The (non-)problem

THE special issue you see before you was born out of an act of allyship. When Seminar decided to put together a number examining the city of Ahmedabad, the editors, with good reason, reached out to one who knows her well. They contacted Tridip Suhrud and asked him to helm this edition. He, however, was of the opinion that this space might better be utilized if it were turned over to other voices – voices carried on the wind, whispering of futures and pasts in languages and scholarship of their own casting. Therefore, he graciously made this issue over to us so that we might tell you of Ahmedabads known and (mostly) un-known; versions, or as Ramanujan1 would prefer ‘tellings’, you might not be as familiar with as certain other canonical ones,2 and worlds you might not have known to look for here because rarely have they been articulated.

In this issue of firsts – most of us are first-time contributors to the ongoing conversation that is Seminar – we decided against the usual ‘Problem’ statement. Instead, we went about designing the issue differently, choosing to seek explorations we felt had something to say to (and sometimes, but always respectfully, across) each other, and to you, as we try to de-and-re-construct the a prioris informing scholarship about this simultaneously fascinating and frustrating city. The ‘problem’ would then fairly write itself, because one thing was certain: despite the newness of method and con/text each contributor brings to this trial of sorts – and we leave it up to you, reader, to decide whether Ahmedabad acquits herself graciously or not – there are a series of long shadows most pieces run into, take cognisance of even as they pointedly avoid them, refer to in passing, or grapple with head-on. These shadows are, unsurprisingly, the looming figure of one Mr. M.K. Gandhi (and the ashram he once willed into being on the ‘other’ side of the then seasonal Sabarmati); the pogrom of 2002 and what living with the fact of its existence might mean for a city-state-people; the schisms of class and caste as they acquire new(er) and (more) insidious forms when they meet neoliberalization; and conversations between centres and peripheries (alongside the recognition that these are dynamic categories, impossible to ‘fix’ or locate permanently).

What does a modern/modernizing Indian city look like, and how can we who encode it by living (in) it each day proceed to adequately decode it?

Several of the articles in this issue employ either narrative ethnographic or overtly autoethnographic methods. Narrative ethnographies, according to Carolyn Ellis, are modes in which the narrative encompasses ‘stories that incorporate the ethnographer’s experiences into the ethnographic descriptions and analysis of others. Here, the emphasis is on the ethnographic study of others... accomplished partly by attending to encounters between the narrator and members of the groups being studied.’3

Autoethnography on the other hand, as the name suggests, is the keen recognition that the ‘auto’ or the self that ‘does’ research, is inevitably the lens that informs it. The method rightfully implicates and makes the researcher account for herself because there is no such thing as research innocent of the researcher. The ‘auto’ brings to bear on the ‘ethnos’ or people/society that forms the heart of the ‘graphein’ or writing process, demonstrating how the self is also a profoundly context sensitive construct. This is an exciting challenge to the notion of ‘objective’ scholarship or its possibility, and explores the close relationship between knowledges/knowledge production and their politics.

Another common theme running through this issue is that in every piece where an author has chosen to gender the city, they have wound up musing on the city-as-woman. Biologically essentialist and erring on the side of binarised gender? Sure, but whether by design or default, all those of us who ‘did’ gender Ahmedabad for the purposes of our investigations, wound up inverting the deeply entrenched masculinist epistemes of mercantile capitalism most closely associated with the city, eschewing them for a more exploratory feminine (and feminist) discursive field.

A dear friend once told me that freedom is never given; it must be occupied. Consider this our act of occupation, as we make you privy to how we wrestle with, think through, write and read against the grain of, and (un)make our worlds in and through and with the curious entity that is Ahmedabad.

HARMONY SIGANPORIA

 

* The Editor would like to express her gratitude to Tridip Suhrud for dreaming up this venture, and bidding her to dream it too.

Footnotes:

1. A.K. Ramanujan, ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation’, in Vinay Dharwadker (ed.) The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1999, pp. 131-160.

2. I’m referring to the scholarship of Achyut Yagnik and Suchitra Sheth (Ahmedabad: From Royal City to Megacity, 2011), Howard Spodek (Ahmedabad: Shock City of 20th-Century India, 2011), Amrita Shah (Ahmedabad: A City in the World, 2016) and Kenneth Gillion (Ahmedabad: A Study in Indian Urban History, 1968) among others, and institutional historiographies such as those on the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, and the commemorative volume, 50 Years of the National Institute of Design: 1962-2011, in 2011.

3. Carolyn Ellis et al, ‘Autoethnography: An Overview’, FQS Forum: Qualitative Social Research 12(1), January 2011.