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The spirit of Gujarat

Gujarat did not wait for some government to rescue it. The state, along wi th its diaspora, rescued itself. One of the beautiful things about Gujarat is that Narendra Modi does not exhaust its possibilities as a story, a metaphor or a sociological fable. I spent ten years in Gujarat, mainly in Ahmedabad, and grew immensely fond of the place. I confess my story may not be as intense or expert as those of friends I know. Let me just dub it as one ordinary story of a state. I must confess mine is autobiographical, a non-Gujarati view of Gujarat and yet I hope it captures bit of the magic of the place. My first encounters of Gujarat were more at Delhi School of Economics and CSDS, Delhi. Encounters I guess also begin with a breaking of stereotypes and I was surprised by the number of Gujarati intellectuals.

There I met Rajni Kothari, heard of Meghnad Desai and Jagdish Bhagawati, found Padma Desai distantly intriguing and discovered even an Ashis Nandy had a Gujarati past, like his other colleague Sudhar Kakkar. MN Srinivas came from the university of Baroda as did Rajni and one heard that even AK Ramanujan did a small stint at Baroda. Gujarat also seemed to engage heavily in dance, craft and design and my first stereotype of Gujaratis was as intellectuals not as businessman. It is their pragmatic sense of intellectual life and its possibilities that I enjoyed rather than encounter with the mercantile imagination.

My second surprise came from Ahmedabad as a city. I looked around for great monuments that dwarf the rest of the city. There was little that was colonial or British to it and best of all it seemed a city built to an ecological scale. There was a sense of proportion about the city, a human scale that was almost an invitation to normalcy after the imperiousness of Delhi. It was ethnic enough to be different. Scale, I felt, marked the wisdom of the city. Scale was more than biology or aesthetics, it created a living, livable sense of the city. Ahmedabad was a city that challenged my idea of city. One of the greatest threats to Gujarat was the earth quake of 2001. Thousands died but was stunning was that while there was a sense of loss, of grief, of mourning, a society galvanized itself into returning to normal.

This was a Gujarati entrepreneurship, a sense of pragmatism, realism, courage which was utterly unsentimental but revealed a deep sense of community. Gujarat did not wait for some government to rescue it. Gujarat, along with its double, its diaspora, rescued itself. The manner and style of the rescue summons the storyteller.

I remember the political sociologist Chandrika Parmar, who studied the quake, telling me of how BAPS Swaminarayan community moved in. The most beautiful part was Pramukh Swami's injunction, that, even in a disaster, no cold food should be served, that hospitability needs cooked food. The Swaminarayan arrangements at Bhuj and Aanjar were pieces of organisational genius and I heard that IIM wanted to make a study of it. A whole middle class mobilized in a fascinating way, and the Diaspora revealed its roots in Gujarat in a wave of concern and logistics which few Diasporas can match.

The Gujarati diaspora became both twin and double to Gujarat creating stupendous sense of comradeship and community. Oddly, it was this same sense of community, which combined with a Gujarati pragmatism to an absence of sentimentally which was heartening. Relief groups moved in and worked efficiently and yet were keen to emphasise recovery and normalcy. There was no sense of dependence. To avoid banalising such an event, I must add that one saw and met hundreds of Gujaratis who lost their families and yet quietly returned to work after the rituals. It was a great heroism that commanded respect, and yet it was so understated, it deserves an archive of its own. It was a culture that discouraged dependency. It did not convey that sense of rights but a sense of dignity that every individual should stand on his own feet. It was part of the taken for granted world of Gujarat and Gujarati culture.

I know a lot of people talk of Gujarati culture and the Gujarat model development. I must confess that this new bowdlerised identity invoking KM Munshi and Patel does not interest me. It is not the paradigm that is impressive, it is the exemplars, extraordinary individuals who created new possibilities, which no matter how eccentric, always managed to institutionalise itself. Eccentricity in Gujarat was always a hypothesis and an innovative organisation. Imagination and pragmatism combined to create the durable. The entrepreneurship was not just business but in all kinds of institution building.

One of my favourites is Ela Bhatt, founder of SEWA, the world's biggest trade union for women. Sewa has been written about, especially the narrative of how authorities and men had to accept a trade union for women has been repeatedly told. But to me what is fascinating is the quiet search for ethical method, anchored in woman's work and dignity. The beauty is that Ela Bhatt does not restrict SEWA to women's work. She sees women's work as the basis of a wider theory of peace. As part of the council of Elders which includes legends like Tutu, Mary Robinson, Bo Brundtland, she is dreaming of a Sewa theory of peace, an experiment where women's work becomes an antidote to war and the basis of a new communities of peace. One must note it is almost understated till one senses the quiet passion behind it, as if every idea of Swadeshi needs its complementary sense of Swaraj. Ela Behn also reminds one of the legendary activist, Anusya Sarabhai, who fought for Kashmir when it was unfashionable.

Another fascinating character is Vikram Sarabhai, who created a sense of a cosmopolitan science, in fact a cosmopolitan style where Gujarat became hospitable to a whole range of institutions. Sarabhai for his entire western ness represented another Gujarati style, which wove science into a whole range of applied imaginations creating institutions where outsiders were invited to pollinate the Gujarati Urban imagination. Sarabhai belonged to the Mahajan mentality, an institution, embedded in tradition which always upheld a notion of service to the community. Between Sarabhai and Kasturbhai Lalbhai , they created a chain of institutions, which have remained creative to this day. One thinks, of ATIRA, where the Tavistock School unfolded as an imagination in India, the school of design, CEPT, which made architecture and the study of the city a new intellectual excitement. But here again what was interesting was the style, a Gujarati embeddedness which triggered a wave of cosmopolitan innovations.

Here culture was never parochial but a pretext for a range of global experiments. Ahmedabad is the only city apart from Chandigarh which has buildings of Corbusier. It adds to it an IIM built by Louis Kahn, who saw architecture as a dream. One thinks of PRL where Sarabhai and K. Ramanathan created a laboratory to match TIFR. Oddly, Gujarat which boasted of great institutions, lacked universities at an undergraduate level. It is as if it neglected itself having outsourced such activity to the Chimanbhai Patel, who built education into a wave of entrepreneurship, which ruined the educational vision. It was if politics commanded education. It took the Nav Nirman movement to restore some sense of balance. One has to add as an aside that Sarabhai was also a family signature for a wave of experiments in dance, ecology and business which also needs its separate narrative. Gandhi for me is the apogee of this tradition, something beyond and something representative of it.

Every time I go to Sabarmati Ashram I salute the man, who turned Sabarmati into an ashram which was a think tank, a thought experiment for a whole nation. Gandhi was a wizard at inventing NGOs and I remember my friend Achyut Yagnik telling me that Gandhi established over 15 NGOs. In that sense, Gandhi combined memory, inventiveness and ethics in a fascinating way. I still remember that little rooms where Madeleine Slade and Vinoba often stayed. It was modest and it had a toilet, which was almost sculpted scrupulously clean, a testimony to the Gujarati idea that innovation has to be every day. In that sense Gujarat to me was always an intellectual style rather than a mercantile or religious one, a style embedded in the ecology of tradition yet which carried a global edge to it. Of late one has missed this tradition.

The Gujarat riots of 2002 mauled this imagination created a fracture which may never heal. One needed a different kind of storyteller to capture it. In fact, in Modi, Gujarat found a bowdlerized representative of a different tradition. He does not grasp that Patel, Sarabhai, created history without worrying whether Delhi understood it. I hope as Gujarat enters Lutyens Delhi, Gujarati culture does not lose its sense of genius, captured in its Kutchi craft, its food, its theories of peace and its sense of community and institution building. This must survive to show that Gujarati culture is more innovative and durable than its alleged claims to development.



