In the Shadow of the Mill

Abstract

This book traces the socio–spatial transformation of Ahmedabad's worker neighbourhoods over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries - during which the city witnessed dramatic and disturbing transformations. It follows the multiple histories of Ahmedabad's labour landscapes from the times when the city acquired prominence as an important site of Gandhian political activity and as a key centre of the textile industry, through the decades of industrial collapse and periods of sectarian violence in the recent years. Taking the working-class neighbourhood as a scale of social practice, the question of urban change is examined along two axes of investigation: the transformation of local political configurations and forms of political mediation and the shifts in the social geography of the neighbourhood as reflected in the changing regimes of property.