Ahmedabad: Shock City of Twentieth-Century India

Part 2 The Westernizing City, 1950–1980

part 2 The Westernizing City, 1950–1980 part 2 The Westernizing City, 1950–1980 The year 1947 ended the era of colonialism and confronted India with the new challenges of independence. In addressing two of these challenges—building a more productive, more equitable economy and encouraging indigenous culture —Ahmedabad stood out as a shock city. As one of the most industrialized cities in India, led by one of the most venerable communities of businessmen and industrialists, Ahmedabad took its place as a beacon in the theory and practice of economic development not only in the private sector, but also in creating public–private ventures. Ahmedabad demonstrated that a city could assert itself as a center for new Western forms of professional, commercial, and technical organization and education while retaining traditional cultures. The city’s concern for advancing both business and tradition carried into the political demand for a new state of Gujarat. Ahmedabadis campaigned militantly for a separate, single-language state of Gujarat.They sought to bifurcate the existing Bombay state, to separate the Gujarati-speaking regions of the north from the Marathi-speaking areas of the south. The new state would give them greater control over both their own culture and their own business development. Both movements—for economic and political/cultural development—had roots in the late colonial era. As independence drew near, the Indian National Congress established a national planning committee under the chairmanship of Jawaharlal Nehru. The committee drew a lesson from Russian planning. Countries that wanted to overcome technological backwardness needed a strong state with control over the commanding heights of the economy: infrastructure, heavy industry, and finance. This emphasis on centralized planning signaled a fundamental break from Gandhi’s emphasis on the decentralized, local village economy. Many of India’s leading businessmen concurred that the state would have to play a major role in the economy. At the same time, they affirmed an important role for private business. In 1944, a group of seven of India’s leading industrialists —including Ahmedabad’s Kasturbhai Lalbhai—drew up the Bombay Plan, which recommended a mixed economy, with the state in charge of the commanding heights of large-scale industry, transport and communication, and 118 The Westernizing City finance, leaving private capitalists free to develop lighter and smaller-scale industry and commerce. Many of their recommendations strongly influenced government policies after independence. In the 1940s and 1950s, as the Congress and private businesspeople were planning for economic growth, Ahmedabad’s industry flourished, giving birth to a city quite different from Gandhi’s.Three events marked the gestation. First was the fabulous industrial profits of World War II. Ahmedabad’s mills ran overtime, and the mill owners reaped profits beyond their dreams, giving them the means to move the postwar, postindependence city in new directions, cultural as well as economic.The new wealth trickled down to the mill workers, represented by the Textile Labour Association, who gained unprecedented new benefits of higher salaries, fewer hours, better working conditions, and the opportunity for at least some of their children to advance into new, white-collar careers. The industrial profits also enriched the tax base of the municipality, facilitating the expansion of city services to new semisuburban developments on the west bank of the Sabarmati River and improvements in some of the services in the mill areas to the east. As the finances of the city improved, and as its population increased by almost 50 percent in one decade (from 595,000 in 1941 to 877,000 in 1951), the government of Bombay raised the status of the Ahmedabad municipality to make it a municipal corporation in 1950, with correspondingly greater control over its self-government and revenues. Independence in 1947 opened the door to increased foreign economic investment in Ahmedabad and Gujarat. New investments and new investors expanded the horizons of Ahmedabad businessmen, increased their sophistication and worldliness, and encouraged them to develop new kinds of enterprises within and outside of Ahmedabad. Educationally, the businessmen had been constructing colleges through the Ahmedabad Education Society for more than a decade. These institutions now provided the basis for establishing Gujarat University, conceived in 1946 and founded in 1949. In 1948, the mill owners added the practically oriented Ahmedabad Textile Industry Research Association, and in the 1950s and 1960s, they captured for their hometown such premier national institutions as the first Indian Institute of Management, the National Institute of Design...