SHOP
Concrete and nationalism reshaped Kutch—and Gujarat.
I have followed the twists and turns of life in Gujarat for twenty-five years. I sometimes think this relationship has gone on for too long. I am a university professor. I have built a career on the difficult ladder of the academy based on my engagement with Gujarat. I have spoken all over the world, published at least half a million words, and collected all manner of Gujaratalia. Over these years, my brain has been moulded to think in the categories of the state, its people, history and regions. All in all, I believe I know Gujarat well. At other moments, events cause me to doubt myself, as my knowledge and narratives are exposed as partial, selective and incomplete.
I first met Gujarat through a doctorate in anthropology, a discipline in which the researcher sets out to ideally understand the point of view and realities of others. As a student, I spent two glorious years living in the coastal town of Mandvi, getting to know people, asking questions and ‘hanging out’. Between hooch sessions on the beach on Friday nights, long motorbike adventures on Sundays and occasional trips to Ahmedabad (then the nearest cash machine) and Bombay, I had a super time. I made lifelong friends and learned a great deal about history, caste, sect and religion. People were generally kind, patient and tolerant with me.
I became close to many people, but one of my earliest friendships was with a Jain merchant who traded agricultural commodities as his father and father’s father had done. He was a warm and kind man who was interested in life. We spent hours sitting in his shop, talking about the mundane themes of the world during the day. We often met again in the bazaar at night to contemplate nocturnal matters. “Have you eaten? What did you eat?” he would ask every evening, seemingly unconcerned by the repetition. He particularly enjoyed walking by the town’s lake on Sunday evenings. Crowds gathered to see and be seen, and to eat highly spiced street food. We marvelled at visiting flamingos and a huge pelican who made a home on the water for a while.
In subsequent years, as I became more familiar, I went through a phase where I found many values current in Gujarat easy to articulate but morally and intellectually difficult to endorse. I began to argue with people I encountered—courageously or foolhardily, depending on your point of view—suggesting that their ideas were not supported by their own histories or the simple facts of life in the present. Nothing I said seemed to make a drop of difference. That I thought it might now seems arrogant and naïve. I was particularly troubled by religious chauvinism and a view of the good life in which the earth’s climate had unquestioned capacity to absorb unbound consumerist ambition.
The political turn in Gujarat rightly attracted a great deal of liberal academic commentary, but to me it only seemed to counterintuitively reaffirm the nationalist position by adopting secularist, smug and sardonic perspectives—positions despised by the well-trained nationalist. The environmentalist argument in Gujarat has seldom gone beyond the fringe.
My merchant friend tolerated my questioning of his world with a warm and patient smile. He encouraged debate but did not give ground. In the end, we stopped talking to one another for a few years—with good reason. His brother had some translucent stones that he believed to be uncut diamonds. He entrusted me with a couple to take to England for ‘testing’. Sadly, I either lost them or they were stolen from a hotel room while I was in Bombay. When I returned to India some time later, the stones were not at the forefront of my mind. My initial silence, followed by the compensatory story of having simply lost a possible fortune, confirmed that I was no more trustworthy than the local jewellers who claimed the stones were not diamonds.
Perhaps I am a slow learner, but sometime in my early forties I began to realise that facts and logic are not what make people believe in certain directions. What used to be called ‘culture’ has a place, but so do convenience, apathy and fear. I checked out of the reality-based world and moved to occupy a realm given shape by arguments and narratives where one reality could be overturned by another—at least if the conditions were correct, or enough force was deployed to change the feel of the game. When you view the world like this, it is easier to understand (and operate within).
Many of us believe we are evidence-based creatures, however provincial our compasses. The more I have engaged in research in Gujarat, the less confidence I have in such claims. In the realms of politics and ideas, the fundamental truths that bring communities of believers together are akin to what some thinkers have called the ‘big lie’. The lie that needs to be told to sustain all else.
If Hindus said spiteful and ‘untrue’ things about Muslims or Christians, there was no place in the Gujarat of those times for debate. That, I realised later, was the point. Such comments are not about crude versions of ‘truth’ but directly reflect community in action: making moral and righteous boundaries by demonising and debasing others. This simple move reinforces internal ideas of purity and the threat of external danger—and significantly creates a vote bank in the process. In this, Gujarat is little different to many other places; think of the unfathomable difference of views in the Trump-Biden version of the US, or Lula-Bolsonaro arguing over Brazil, or the phantasmagoria of the Great British Brexit debate. Caught in spells, enchanted by ourselves, we generally believe that we are doing the right things and the others are deluded or foolish. The human condition really is extraordinary and fascinating. If you think about it hard enough, then you may even want to study sociology.
LOOKING BACK, TWO things stand out from the crowd of personalities, critical events and mixed emotions of the time I spent in Gujarat: Narendra Modi and concrete. These two forces—shorthand here for neo-liberal nationalism and a growth-led vision of development—have allied to bring about a fantastic transformation. Since coming to power in the aftermath of the 2001 earthquake, Modi set to work on creating a society sympathetic to his political project; some have called it the ‘laboratory of Hindutva’.
I lived in Bhuj at the time that Modi was a very regular visitor to the town. He came to inaugurate new buildings, he endorsed the commerce of the bazaar and the Hinduism of some temples, and embraced the beauty of the hill garden. Modi had clearly been moved by the destruction of the earthquake and wanted to oversee recovery. He wanted to build back better, but he also wanted to build back different.
There had been the earlier Advani-Mahajan Toyota Rath Yatra from Somnath in 1990 that changed the rules of political message-making and emboldened the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). A little more than a decade later, Modi introduced the term ‘Godhra’ to popular language, shorthand for injustice against Hindus coupled with public and mass revenge on Muslims—in which the state’s role was between complicit and supine.
Back then, Modi also gave freedom to men like Pravin Togadia, then the general secretary of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, to whip up hatred by saying outrageous things on public platforms. One of the darkest memories I have of that time is attending a rally with a female Muslim academic and listening to Togadia fulminate about hanging jihadis. Suresh Mehta, the former moderate BJP chief minister, was also there and was clearly shocked. There was iron in the language, coupled to palpable excitement about change and to the new confidence of religiously inflected politics.
As Modi’s office matured, and his mandate grew stronger, his government set about reforming school curricula, introducing new heroes and villains in the history books and renaming streets and institutions. Modi’s men were interested in ideology and ideas but took a material and populist approach to messaging. The Gujarat International Finance Tec-City between Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar, the waterfront development of Ahmedabad, the smart city of Dholera in Saurashtra and the Statue of Unity featuring Sardar Patel—now the world’s tallest man—are all narrative interventions with concrete, millions of tonnes of it.
CONCRETE WAS KEY to the reconstruction of Kutch. There were big statements made with roads, hospitals and theme parks, but everyone was to have a part of the new concrete world. The earthquake bumped life into suburbs, industry and service, and the consumer economy. The old ways of clustered caste neighbourhoods succumbed, in part, to the planners’ metrics of population density and building height. The detached house with boundary walls became the new Gujarat standard. Concrete became the measure of progress.
The shock of the disaster allowed for work to progress apace on industrial corridors, port-led development schemes, roads and power infrastructures. The region was wired and cemented to the nation and the national economy. With the boom came people from all over India to prosper on the new economic frontier, then India’s Wild West. With them came national languages and cosmopolitanism characterised by the civility of indifference; without sentiment, care or even interest for the land, landscape and old ways.
I AM UNASHAMEDLY nostalgic for the life in Kutch before the earthquake—although I have been repeatedly told by people I hold dear that as a foreigner I have no right to be. There was, of course, a relative innocence in relation to the suffering of mass death, but the place was far from a sleepy backwater. There was living history in the towns and villages and a far-flung global population, who throughout the nineteenth and early centuries, formed caste and religious diasporas. Their legacies, charities and places of worship and pilgrimage gave Kutch a distinct character. The deities of Sindh and Rajasthan intertwined with local mythology, identity politics and institutions.
As Modi concreted over Gujarat, double-digit growth was the order of the day. The ghosts of the past—divergent regional identity, language, caste —were buried under the foundations. The old ways succumbed, sealed beneath screed. The ports of Kandla and Mundra expanded rapidly, demolishing the history, monuments and buildings of mercantile achievement and local success. Industry ribboned along highways, obliterating ecosystems and nomadic pathways. Electricity was produced in shocking quantities from low-quality Australian coal burned on what were mangroves. Levels of traffic accelerated to new norms of congestion as the supreme consumer good ‘mobility’ became mainstream. On the back of all this, Modi’s provincial mandate became national and the rest, so to speak, is history.
Against this backdrop, I inform you with profound regret that the friend whose brother’s possible diamonds I lost in Bombay recently drowned himself. He chose to do so in the pond where we used to walk around on Sunday evenings, a focal point of the town and place of public merriment. It was debt that got the better of him. At least for one crucial moment, what he owed must have seemed more shameful than leaving his wife and daughter forever.
A local television news camera captured his body being pulled from the water, his arms flopping like Captain Ahab speared on the whale. His stressed-thin corpse heavy, without life. The pictures came to me without warning on my mobile phone. Two weeks earlier, another friend in Kutch had asked me for a loan, I had said “No”. Two weeks after the suicide, yet another friend in Kutch asked me for a loan. I said “Yes”.
I have no idea how many, or how deep, the middle classes of Gujarat are in debt. The COVID-19 pandemic and a global economic downturn cannot have helped, but friends were busily over-extending themselves for years before. Gujarat is known for its enterprise, but with that sometimes comes the trickier qualities of risk and speculation. Think also gambling and a love of ‘numbers’ (a form of lottery), instant stock trading apps, pyramid schemes and a host of other addictive financial opportunities.
Through the pandemic, think-tanks and policy institutes produced numbers showing how large the financial loss was for India’s middle classes. The Washington-based Pew Research Center claimed that the middle class shrank by thirty-two million in 2020. I wondered glibly where they had all gone. They had not, of course, gone anywhere—their incomes had.
The person I recently loaned money to needed cash to pay off an informal creditor, who had to satisfy a creditor of his own. This friend had struggled with hospital bills during the pandemic and a downturn in his business. He also had a lifestyle based on unregulated borrowing—large slabs of residential concrete, regular payments to speculative land investment projects (he purchased ‘plots’ on which more concrete could be poured), cars, domestic help, office space. The downturn hit him faster than he could rationalise—even had he wanted to, or been able to, cut back. He has always been a Modi man—both in the nationalism and the concrete dreams—but I am not convinced his loyalty has produced beneficial results.
Pew focused on formal numbers, but all the cash I refer to here is informal—friends, acquaintances, syndicates, asset gamblers, strongmen, mafia raj. Rakesh robbed to pay Rajesh. Hetal will pay a higher rate of interest than Kamal will access from a syndicate, so Kamal borrows to make money from Hetal. And so on.
I look back over the body being dragged from a lake to reflect on my time in Gujarat. I had heard the words ‘nationalism’ and ‘development’ endlessly since 1997. Was I actually hearing stories about speculation and debt? I could certainly see the endless juggle, the bluff and double bluff required to keep an ever-expanding network of creditors and allies warm and onside. This is probably where the real story of India’s indebted classes lies—not in the Pew numbers but in private and informal networks. It also occurs to me that nationalism and concrete dreams will have to be accounted for one day. I also want to clear my name: I did not steal the stones that might have been diamonds; I lost them and, yes, perhaps I really did lose a fortune. I have also lost a friend.
