Ghetto and Suburb

Two possible ways of characterizing a neighborhood that exists on the outskirts of a growing city, and to study the relation of this neighborhood with the rest of the city, are the lenses of the ghetto and the suburb. Both terms have had a rich history in discussions on urban transformation in India. In India, the term “ghettoization” (Gayer and Jaffrelot 2012) is used mainly to describe the displacement of Muslims to marginal spaces; “suburb” (Rao 2013), in contrast, describes distinctly middle-class residential areas on the outskirts of the town. Both terms have some application to explain and describe the formation of a Muslim area in Anand town. Over time, however, I came to recognize not only the value but also the limitations of using these terms. Both terms can be considered as viewpoints, or lenses, that offer relevant insights into the formation and consolidation of Anand’s Muslim area. Neither of them, however, is sufficient in isolation.

Walls and chowkidars (guards) have been a part of South Asian cities long before the term “ghetto” entered the Indian vocabulary. South Asian cities have historically been organized in clusters to establish and consolidate social distinctions. The morphologies of this residential clustering are complex, involving aspects of race, caste, class, and religious identity, as well as regional and language distinctions. Under colonial rule, for example, “white towns” were created (Marshall 2000) along with “hill stations,” in which the colonial elites could enjoy the cool air of the mountains (Kenny 1995). In postcolonial India, strategies to create exclusive spaces for the privileged sections of society still shape residential spaces, but in different ways. For example, municipal governments now build gated communities with world-class amenities for a global corporate class, while demolishing slums and resettling slum dwellers to the outermost peripheries of the city (Goldman and Longhofer 2009). The urban middle class distances itself from the urban poor through gated communities (Falzon 2004), “nuisance talk” (Ghertner 2015) and, on social media, activism around cleaning the city (Doron 2016). The dynamics of caste exclusion, too, continue to shape these urban landscapes, with marginalized Hindu caste groups relegated to specific residential neighborhoods, because they face discrimination in other parts of the city (Banerjee and Mehta 2017).

In Indian newspapers and academic discussions, the term “ghettoization” is used to describe one particular mode of residential segregation, where Muslims are relegated either to the outskirts of the city or to the old inner city. Instances of ghettoization have been recorded in many parts of India, but the state of Gujarat has been discussed as a paradigmatic case due to the unprecedented spatial marginalization of Muslims in Ahmedabad (Gayer and Jaffrelot 2012; Jaffrelot and Thomas 2012). Scholars of India have found the framework of ghettoization useful in drawing attention to the spatial marginalization of Muslims as a consequence of the rise of anti-Muslim violence in India, and have proceeded to test its premises.

The Muslims of Anand show that seeking safety in numbers after violence occurs not only in Indian cities, but also in towns and villages. The anti-Muslim pogroms of 2002 in Gujarat were not confined to cities—mobs swept the countryside, attacking Muslim homes in village after village. In the Charotar region, Ode was the worst-affected village, while the town of Anand became a safety zone. The pogroms reached only some parts of Anand town, such as Vidyanagar, where Hindus were the majority. The mobs bypassed the area around the railway tracks, where some Muslim-majority housing societies already existed at the time. It was this safety zone, on the eastern outskirts of Anand, that refugees sought when their homes in the villages had been set aflame or when they feared they would be attacked. In the years thereafter, many more Muslims arrived in Anand from the nearby villages. The eastern outskirts of Anand, which consisted of agricultural and communal lands before, were developed into residential areas. In areas where Muslims moved in, Hindus and Christians moved out. Most residents moved only a few kilometers away; still, they remember this episode as a turning point in the town’s history. Some call it a partition.

In this rural region, urbanization has been accompanied by the emergence of new spatial imaginaries, with “Hindu villages” and “Muslim villages” in the countryside, “Hindu areas” in the main urban centers of government and education, and a growing “Muslim area” in the urban and peri-urban outskirts of Anand town. Anand’s municipal government is locally famous for its meticulous town-planning schemes, but town planning had not yet arrived in most parts of the Muslim areas ten years after the violence. In the period 2011–2012, I walked around a patchy landscape with new, freshly painted houses amid green patches, on (mostly) unpaved roads. When I returned in 2014 and 2017, new street lights had been added and more streets had been paved, yet others remained dirt roads. Residents understood the unevenness of infrastructural development as a result of the political constellation in the town: the municipal state authorities have been dominated by the BJP in this period, but most Muslims in Anand voted for the Indian National Congress party.

The development of these urban spaces was an outcome of political and social developments that involved the regrouping of people on the basis of their ascribed (religious) identities in response to violence. These are characteristics that define a “Muslim ghetto” (according to the analysis in Gayer and Jaffrelot 2012, 21–22). But the concept of the ghetto does not fully capture the themes and concerns that emerge in this site, for three reasons. First, the residents themselves do not use the term. Second, the negative connotations of the term do not resonate well with the residents’ experiences. Both public and state narratives present the Muslim ghetto as a problematic space, either because it is perceived to be criminal and deviant (in Hindu majoritarian narratives), or because it is neglected, isolated, and deprived (in the critical narratives of activists and journalists). Scholars who use the term “Muslim ghetto” as an analytical tool also present it primarily in negative terms—as a symbol of marginalization. Third, and most important in my analysis, two key aspects of the definition of a Muslim ghetto do not describe Anand: the “estrangement” and the subjective “sense of closure” of these Muslim residents from the rest of the city.1

Rather than experiencing estrangement and closure, the Muslim residents of Anand consider their homes to be well connected to the rest of the town and the wider region. They feel that their residences in the town are better connected geographically than their former homes in the villages, because they have better access to road networks and public transport facilities. Anand has a railway station that connects them to nearby cities, and a vibrant bus station and shared rickshaw system that connects them to the surrounding region and other parts of the town. The area is close to institutes of higher education, various marketplaces, and government institutes and private offices that offer coveted white-collar jobs. These are some of the reasons why they consider their new residential area a privileged space, a “lucky space” that is better connected, more convenient, and more desirable than the village.

While moving to the Muslim area of Anand may, in one sense, separate them from the majority society of Hindus, in another sense, it enables Muslims to access the facilities in the Hindu-majority areas of the urban conglomerate as students, consumers, and potential workers or businesspeople. The setup of Anand enables them to move between these different spaces and social realms, thereby maintaining long-standing relations while also exploring new kinds of relations within and beyond their own neighborhoods. Thus, their residence in Anand has become a way of broadening their scope and seeking new ways to connect with the wider society dominated by Hindus. Paradoxically, it is by moving into a Muslim area that some Muslims seem to be able to reconfigure themselves as part of an urbanized and educated Indian middle class.

The Hindu areas of the town and the surrounding region are not no-go areas for Muslims; rather, these are important spaces of education, work and business, and consumption. Ventures into Hindu areas require some skills and knowledge, as shown in the cases of students or businessmen who skillfully adjust their attire and demeanor when they operate in such spaces. The businessman Vasim (in chapter 4), for example, carefully controls his self-presentation to be perceived as socially acceptable by his non-Muslim customers and partners. As Vasim explains, he learns these skills of building and maintaining relations from his more experienced father. These relations have long histories, and they remain important to economic and social life even in the present context of residential segregation.

Altogether, Anand’s Muslim area does not fit in the existing classifications of estrangement and closure. The absence of language with which to capture my observations has led me to consider whether another notion (instead of the ghetto) is more suitable. The residents’ feelings of being well connected and privileged in Anand suggest another label: the Indian suburb. This notion draws on Nikhil Rao’s historical account of colonial Bombay (1898–1964). Rao describes the “suburb” in contrast to the “old city,” which the colonial state authorities regarded as cramped, chaotic, and unruly. They constructed new residential spaces on the outskirts of the city, where traffic, people, and air could be better controlled (Rao 2013, 21–58). These spaces were intended to attract middle-class residents, but it was not the established urban middle classes of the inner city who relocated there. The people who moved into the suburb (from the 1920s onward) were aspiring middle classes from the rural south of India, attracted to the white-collar office jobs that were available in the city for educated individuals at that time. Over time, this new middle-class suburb also turned into a neighborhood with a distinctly South Indian identity (Rao 2013, 96).

There are obvious differences between colonial Bombay and contemporary Anand—for example, Bombay’s suburbs consisted of apartments while most of Anand’s middle-class families live in houses. Still, in several ways Rao’s characterizations of a suburb do apply in Anand. Like other Indian suburbs, Anand’s housing societies house middle-class residents with a history of rural-urban relocation and share the characteristic rhythm of life in a suburb—especially the daily commute to places of work, business, and studies in the commercial and office centers of the city. They also display an evolving social identity as spatial, ethnic (religious), and social-political communities. The middle-class Muslims of Anand see their neighborhood as one in which they can find safety as well as certain forms of modernity, enhanced social status, and improved religious propriety. In these ways, defining it as a suburb fits Anand’s Muslim area very well. The spacious houses, the two-wheelers and cars parked around these houses, and the astronomic land prices—in comparison to the rest of the region—shape the experience of Anand’s Muslim area as a relatively privileged space; the constant in-and outflow of visitors from America, England, and Australia further reinforce this idea of a Royal Plaza (the name of a local landmark building).

When one spends enough time on the rooftops and in the living rooms of this neighborhood, however, another story emerges. Worried parents start to talk about their troubled sons, who are frustrated that they cannot find a job, or about their daughters, who are educated but cannot find a spouse with a reliable income. It is the absence of decent employment that troubles the residents the most. Those with considerable economic and social capital run their own businesses, while those who are less privileged strategize to land government jobs or migrate overseas. This is what life looks like, not just for Muslims, but for many middle-class people in small-town India.

If the term “suburb” captures some aspects of life in Anand’s Muslim area better than the term “ghetto,” it is also, ultimately, not a satisfactory description. This is because the proliferation of separate residential areas is the product of a specific history of marginalization and exclusion of Muslims in India. This needs to be recognized and factored into the discussion. Thus, the middle-class Muslim area of Anand does not neatly fit in with either of these categories, the ghetto or the suburb. In what terms, then, can we aptly describe it?

Hub

Anand’s Muslim area has been described here as the headquarters of the regional Vohra community, as a new hometown for overseas Vohras, and also, jokingly, as a “Mecca” for Vohras. Its residents have described it as a new space that signifies upward socioeconomic mobility as well as enhanced geographic mobility and connectivity. Muslims in nearby villages and towns have described Anand’s Muslim area as a place that they aspire to move to in the future. The fact that overseas Muslims have also bought property in the town has further reinforced this idea of Anand as a well-connected space onto which aspirations for better futures can be projected. For members of the Charotar Sunni Vohra community, Anand has also become one of few places in the world in which Vohras are a large, dominant community among Muslims.

When overseas Vohras in the United Kingdom and United States visit their home region, they see that their relatives have moved—some of their houses in the villages having been ransacked and abandoned, others having been sold or rented to others. The overseas Vohras have responded by following their relatives, or even actively encouraging them to move to Anand, playing a proactive role in helping refugees resettle in the town. Some have bought new houses in Anand themselves. Through their investments, business endeavors, and charitable projects, they provide local Muslims with support and simultaneously carve out a space of their own. In this way, a town in which they previously had little interest has become their new home in their region of origin. When they come to visit, they do not limit themselves to their houses in the Muslim area of Anand; on the contrary, they see their house as a convenient central location from which to maintain relations within the wider region. For those among them who continue to be involved in business affairs in Gujarat, their relationships with powerful Hindu friends remain a form of social capital that safeguards their access to various resources, including the ability to participate in the region’s omnipresent land brokerage business.

The notion of the hub implies that residential segregation does not need to be accompanied by estrangement or a subjective sense of closure. It invites us, instead, to look at a space as being embedded in multiple networks. Both ghettoization and suburbanization analyses are usually contextualized within an urban studies framework; the geographic focus is the city, and the analysis itself is focused on the neighborhood. Broader networks, however, shape urban life in India to a great extent. The alternative notion of the hub makes it possible to understand an urban neighborhood as outward-looking and shaped by diverse, intersecting mobilities, connected with the rest of the city and its broader surroundings. It invites us to reconsider the false binary distinction between segregation and connection that is often implicit in discussions about residential segregation.

My observations in Anand’s Muslim area align with other descriptions of small-town India as regional centers—as market towns, transport nodes, and as centers of networks of rural-urban exchange.2 In Gujarat, historical and sociological descriptions of small towns have repeatedly evoked this imaginary of small-town connectivity, and towns have been described as being tightly interwoven with rural hinterlands through roadways and rivers, containing dynamic histories of economic and sociocultural exchange (Sheikh 2010; Spodek 1976; Tambs-Lyche 1997). These multiple, intersecting mobility patterns may thus be specific to small towns. Further research is required to compare these observations with other towns and metropolitan cities in India. Now that communal violence has shifted from attacks on Muslim homes to Muslims traveling in cars, and on buses and trains, it is even more necessary for scholars of Muslims in India to incorporate mobility as an analytical category and methodological challenge.

This requires an analytical shift in the scale of the research, to look at the spaces where Muslims live not only as a neighborhood-in-a-city, but also as a neighborhood-in-a-region and a neighborhood-in-a-transnational-network. The scales discussed in this book—the city, the region, the nation, and the transnational social field —have been conceptualized as different yet interconnected social networks of the residents. This multiscalar perspective has been developed through a multisited ethnographic research methodology, mobile yet still grounded in a locality, which entailed the mapping of the relations and the following of the flows that emanate from their neighborhood.

With regard to the power structures that affect people’s opportunities, aspirations, and social relations, Anand’s Muslim area is complex. Anand has been a prime location for growth, investment, district government offices, and education, and can be considered a central market and service town to its surrounding region; however, its Muslim area has been marginalized in the municipality’s development schemes. My findings show that this marginalization is discussed but still most of the time ignored by the residents. It is also by and large ignored in the narratives of Vohras residing in the surrounding villages, when they speak of Anand as a site of aspiration, and by the overseas Vohras who speak of Anand as a new home or holiday destination. Their narratives do not exclude marginalization but invite us to also consider other possible interpretations.

While writing this book, I have grappled with the terminologies used in the existing debates about Muslims in Indian cities. Over the years, I have become increasingly concerned that the prevalent terms of the debate prohibit an understanding of on-the-ground realities; in fact, they might even be hindering us. By using the term “hub,” I aim to make a fresh start, but this is not meant to be the end of the discussion; it is, rather, an entry point for further reconsideration of what the terms of the debate could be. This notion of a hub, like the ghetto and the suburb, can ultimately capture only certain aspects of life in Anand town. It generates a risk of its own: it bypasses—and thus, risks erasing—the memory of violence and displacement. This suits the self-perception of those who attempt every day to create a life on their own terms, and who do not wish to be defined by or reduced to the incidents of 2002. Documenting their perspective has been at the core of my effort in this research—to look at a Muslim area from the inside, based on the perspectives of those who participate in its making.3

Regional Orientations and Reorientations

The importance of regional identities is mentioned in existing research on Indian Muslims (e.g., Kirmani 2013), and especially in Gujarat, where Muslims have been represented as threats to the territorial integrity of the nation and the state, so that they are challenged to formulate alternative views of space and belonging (Ibrahim 2011). Vohras, too, present themselves as a Gujarati community—more specifically, a central Gujarati community—who also happen to be Muslim. Their story presents a challenge to prevalent interpretations of the Gujarati regional identity as one that excludes Muslims. It offers insights into the ways Muslims represent themselves beyond the Hindu-Muslim binary (Gottschalk 2000), and conceive of religious boundaries as only one aspect of a complex and multilayered constellation of identities, including location, class and occupation, samaj and marriage circle, gender, age, and regional identity (Kirmani 2008). It presents, moreover, new insights into how transnational identities in South Asia are regionally produced (Gardner 2001; Ballard 1990), and how pathways of rural-urban and transnational mobility become entwined in response to regional-level politics in migrant-sending regions (King and Skeldon 2010; Sheller and Urry 2016).

The notion of reorientation has been used here to capture the dynamism of the Vohras’ regional orientations. The Vohra community identity is produced through narratives, practices, and networks that are passed onto a new generation of young Vohras by their parents and other elders of the community. These practices and relations have been spatially redirected as a result of the post-violence displacements and other developments described in this book, and a shift has occurred in the conceptualization of the regional community. A regional concept of dispersed yet entangled village groups—with a varied set of leaders and family homes in hundreds of villages in the Charotar tract—has been maintained, yet converges with a new regional concept, in which Anand becomes the center of this region and of the regional Vohra network. This reconceptualization of the region is shaped by spatial shifts in the post-violence landscape but also by new social and economic practices that are associated with the shift to the town.

The regional community of Charotar Sunni Vohras was first organized in the 1920s, and, during conferences organized between 1926 and 1940, issues of community unity, education, and marriage were discussed. The community organization lost traction after Partition, when the Vohras reorganized themselves independently on both sides of the India-Pakistan border, but meetings were again organized in Gujarat in the 1950s. One point of internal discussion and regulation was the ideal of endogamous marriage (to preserve unity within the community) and the system of marriage circles that existed informally and was formalized in the 1950s (Heitmeyer 2009a, 170). The Vohra marriage system categorizes the wealthier and less wealthy sections of the community in two related yet broadly endogamous marriage circles (Chaud and Arsad). Membership in a circle is defined by a family’s village of origin, as each village is attributed a distinctive place within the marriage system.

This development of the Charotar Sunni Vohras as a regional community, with its marriage system linked to a specific subset of villages in the region, is in many ways analogous to the history of the Patidar caste (described by Pocock 1972, 1973). Patidars, too, have delineated hierarchically related marriage circles, in which every family is assigned a status on the basis of its home village. These marriage circles feature in descriptions of the Patidar caste as a central aspect of internal caste politics, as the boundaries and meanings of these circles are constantly being renegotiated (e.g., Rutten 1995; Tilche 2016). These analogies between Patidars and Vohras have been described in various resources (e.g., Heitmeyer 2009a; Mahammad 1954). They are also known to the Vohras themselves, who consider themselves as similar in practices and outlook to the Patidars, although they also observe differences—for example, in terms of the different treatment of hierarchy within the community. Vohras in Anand describe their regional community as one that is very similar to the locally dominant Hindu caste, yet distinctive: e.g., in promoting (Islamic) values such as equality in a caste-based society.

Despite the shared claims to local ancestry and rootedness in local villages, the relations Vohras and Patidars maintain with the designated villages have evolved differently: while Patels can claim dominance in most of “their” villages, Vohras were always a minority in most villages and, following their expulsion in 2002, have lost the claim to village space even further. In Anand, their regional orientation stands out as a recurrent theme in the Vohras’ narratives, but becomes something that has to be actively cultivated after the post-violence ruptures of displacement, urbanization, and residential segregation. Among Vohras in Anand, regional orientation is marked through a shared lexicon of words (village names, and the recurrent use of the unifying term “Charotar,” for example) and everyday practices that substantiate the sense of regional belonging as a lived experience. Businessmen maintain partnerships and friendly relations with a variety of their collaborators within and beyond the Vohra community. Vohras’ patrilocal marriage practices reveal the active role women play as keepers of dispersed kinship networks, when they marry and move to the household of their husband while maintaining relations with their maternal kin, thus connecting dispersed families across the region.

When overseas Vohras visit their region of origin on vacation or during retirement, they participate in these dispersed networks as well. In this inland region of central Gujarat, with its long history of transnational mobility, migration has been caste-specific, and for a long time it has been mostly limited to the caste networks of the Patidars. As a result, Vohras migrated later than others and in fewer numbers, but those who did settle overseas are now well equipped to travel back and forth. They have the financial capacity to make investments and conduct business in their region of origin, and as these endeavors remain largely dependent on the networks and wayfinding capacities of their local relations, local and transnational pathways have become intricately entangled.

The local and overseas reproduction of these regional orientations is significant, given the prevalence of interpretations of regional identity that exclude Muslims from the Gujarati imagination. The story of a regional community, as it was told to me and is passed on to a next generation of Vohras, is told from a situation of rupture. The stories recognize this rupture by describing the Vohras as an urbanizing community with rural roots, which operates from a Muslim area and maintains social and economic relations beyond it. Mobility becomes a crucial aspect of this regional conceptualization, because it is in the constant mobility across the rural-urban continuum that people are able to reproduce, as well as reshape, their regional orientations.

The process of reorientation described here occurs both in India and transnationally, involving not only the local residents but also their overseas relatives who have migrated away from their region of origin, yet maintain connections with it. In India, there is a shift from being a rural to an urban community, with Anand emerging as a focal point for the regional community. Transnationally, there is a similar shift in the homeland anchoring of overseas Vohras toward the urban space of Anand, even as relations with other villages are maintained as well.

What, then, does this lens of reorientation offer? How may it enable us to look from the housing societies of Anand toward the wider world, where comparable processes occur? An anthropology of reorientation offers a people-oriented perspective of post-displacement transformation, and it invites us to think in the broadest possible sense about the social-spatial consequences of violence-induced, forced migration.4 It allows us to examine how people find their way anew through shifting terrains, and how, through their adjustments, they themselves become part of producing a changing landscape. It enables us to study how people engage with a changing landscape, which they assist in coproducing, and, especially, how their carving out new pathways is paired with the reconceptualization of sociality—in this case, of a regional community. An anthropology of reorientation is an empirical and exploratory approach, in that it foregrounds the places, practices, and narratives that emerge as significant to the people being researched. It is also a translocal approach, since the “local” knowledge under study is common to the residents and their overseas acquaintances.

In Anand, reorientation has been an experience shared by differently positioned people—young and old; rural and urban; resident and nonresident; Muslim, Hindu, and Christian. It started with the displacement of some and the disorientation of many; this temporary but dramatic moment then turned into a gradual, long-term process of adjusting to a new situation. People’s places of residence changed, their sense of direction changed, and a new locality emerged as a shared space of community-making and home-making. This reorientation process was influenced by complex constellations of power, including religious politics, class/caste dynamics, and rural-urban inequalities, as well as regional patterns of socioeconomic exchange that continue to influence the lives of Gujarati Muslims at home and abroad.

The second underlying aim of this book has been to explore how the violence and its aftermath of urbanization and residential segregation affected a range of people—both within the region and overseas—far wider than that of the direct perpetrators and victims. Other ethnographic work that has described the consequences of communal violence in Gujarat have focused on displacement (Lokhande 2015), reconstruction (Jasani 2008), community making (Ibrahim 2018), religious dynamism (Simpson 2006), politics (Simpson 2013), and the impacts on Muslims’ relations with the state (Ibrahim 2008; Jasani 2011). My ethnography has described a range of social, spatial, and economic practices that I observed and have conceptualized jointly as a process of reorientation. I have incorporated but also looked beyond the vocabulary of violence, displacement, reconstruction, and the figure of the refugee. These terms remain important anchors in discussions on citizenship and rights, but can be complemented with explorations of a wider range of practices and narratives that reveal the long-term consequences of the pogroms as they unfold slowly, sometimes almost imperceptibly, and in combination with other factors.

It has taken me a long time to write this down. Finding the words has not been easy in a climate of polarized public debate. If the protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act in Delhi in 2019–2020 opened new opportunities for Indian Muslims to express themselves in terms different than the ones imposed on them, they also revealed that those doing so were regarded as dissenters and vulnerable for attacks. Books can make a contribution to extending the conversation, by revealing the diversity of perspectives that exists in India’s cities, towns, and villages, and by broadening the language and frameworks through which we discuss them. I hope this book will be a source of information and encouragement for those who are concerned about the unfolding developments, and who wish to imagine a society in different terms.