New Lives in Anand: Building a Muslim Hub in Western India

New Lives in Anand

Padma Kaimal

K. Sivaramakrishnan

Anand A. Yang

Series Editors

New Lives in Anand

Building a Muslim Hub in Western India

•

Sanderien Verstappen

University of Washington Press

Seattle

New Lives in Anand was made possible in part by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional support from the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna.

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Contents

Preface: On the Road to Anand

Map of Gujarat and Surroundings

Map of Anand Town and Surroundings

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Reorientation in a Post-Violence Landscape

Chapter 1

Regional Orientations: The Charotar Sunni Vohras

Chapter 2

Rural-Urban Transitions: From the Village to the Segregated Town

Chapter 3

Uprooted and at Home: Transnational Routes of (No) Return

Chapter 4

Getting Around: Middle-Class Muslims in a Regional Town

Conclusion

New Lives, New Concepts

Appendix: Tables

List of Characters

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Preface

On the Road to Anand

On a hot day in September 2011, we step into an old and not-so-white car. The day’s journey leads to the town of Anand from the nearby city of Ahmedabad. Behind the wheel during the two-hour trip is Amrapali Merchant, Professor of Sociology at the Sardar Patel University in Anand.¹ She takes the normal (free) road—not the new expressway that has a toll booth—and in doing so displays her impressive driving skills: she overtakes buses, trucks, two-wheelers, and buffalo-drawn carts, while successfully avoiding bumping into speeding cars, stray dogs, and the occasional cow that strolls onto the road. The rickshaws and buses we pass are packed—elbows stick out from windows. Food stalls and tea shops along the road abound. On either side of the road are the tobacco, ginger, and potato fields of the Charotar region, cold-storage facilities where farmers store their produce, small-scale factories and processing workshops that cater to the agricultural economy, and the occasional air-conditioned restaurant. It has rained and the road is muddy, so we keep the windows closed.

As the hustle and bustle of a rural road unfolds before us, Amrapali points at landmarks, tells stories, and shares her life philosophy inspired by Jainism. Finally, we enter Anand, cross the overbridge (an overpass) and head toward the main road that is the pulse of Anand: Anand-Vidyanagar Road. Just before the overpass, as we enter the town, Amrapali suddenly asks me, What is your religion? When I mention my Catholic family in the Netherlands, she continues:

All religions are pathways to God. Now, look outside the car. These houses you see weren’t there before. This was just agricultural land. In 2002, there were riots here. Then, there was a lot of killing in the villages around here, and so many Muslims were murdered. After that, Muslims left their village and came here. Maybe 50,000 Muslims are now living in Anand. They occupy the gates of the town. Whenever you enter Anand, you pass Muslims.

As we cross the overpass, I look out the window but do not see much that indicates a Muslim presence (figure p.1). The sights that strike me on that day are the construction along the road, some churches—which stand out from the landscape due to their height and whiteness—and the blue patches of tents (which, I learned later, are the temporary homes of temporary laborers—both Hindu and Muslim—working in Anand’s thriving construction industry).

Figure P.1. View from the overpass, Anand. (Photo by the author, 2014.)

As we continue our journey through Anand, into the spaces I learn to perceive later as Hindu areas, Amrapali points out vegetable markets, the town hall, and the Sony store, where she stops to buy a computer cable. We pass the statue of Bhaikaka, the hero-engineer who is credited with designing the spacious and airy campus area of Vallabh Vidyanagar. Vidyanagar, as residents call it, is an educational hub of Gujarat, home to the Sardar Patel University and its many affiliated colleges and schools, and attracts students from all over India and Nepal. This is our destination. At Sardar Patel University I register to start my research. Amrapali makes sure I am assigned housing on campus.

It was initially through the directions of non-Muslims that I was able to see the Muslim spaces of the town from the outside. Like many other researchers who have studied the Charotar region, my research started with Hindu and Jain contacts. I could have remained in the campus area, which is seen by Muslims as a Hindu area, although Muslims also participate in it as students, staff members, and consumers. I could also have accepted the invitations of Hindu friends,² who generously offered to host me during my research. But I had come with the aim of studying lesser-known perspectives. After two months, I found a Vohra family willing to rent out the apartment above their house to me, and I moved into the Muslim area that I had seen from the car window on my first day in Anand.

The stories I tell here stem from my experiences of living in Anand for ten months in 2011–2012, with repeat visits in 2014 and 2017, and from interviews and observations with overseas Gujarati Muslims in the United Kingdom (in 2012 and 2016) and United States (in 2015 and 2018). The aim of this research was to study one of India’s Muslim areas in the making, and to see it from the perspective of those who participate in its making. During most of the research period, I lived in a housing society described by its residents as relatively well-to-do within the economically heterogeneous Muslim area. Housing societies (a group of neighboring houses that, like a subdivision, share joint regulations) tend to develop a feeling of commonality, in that residents are broadly aware of who their co-residents are and develop ideas about their shared characteristics. The residents of this housing society, which had twenty-four houses, described it as middle-class territory. They self-identified as middle-class people, and as Muslims. While a few neighboring housing societies consisted of Christians, most of the residents of the surrounding housing societies were also middle-class Muslims.

My encounters with this neighborhood started with my landlady, Shahinben Vahora (a pseudonym), and Minaz Pathan, a young woman who worked with me as a research assistant, both of whom had their own local networks. Shahinben no longer lives in Anand and has since moved to Australia, but at that time she worked as an English teacher in a Catholic school funded by the state government, and her husband ran a small business as a vendor on a pushcart. Her two sons had moved to Australia a few years before I arrived, and their remittances had been used to build an apartment on top of the house, as accommodation during their visits. The apartment became available for rent soon after the younger son’s visit had ended. From here, I started participating in the social life of the neighborhood and in the regional and transnational networks of my neighbors.

The neighborhood study was shaped by participation in neighborhood life, interviews, and a survey I conducted in 147 Muslim households (Survey A).³ Besides walking around with Shahinben and Minaz, I visited organizations in the neighborhood and became a frequent visitor to a nearby primary school and a health clinic. It did not take long for my new neighbors and acquaintances to start inviting me to accompany them to places near and far: a shop, a school, a workplace, or the home of a relative. Through these invitations I became involved in a variety of movements and flows. The neighborhood study grew into a regional study by following my new acquaintances to the places that mattered to them in the surrounding villages and towns, and partly by developing my own contacts with Muslim associations.⁴ These journeys—on foot, on two-wheelers, or in cars or shared rickshaws—brought many topics, destinations, and pathways under the scope of conversation.

During these encounters, I also met overseas Indians from the United Kingdom and United States, visiting their region of origin. Some of these visitors were very busy, and they granted my project only a few minutes of their time; others welcomed my company and took me along for several days while they were arranging their affairs. As the transnational life of Muslims in Anand centers mostly on the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia, I conducted follow-up research in two of these locations, following the leads of the British and American visitors I had met in Gujarat, who supported me in continuing my research among their families and communities abroad.⁵ In these ways, I gradually came to see how the neighborhood was embedded in the town, the region, and the transnational networks that surround it.

Map 1. Gujarat and surroundings, with the Charotar region highlighted. (Map by Ben Pease.)

Map 2. Anand town and surroundings. (Map by Ben Pease.)

Acknowledgments

This book could be written because of many people in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States, who welcomed me into their lives and shared their stories. I thank all of them, particularly Roshan and Yasin Vahora; Abedaben Vahora; Minaz Pathan; Rahila, Selma, and Bibi Vahora; Suhanna and Rukhsar Pathan; Ilyas Vahora; Mansurisir, Subhan, Sajid, and Tanzima Vahora; Asif Thakor; Ayub and Ishaq Vohra; Hifzur Rehman; Rashid, Salim, and Mohammed Vohra; Dr. Gulamnabi Vahora; Yusuf and Mumtaz Bora; Dr. Parvez Vora; Firoz Vohra; and their families.

The research was conducted in two phases. The first phase (2010–2016) was conducted as a project within the Provincial Globalisation research program, hosted at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR) at the University of Amsterdam and the National Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) in Bangalore, and funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO/WOTRO). The second phase (2017–2019) took place during fellowships at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) at Leiden University and the University of Tübingen, with travel funding by the Asian Modernities and Traditions fund at Leiden University (AMT) and the Moving Matters research group at the University of Amsterdam. The Open Access publication of the book was made possible by the Mellon Foundation, with additional support from the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna.

The person who introduced me to central Gujarat is Mario Rutten, whose lifelong commitment to regionally rooted yet transnational ethnography proved contagious. Between 2007 and 2011, Mario and I collaborated with Isabelle Makay to make the documentary film Living Like a Common Man, about Gujarati youth in London and their parents in Gujarat. After I joined the Provincial Globalisation research program in 2010, I developed my own line of research in Gujarat, with input from Mario, Carol Upadhya, and many other scholars and colleagues. Very sadly, Mario fell ill and died in 2015.

During the second research phase, the IIAS and the University of Tübingen provided a highly supportive academic climate in which I could conduct further fieldwork and write this monograph. At IIAS, I thank Nira Wickramasinghe, Sanjukta Sunderason, Erik de Maaker, Ward Berenschot, Luisa Steur, Tina Harris, Britta Ohm, Priya Swamy, Roshni Sengupta, Bindu Menon, Erica van Bentem, and Philippe Peycam. In Tübingen, I thank all the members of the Anthropology Department, especially Karin Polit and Eva Ambos. My writing buddies included Radhika Gupta, Raheel Dhattiwala, and, especially, Willy Sier.

In the revision phase, Rosanne Rutten was the first to read the entire book. She responded with substantial comments on each chapter. Anand Yang invited me to the book writing workshop of the American Institute of Indian Studies and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies at the South Asia Conference in Madison, where I received further comments on some of the chapters. Chritralekha Manohar and Carole Pearce helped to prepare the manuscript for review, and Lorri Hagman directed the peer review and editorial development process. I thank them all for their generous input.

Introduction

Reorientation in a Post-Violence Landscape

2002. A line of trucks traverses a road in central Gujarat from the village of Ode to the small town of Anand, a distance of twenty-five kilometers. They halt at an open piece of land in the northeastern outskirts of Anand. They unload their passengers—refugees who have survived a violent attack on their homes a few hours earlier, when a mob entered their village carrying kerosene and matches, setting fire to houses after locking them from the outside, and burning twenty-three people alive. Ode is one of the villages in which Muslims are targeted during Gujarat’s anti-Muslim pogroms, organized by militant Hindu nationalist organizations in the run-up to the Gujarat state elections. Of the Muslims who escape the fire, many seek refuge in Anand, in a hastily set up camp alongside hundreds of other refugees, whose numbers swell into thousands during the following months. All the refugees have arrived from nearby villages. All of them are Muslim. Many of them belong to the regional Muslim community of Charotar Sunni Vohras. Some return to their villages afterward; many stay in Anand. In the fifteen years after 2002, many other Muslims leave their villages and move to Anand, too.

2016. In a living room in London, photographs of Anand’s 100 Feet Road appear on a flat-screen TV. The pictures are taken from the balcony of a new flat in Anand, recently purchased by an overseas Gujarati Muslim family for a vacation home. The family has just returned from another trip to Anand, and enthusiastically describe Anand’s rapid development and the comfort offered by some of its newly constructed houses. The atmosphere is cheerful, their delight palpable. While the family comments on the new curtains and furniture in their holiday home, I wonder how a neighborhood grown out of violence and displacement has evolved into a vacation destination within the span of a decade. This family has no prior history in Anand—most of their family is in Mumbai, and they trace their roots to a village in Gujarat that did not see violence in 2002.

2017. A middle-aged Vohra woman drives around Anand on her two-wheeler. She talks about how the town has changed since 2002. The 100 Feet Road, she explains, was considered to be the border between Hindus and Muslims in 2002, when the police had stood guard along this road to prevent residents from crossing it. The border is moving, she adds, pointing southward. Hindus and Christians have been selling their houses, and Muslim buyers from the nearby villages are willing to pay high prices for them even now, fifteen years after the pogroms. New housing societies are being constructed on the agricultural land around the town to meet the housing demand. Pointing around her, she says, This area is very lucky for us [Muslims]. Everybody thinks that. This area is very lucky. This is a good area.

How do people get on with their lives after an episode of violence? How, in the process, are new spaces and societies made? This book addresses these questions. It describes the long-term transformations that have occurred in a town where, according to the residents, nothing happened in 2002, while the surrounding villages were on fire. It shows how this town grew into an important focal point for Muslims in central Gujarat, a safe place, a lucky place, a regional center for the local Muslim community of Charotar Sunni Vohras, and a place to which overseas Gujarati Muslims return. Just as the villagers found a new home in the town, their relatives living abroad did the same, buying houses and land in a town that previously had little meaning for them. In a rural region undergoing rapid urbanization, these relocations have been accompanied by the creation of new rural-urban imaginaries, in which the rural is seen as primarily a Hindu domain, whereas the urban—or rather the urban outskirts—has come to be seen as a Muslim domain. Amidst this changing landscape, people’s sense of direction, of belonging, and prospects has also been reconfigured. These relocations and reimaginings are viewed here through the lens of center-making and the broader social implications through the lens of reorientation.

Representing Indian Muslims

This book can be read as a reconsideration of the available vocabulary with which Muslim spaces and experiences are described, and as an invitation to expand this vocabulary. The public and political stakes in representing Muslims are high, not just in India but around the world, where stereotypical representations dominate. With the growing suppression of minority voices in India in recent years, information about how Muslims understand themselves has been limited even further.

The representation of Muslims as non-Indian and as not belonging in India is crucial to the Hindu nationalist agenda, which consists of a majoritarian and exclusivist interpretation of nationalism. In Hindu nationalist articulations, Muslims are represented as stereotypical outsiders against which the nation has come to be defined. This story has grown in popularity since the 1990s (Hansen 1999) and has consolidated into a political agenda that commentators have compared with fascism (Banaji 2013). In Gujarat, the state that has been described as a testing ground (laboratory) for the Hindu nation, Hindu nationalism been couched in the language of asmita, or Gujarati pride—an interpretation that makes Gujarat and Gujaratis synonymous with Hindus and antithetical to Muslims (Chandrani 2013; Ibrahim 2008). While this language resonates with forms of Islamophobia that exist in Europe and the United States, it operates in distinctive registers, for example, when the Gujarati ideal of Hindu vegetarianism is projected against a stereotype of Muslims as (disgustingly) meat-eating (Ghassem-Fachandi 2010, 2012). Stereotypical representations of the supposedly threatening or evil character of Muslims can be used to legitimize anti-Muslim violence during electoral campaigns in order to divide the electorate along religious lines.

Another representation of Muslims highlights their marginalization. The social, political, and spatial marginalization of Muslims has been well recorded in a multitude of research reports, some written by committees that had been established by the Indian government itself (Sachar et al. 2006). Indian Muslims are excluded from holding power in the state apparatus; they are underrepresented in the judiciary, the administration, and the police, marginalized within the formal sector of employment, and are only minimally present among salaried public sector workers (Gayer and Jaffrelot 2012, 4–6, 314). They have also been at the receiving end of violent attacks on their lives and property. A particularly gruesome wave of anti-Muslim violence took place in Gujarat in 2002, during which mobs of men travelled