Heritage city

An ode to Ahmedabad-India’s first World Heritage City

city-walls The city walls of Ahmedabad in 1866 | via Commons

At first we thought Ahmedabad would never make it as a Unesco Heritage City.

It did.

Immediately, even before the official announcement was made, there was a sense of gaiety and pride all over the city.

As most of my literary work is inspired from around Ahmedabad, I am happy to hear the news. But it has also confused me and left me with many questions. Why is that there is no official announcement, except that I see crowds celebrating around Jama Masjid, citizens pledging to keep the city clean, announcements for painting competitions and Heritage walks, as though we were tourists in our own city. I assumed that the civic authorities would appoint well-known conservation architects to spruce up the city and make it into a real Heritage City. I want to know which parts of the city would get the heritage tag—is it the the entire old city or just some parts.

In the fifties, Ahmedabad was known as a city of textile mills.

It also has the legacy of Gandhi Ashram, ancient Islamic architecture like Sarkhej Roza, temples, stepwells, bird feeders known as Chabutro, Pols and Havelis made with intricate wood carvings.

Besides, the world’s best known architects came to Ahmedabad on invitation and gave a new flavour to the city with buildings like I.I.M. and Sanskar Kendra.

Ahmedabad is a magical city.

It has Shaking Minarets and a Walking Mosque, along with many more such sites.

It is a city without walls, but is still known as the Walled City. Here, there are open bazaars which lend certain richness to our life.

Ahmedabad is now a highly developed city, but still retains the quality of an overgrown village. Between the malls and high rise apartments, you get glimpses of various communities in traditional dresses, along with their cattle and other animals. For a change, you can also see them on motorbikes, wearing jeans instead of ‘dhotis,’ sport shoes with a tell-tale turban and ear-studs.

Our traffic moves along with camels, cows, dogs and elephants, as kites and vultures patrol the skies. Lines of langurs sit on walls, as bee-eaters, sunbirds, peafowl and a variety of smaller birds can be spotted in the green patches of the city, which also attracts a variety of migratory water- birds during winter, like Rosy Pastors, Flamingos and Pelicans.

And I wonder why nobody has so far, lit a lamp for Goddess Laxmi in the central arch of Teen Darwaza, where Jabbar bhai’s widow sits, waiting for donations, but protecting the eternal light. In this new age celebration, we also seem to forget such amazing stories connected with the city, that Goddess Laxmi still resides in the old city of Ahmedabad and that the idea of creating Ahmedabad was conceived by Sufi saint Sheikh Ahmed Khattu, whose tomb is at Sarkhej. There are many more such little stories, where we need to light lamps for these visionaries and make sure that the Nagarkhana at Badshah-no-Hajiro comes alive and reverberates with the sound of drums. The old city of Ahmedabad is our living heritage and needs to be celebrated with the revival of memory.

These stories are the soul of the city.

(Esther David is an Ahmedabad-based author and Sahitya Akademi Award winner)

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Topics : #Gujarat

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