Ahmedabad

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Ahmedabad stands on the banks of the Sabarmati River in western India, and on the 26th of February 1411, a sultan put a stake in the ground at a spot called Manek Burj and declared it the foundation of a new capital city. That sultan was Ahmad Shah, and the city he named after himself would grow over six centuries into a place of more than five million people, the most populous city in the state of Gujarat and the fifth most populous in all of India. The stadium at Motera can fit 132,000 spectators, making it the largest in the world. Old Ahmedabad was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in July 2017. Time magazine placed the city on its list of the world's fifty greatest places in 2022. Yet the same city that earned those distinctions also lived through the deadliest earthquakes, the worst communal riots, and a textile collapse that stripped tens of thousands of workers of their livelihoods. What is this city, and how did it become what it is? The answers reach back more than a thousand years, to a Bhil tribal settlement the Persian historian al-Biruni wrote about, a place called Ashaval.

• 2. From Ashaval to Ahmedabad

  ›

  Karna, the Chaulukya ruler of Anhilwara, waged a successful campaign against the Bhil king of Ashaval in the 11th century and established a city on the Sabarmati's banks he called Karnavati. Solanki rule held for roughly two centuries before the Vaghela dynasty of Dholka took over, and then the Delhi Sultanate absorbed Gujarat in the 14th century. By the early 15th century, the local Muslim governor Zafar Khan Muzaffar broke away, crowned himself Muzaffar Shah I, and founded the Muzaffarid dynasty. His grandson Sultan Ahmed Shah inherited that power and made a pivotal choice: he selected a forested stretch along the Sabarmati for a brand-new walled capital. He laid its foundation at Manek Burj on a Thursday, the second day of Dhu al-Qi'dah in Hijri year 813, and formally chose the site on the 4th of March 1411. One tradition says he named the city after himself; another holds that he named it after four Muslim saints in the area, all of whom shared the name Ahmed. The Hindu saint Maneknath, a legendary 15th-century figure, is said to have intervened to help Ahmed Shah build Bhadra Fort that same year, and his descendants still perform puja and hoist the flag at Manek Burj on the city's foundation day and during Vijayadashami. By 1487, Mahmud Begada, the great-great-grandson of Ahmad Shah, had enclosed the city with an outer wall ten kilometres in circumference, twelve gates, 189 bastions, and more than 6,000 battlements. Humayun briefly occupied the city in 1535 after capturing Champaner, but the Muzaffarids retook it. In 1573, the Mughal emperor Akbar conquered Gujarat, and Ahmedabad became one of the empire's centres for the textile trade. Textiles from the city reached as far as Europe during Mughal rule, and Shah Jahan spent what the sources describe as the prime of his life in the city, commissioning the Moti Shahi Mahal in Shahibaug. The Deccan Famine of 1630-32 reached Ahmedabad, as did further famines in 1650 and 1686. The Mughals held the city as a provincial headquarters until 1758, when they surrendered it to the Marathas.

• 3. Cotton, Railways, and Gandhi

  ›

  On the 30th of May 1861, a man named Ranchhodlal Chhotalal founded the Ahmedabad Spinning and Weaving Company Limited, the first Indian-owned textile mill. More mills followed, and by 1905 there were roughly 33 of them in the city. A railway link between Ahmedabad and Mumbai had been established in 1864 by the Bombay, Baroda, and Central India Railway, connecting northern and southern trade routes through the city. By the time of the First World War, the textile industry was expanding rapidly, boosted in part by Mahatma Gandhi's Swadeshi movement, which promoted Indian-made goods. The city's output earned it a nickname: the Manchester of India. Then Gandhi himself arrived. In 1915 he established the Kochrab Ashram near Paldi, followed in 1917 by the Satyagraha Ashram on the Sabarmati itself, later known as Sabarmati Ashram. These became nerve centres of India's independence movement. During the mass protests against the Rowlatt Act in 1919, textile workers burned down 51 government buildings across the city. In the 1920s, workers and teachers went on strike over civil rights, pay, and working conditions. In 1930, Gandhi set off from his ashram on the Dandi March, initiating the Salt Satyagraha. Peaceful protests rendered the city's institutions effectively inoperative in the early 1930s. The movement surged again in 1942 during the Quit India campaign. The British East India Company had formally taken the city in 1818 during the Third Anglo-Maratha War, established a military cantonment by 1824, and set up a municipal government by 1858. A Navajivan Publishing House, founded in 1919 by Gandhi himself, became part of the city's institutional fabric. Gandhi also founded Gujarat Vidyapith in 1920, near the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium; it later became a deemed university in 1963.

• 4. Partition, Decline, and Rupture

  ›

  Independence in 1947 brought violent communal clashes between Hindus and Muslims to Ahmedabad. Hindu migrants from Pakistan poured into the city, transforming both its population and its economy. By 1960 the city had passed one million people. On the 1st of May 1960, it was chosen as the capital of the newly formed state of Gujarat, following the partition of the State of Bombay. Educational and research institutions multiplied during this period, and heavy and chemical industries diversified the economic base. Then in the late 1970s, the capital shifted to the newly built city of Gandhinagar, and a prolonged decline set in. The 1974 Navnirman agitation began as a protest against a 20% hike in hostel food fees at the L.D. College of Engineering, but it escalated into a movement to remove the then chief minister of Gujarat, Chimanbhai Patel. In the 1980s, anti-reservation protests in 1981 and 1985 brought violent caste clashes. In the mid-1970s and early 1980s, the textile mills that had underpinned much of the city's wealth faced competition from automation and domestic speciality looms. Dozens of mills shut down, leaving between 40,000 and 50,000 workers without income. Many moved into informal settlements in the city centre, and the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation lost a large part of its tax base while demand for services climbed. The 2001 Gujarat earthquake struck next, and in Ahmedabad alone up to 50 multi-storey buildings collapsed, killing 752 people. The following year, three days of violence between Hindus and Muslims across Gujarat spread into the city. On the 28th of February 2002, in the eastern neighbourhood of Chamanpura, 69 people were killed at the Gulbarg Society in what became known as the Gulbarg Society massacre. Refugee camps set up around the city sheltered 50,000 Muslims, along with some smaller Hindu camps. In 2008, seventeen bomb blasts struck the city; the terrorist group Harkat-ul-Jihad claimed responsibility.

• 5. Architecture Across Centuries

  ›

  Under Ahmed Shah, builders in Ahmedabad fused Hindu craftsmanship with Persian architecture, producing a style the sources describe as Indo-Saracenic. Many of the city's mosques were built in this mode. The Sidi Saiyyed Mosque, constructed in the final year of the Sultanate of Gujarat, is entirely arched and features ten stone latticework windows known as jali on its side and rear arches. Private mansions called haveli from the same era bear elaborate carvings. After independence, Ahmedabad became one of the most architecturally documented cities in India. Louis Kahn designed the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. Le Corbusier designed the Shodhan and Sarabhai Villas, the Sanskar Kendra, and the Mill Owners' Association Building. Frank Lloyd Wright designed the administrative building and the Calico Dome for Calico Mills. B. V. Doshi came from Paris to oversee Le Corbusier's work and then set up the School of Architecture, now CEPT University. His own local buildings include Sangath, Amdavad ni Gufa, Tagore Memorial Hall, and the School of Architecture itself. Charles Correa, who became Doshi's partner, designed the Gandhi Ashram. Christopher Charles Benninger's first professional work, the Alliance Francaise, stands in the Ellis Bridge area. The city's pol system in Old Ahmedabad, a pattern of closely clustered housing groups built around caste, profession, or religion, helped earn the historic core its UNESCO World Heritage designation. The first pol in Ahmedabad was named Mahurat Pol. The colonial period saw the western bank of the Sabarmati develop after Ellis Bridge was constructed in 1875, and a later expansion added modern commercial and residential districts around roads like Ashram Road and C.G. Road.

• 6. Living With Heat and Water

  ›

  Ahmedabad sits at 53 metres above sea level in a hot semi-arid zone. Average summer temperatures reach a maximum of 43 degrees Celsius, and the highest recorded temperature in the city, measured on the 20th of May 2016, reached 48 degrees Celsius. The Sabarmati River, which splits the city into its eastern and western halves, would dry to a trickle each summer before water from the Narmada River was diverted into it through the Sabarmati River Front Project. A heat wave in May 2010 reached 46.8 degrees Celsius and claimed hundreds of lives. In response, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation partnered with an international coalition of health and academic groups and developed what the source describes as the first comprehensive plan in Asia to address the threat of extreme heat to public health, the Ahmedabad Heat Action Plan. The plan works through community participation, building public awareness of heat risks, training medical and community workers, and coordinating an interagency emergency response. On the cleaner air front, in 2001 the Central Pollution Control Board ranked Ahmedabad the most polluted city in India out of 85 surveyed. The Gujarat Pollution Control Board then offered autorickshaw drivers a 10,000 rupee incentive to convert all 37,733 vehicles to compressed natural gas. By 2008, Ahmedabad had improved to 50th on the same pollution ranking. Three lakes lie within the city limits: Kankaria, Vastrapur, and Chandola. Kankaria, the oldest, was built in 1451 by the Sultan of Gujarat, Qutb-ud-din. Chandola covers 1,200 hectares and hosts cormorants, painted storks, and spoonbills. In 2010, plans were announced to develop another 34 lakes in and around the city.

• 7. Sport, Food, and Street Life

  ›

  The Narendra Modi Stadium, originally the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium built in 1982 and also known as the Motera Stadium, seats 132,000 people and is the largest stadium in the world. It hosted Cricket World Cup matches in 1987, 1996, 2011, and 2023, including the 2023 final. The Gujarat Titans, the city's IPL franchise, won their first IPL title in 2022 in front of their home crowd at that stadium. Geet Sethi, raised in Ahmedabad, won the World Professional Billiards Championship five times and received the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna, India's highest sporting award. The Sabarmati Marathon has run annually since 2011, with categories including a 5 km wheelchair run and a separate 5 km run for the visually disabled. The 2016 Kabaddi World Cup was held at The Arena by Transtadia, a renovated Kankaria football ground. In the 2020s, Ahmedabad has been put forward as India's proposed host for the 2036 Summer Olympics; the Gujarat government has identified 33 sites in and around the city for Olympic infrastructure. On the food side, the Gujarati thali was first served commercially by Chandvilas Hotel in 1900. The first all-vegetarian Pizza Hut in the world opened in Ahmedabad, and KFC prepares vegetarian items in a separate kitchen. Manek Chowk, a square named after the Hindu saint Baba Maneknath, serves as a vegetable market in the morning, a jewellery market in the afternoon, and a sprawling street food bazaar in the evening. Drinking alcohol is legally banned across Gujarat. PETA India named Ahmedabad India's most vegan-friendly city of 2024.

• 8. A City Still Being Built

  ›

  In July 2017 the Government of India declared Old Ahmedabad a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the first such designation for any Indian city. The broader metro area had an estimated gross domestic product of 136.1 billion dollars in 2023. In 2010, Forbes ranked Ahmedabad third among the world's fastest-growing cities of the decade. The Ahmedabad Metro, inaugurated in March 2019, carries around 90,000 riders a day across 40 kilometres of track on two lines. The Janmarg bus rapid transit system, launched in October 2009, runs 325 buses over 19 routes with a daily ridership of 190,000. The Slum Networking Project, known as Parivartan or Change, launched in 1995 and brought legal water, sewage, roads, and electricity to 60 slums covering roughly 13,000 households. It received the 2006 UN-Habitat Dubai International Award for Best Practice. Urban poverty has declined from 28% in 1993-94 to 10% in 2011-12. The city's second-oldest stock exchange closed in 2018. Two pharmaceutical giants, Zydus Lifesciences and Torrent Pharmaceuticals, and the multinational Adani Group have their corporate headquarters here. Dholera International Airport, located 110 kilometres southwest of central Ahmedabad, was under construction and expected to complete its first phase by 2025, a project that would give the city a second air gateway and position it for the scale of ambition that an Olympic bid demands.