Colonialism, Indigenous Elites and the Transformation of Cities in the Non-Western World: Ahmedabad (Western India), 1890-1947

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Processes of transformation in cities in the non-western world during the colonial period have often been described as one-way processes through which European colonial regimes restructured the physical and social environments of the cities and established their domination there.Thus, for Anthony King, the transformation in Delhi between the early 19th and the mid 20th centuries was a process whereby the British colonial government installed, apparently at will, particular spatial and physical arrangements in the old city of Delhi and in the region immediately beyond it. For Narayani Gupta, this process had the additional impact of damaging the finely balanced social relationships and social structure of the city which had done so much to enhance the quality of social life there in earlier times. For Veena Oldenburg, the changes in late 19th century Lucknow represented a process by which the government, ‘guided by a ruthless concern for the security and well-being of its own members and agents’, drastically reorganized the physical space in the city. For Mariam Dossal, again, the changes in late 19th century Bombay were constituted by the drastic restructuring of the landscape, topography and everyday life of the people in the city through the active intervention by the colonial state. The ordinary residents of the city had hardly any voice in those developments. Anthony D. King, Colonial Urban Development (London, 1976); Narayani Gupta, Delhi Between Two Empires 1803-1931: Society, Government and Urban Growth (Delhi, 1981); Veena Oldenburg, The Making of Colonial Lucknow (Princeton, 1984); Mariam Dossal, Imperial Designs and Indian Realities: The Planning of Bombay City, 1845-1875 (Bombay, 1991). Rarely have scholars explored the possibility that these processes could have been contested and negotiated and that the indigenous elites of the cities could have appropriated some of the policies of the colonial governments to their advantage, thereby imparting a somewhat different nature to the changes in the cities.Though some works on South Asian cities examined the question of contestation and the attempts at political dominance in the cities by the indigenous elites, they kept the description of these contestations limited mostly to the sphere of electoral and representational politics. None of them took up the question of contestation by the indigenous elites (or, for that matter, by other social groups) in the field of spatial reorganization in the cities or dealt with the cities as lived and build environments. Examples of such works are, Kenneth Gillion, Ahmedabad: A Study in Indian Urban History (Berkeley, 1968); C. A. Bayly, The Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad 1880-1920 (Oxford, 1975); Rajat Ray, Urban Roots of Indian Nationalism: Pressure Groups and Conflict of Interests in Calcutta City Politics, 1875-1939 (New Delhi, 1979); A.D.D. Gordon, Businessmen and Politics: Rising Nationalism and a Mod ernising Economy in Bombay, 1918-1933 (New Delhi, 1978); Douglas Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: the shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852-1928 (Berkeley, 1991). This article seeks to correct this deficiency by showing that the process of change in at least one non-western city, namely, Ahmedabad, a large industrial city in western India, in the first half of the twentieth century, was not a one-way process of the establishment of domination by the colonial government but was instead one where a section of the Indian elites contested the restructuring that the government was carrying out in the city and appropri ated it to bring about their own reorganization of the urban centre. In carrying out the reorganization, the elites also established their political and social hegemony in the urban centre. The article analyses how the Indian elite group brought about the transformation, the nature of the changes fostered and the way in which the process of transformation helped the elite leaders to establish their hegemony in the city.