation and Self-Help,” in Muslims in Indian Cities: Trajectories of Marginalisation, ed. Laurent Gayer and Christophe Jaffrelot (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 44–80; Rubina Jasani, “Violence, Reconstruction and Islamic Reform—Stories from the Muslim ‘Ghetto,’ ” in “Islam in South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 42, nos. 2–3 (March 2008): 431–56; Tommaso Bobbio, “Collective Violence, Urban Change and Social Exclusion: Ahmedabad 1930–2002” (PhD diss., Royal Holloway, University of London, 2010). See also Soutik Biswas, “Why Segregated Housing Is Thriving in India,” BBC, December 10, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-30204806; Indian Express, April 25, 2014.

^11. Renu Desai et al., “Bombay Hotel: Urban Planning, Governance and Everyday Conflict and Violence in a Muslim Locality on the Peripheries of Ahmedabad” (Working Paper 31, Centre for Urban Equity, CEPT University, Ahmedabad, IN, 2016).

^12. For instance, nearly five hundred Muslim families were evicted from Khanpur Darwaza along the riverbank and relocated to newly built quarters in the Vivekananda Mill Compound and Isanpur—both predominantly Hindu areas. When some of the 140 Muslim families assigned housing in Vivekananda Mills went to the relocation site, they were met with hostility and intimidation from the Hindu residents of the area. They appealed for resettlement in Vatva, a majority-Muslim neighborhood. Similarly, Hindu evictees from the riverfront who were allotted flats in Ajit Mills, situated in a largely Muslim neighborhood, demanded to be relocated to the Hindu-majority areas of Vadaj and Isanpur. “India News,” New Delhi Television (NDTV), March 15, 2010, http://www.ndtv.com/news/blogs/a_fine_balance/riverside_story.php; Indian Express, February 19, 2010; Hindustan Times, February 28, 2010.

^13. Financial Express (India), February 19, 2010. See also Rajubhai Kumavati Marwadi v. Sabarmati River Front Development Corporation Limitation (Gujarat High Court, June 13, 2012).

^14. Ahmedabad Mirror, June 15, 2010.

^15. “Ahmedabad: More but Different Government for Slum Free and Livable Cities” (Policy Research Working Paper 6267, World Bank, 2012).

^16. Daily News and Analysis (DNA) (India), February 24, 2013.

^17. Kabir Kumar, interviewed by the author, Vatva, IN, January 17, 2012.

^18. For a longer history of Vatva, see Rukmini Barua, In the Shadow of the Mill: Transformation of Workers’ Neighbourhoods in Ahmedabad, 1920s to 2000s (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

^19. Sayyad interview, November 28, 2011.

^20. ToI, October 24, 1971.

^21. ToI, November 12, 1971.

^22. ToI, March 20, 1965, March 4, 1965.

^23. ToI, September 21, 1965.

^24. A colloquial term for a tall person, lambu is also a common nickname for Amitabh Bachchan. See also Yasser Usman, Rajesh Khanna: The Untold Story of India’s First Superstar (New Delhi, IN: Penguin, 2014); M. R. Sayyad, interviewed by author, Ahmedabad, IN, December 1, 2011.

^25. 10 Janpath is closely associated, in popular memory, with the Gandhi family. It has been the residence of late Prime Minister (and Indira Gandhi’s son) Rajiv Gandhi and his family since the late 1980s. However, as far as I am aware, Indira Gandhi did not live at this address. Sayyad interview, December 1, 2011.

^26. Janmohamed wrote of education as a field in which Muslim social workers have intensified investments as a way of addressing the gap left by the lack of government schools. Jasani documented the role of Islamic social and cultural organizations that offered assistance in housing in the increasingly arduous conditions following 2002. See Zahir Janmohamed, “Muslim Education in Ahmedabad in the Aftermath of the 2002 Gujarat Riots,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 13, no. 3 (2013): 466–76; Jasani, “Violence, Reconstruction and Islamic Reform,” 431–56.

^27. The Hindu (India), October 28, 2013.

^28. Thomas Blom Hansen and Oskar Verkaaik, “Introduction—Urban Charisma: On Everyday Mythologies in the City,” Critique of Anthropology 29 (2009).

^29. Blom Hansen and Verkaaik, “Introduction—Urban Charisma.”

^30. Kaushik Bhaumik, “Cinematograph to Cinema: Bombay 1896–1928,” BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 2, no. 1 (2011).

^31. Kartik Nair, “Taste, Taboo, Trash: The Story of the Ramsay Brothers,” BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 3, no. 2 (2012); Sandip Hazareesingh, “Colonial Modernism and the Flawed Paradigms of Urban Renewal: Uneven Development in Bombay, 1900–25,” Urban History 28, no. 2 (2001).

^32. Literally “friend,” an informal form of address.

^33. A wildlife sanctuary in Gujarat, which is the only remaining habitat of the Asiatic lion.

^34. “Sir,” a term of respect.

^35. Literally, “like a hurricane” or “feisty.”

^36. Sayyad interview, December 1, 2011.

^37. A song from the film, loosely translated as “my life is a severed kite.”

^38. Sayyad interview, December 1, 2011.

^39. Rajkot is a city close to Junagadh, and incidentally, there is a Rajshri Cinema in the city.

^40. Sayyad interview, December 1, 2011.

^41. Kathleen M. Ryan, “ ‘I Didn’t Do Anything Important’: A Pragmatist Analysis of the Oral History Interview,” Oral History Review 36, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2009): 25–44.

^42. Chitra Joshi, “On ‘De-Industrialization’ and the Crisis of Male Identities,” International Review of Social History 47 (2002).

^43. ToI, July 30, 1982.

^44. Sayyad interview, December 1, 2011.

^45. Stories of buried treasure are common in South Asian folk tales. See Paul G. Hiebert, “Treasure-Lore in India’s Great and Little Traditions,” Folklore 11, no. 10 (October 1970): 354–61; Kusum Budhwar, Where Gods Dwell: Central Himalayan Folktales and Legends (New Delhi, IN: Penguin, 2010).

^46. Industrial Disputes Act of 1947; Abdul Hafij Yakubbhai Patel v. Golden Theatres, Gujarat High Court, June 27, 2008, https://indiankanoon.org/doc/842866/.

^47. Abdul Patel v. Golden Theatres, June 27, 2008, p. 4, https://indiankanoon.org/doc/842866/.

^48. Abdul Patel v. Golden Theatres, June 27, 2008, pp. 4–5, https://indiankanoon.org/doc/842866/.

^49. Abdul Patel v. Golden Theatres, Gujarat High Court, February 14, 2017, https://indiankanoon.org/doc/7367433/; see also Mohammad Siddique Kasambhai Kureshi v. Golden Theatres, Gujarat High Court, January 22, 2015, https://indiankanoon.org/doc/173135471/.

^50. Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990; 2010). Citation refers to the 2010 edition.

^51. Alessandro Portelli, “Uchronic Dreams: Working Class Memory and Possible Worlds,” Oral History 16, no. 2 (1988).

^52. Luise White, “Telling More: Lies, Secrets, and History,” History and Theory 39, no. 4 (2000).

^53. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rukmini Barua

Rukmini Barua is Assistant Professor of South Asian History, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.