Introduction

The life and political activity of the Mahatma Gandhi has attracted great attention over the years, and countless scholarly works have been written about him. Aspects of both his public and private life have been teased out, mainly in a critical search for an explanation for the complexity of the Mahatma's life and thought.Footnote ¹ The meanings, outcomes and shortcomings of Gandhi’s political philosophy are still under discussion, as an ongoing debate and the continuous production of new works on these themes testifies.Footnote ² However, the Mahatma’s engagement with what can be defined as conceptions and practices of citizenship has hardly been explored and needs thorough investigation.

Two recent academic investigations, by Vinay Lal and Ornit Shani, explore the elements of Gandhi’s thought that can be considered as defining his thinking around an idea of citizenship. As both Lal and Shani noted, “Gandhi did not often speak of citizenship”, but it is also true that he implicitly sought to define principles and practices to discipline life and sociality in common.Footnote ³ Interestingly enough, both authors take into consideration the legacies of Gandhi’s thinking about citizenship in the frame of the struggle for swaraj and in the construction of the independent state of India, and both of them arrive at very similar conclusions.Footnote ⁴ In this perspective, the discourse on citizenship becomes embedded within a broader legislative framework, in which traditionally “the conception of the citizen has gone hand-in-hand with the conception of rights”.Footnote ⁵ In Gandhi’s understanding of community life however, the definition of, and demand for, rights came after the acknowledgement of the ‘duties’ of each individual towards his/her community. This approach appears to be perfectly in line with the way in which Gandhi conceived moral responsibility in relation to society, and allowed him to open the way for an innovative “non-statist” conception of citizenship, in which the balance between duties and rights would lead to self-governance and help regulate the relationship amongst individuals. As Gandhi stated, swaraj could come “only from performance by individuals of their duties as citizens”.Footnote ⁶

However, as Shani notes, such a “non-statist” notion of citizenship was not theorised by Gandhi himself, rather it can be “inferred” from his thinking and was developed after independence. In fact, Gandhi did not engage directly with conceptions of citizenship in theoretical terms or in relationship with broader definitions of the limits and powers of the new state. As this article argues, more than in political and legislative terms, Gandhi's engagement with issues relating to citizenship was at a practical, every-day level. It touched all those sets of unwritten rules and practical norms that could help establish shared criteria of inclusion and exclusion. This perspective allows us to understand the meaning and importance of Gandhi's involvement in the working class movement in Ahmedabad. When, in 1915, Gandhi returned to India and established his ashram near Ahmedabad, he found a very critical situation in the city, mostly related to the dynamics that accompanied industrialisation. Gandhi, who was in his late forties at the time, became involved with the city in its entirety, and chose to engage with one of the most critical phase of its dynamic; that is the transformation of the city, both socially and spatially, following the arrival of masses of rural migrants who formed makeshift settlements around the textile mills. In doing that, he directly dealt with the issue of citizenship, in terms of membership and belonging to a community, and he did this by requesting migrant-labourers to conform to an urbanised lifestyle. In fact, the gap between ‘citizens’ and ‘rural migrants’ was mainly understood as a matter of habits, in which two different lifestyles were opposed to each other. Rural migrants were perceived as outsiders, alien people who occupied portions of the urban territory but were not participating to the urban life and culture.

By taking the leadership of the mill workers, in 1918, Gandhi sought not only to help them secure better wages and working conditions but, before that, he aimed at showing the workers how to behave ‘morally’, how to conduct their lives and run their household in accordance to urbanised values. As this article shows, while Gandhi became involved with the fight of the working classes, he in fact chose to deal with the complex dynamics and the challenges that industrialisation was posing throughout the city. He responded on different levels to communicate to different social groups: first, Gandhi sought to guide the working classes in a process of integration and assimilation within the urban milieu. Second, he called on the industrialists to bear their responsibilities towards the workers, providing them with houses, services and facilities. Third, Gandhi presented himself as an example of what he defined “citizen-service”, so as to inspire the whole citizenry to a ‘correct’ (in terms of morals) code of conduct: “I thought I should contribute my share in the service of this city, and be worthy of calling myself its citizen”. Gandhi highlighted that the very idea of social service could not be devoid from an awareness of context where it took place, in this case the city and its socio-cultural practices. Living morally meant also to live in accordance with the rules and the ‘mores’ of the community, hence accepting its principles and ‘serving’ all its members.Footnote ⁷

From town to city: the outcomes of industrial development on the transformation of the urban landscape

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Ahmedabad emerged as one of the first cities in India to develop a mechanised industrial sector. From the early decades of that century, many merchant families of Ahmedabad had flourished thanks to the commerce of European articles and, more importantly, of opium.Footnote ⁸ Thus, the large financial capability and the traditional propensity of these families towards business provided a fertile terrain for the establishment of the first few steam-powered textile mills in the 1860s.Footnote ⁹ During the last three decades of the century, the textile industrial sector expanded slowly but steadily, as more traders sought business opportunities by establishing new factories in the city. Moreover, the construction of a railway line linking Ahmedabad to Bombay (in 1864) increased the potential for distribution of the textile products, favouring the expansion of the whole sector within the city. Its growth however assumed staggering proportions in the first decade of the twentieth century and, in particular, in correspondence with the swadeshi (self-sufficiency) movement in 1905.

In Ahmedabad, the number of mills almost doubled and the size of the working population increased by more than three times between 1899 and 1914 (see Table 1). In this period, textile industries became the dominant economic sector in the city, attracting capital and a workforce to Ahmedabad, which came to be known as the ‘Manchester of India’.Footnote ¹⁰ Other than having a critical impact on the city's economy, industrial growth hastened a process of redefinition of both the geographic and social landscape of Ahmedabad. The rise of new mills in the city and the overall expansion of the industrial sector became part of a dynamic of urban transformation influencing the structure of the city. Industrial neighbourhoods mushroomed. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Ahmedabad was a medium size township of 185,889 inhabitants with the urbanised area almost entirely confined within the city walls – the fifteenth century fortifications that delimited the traditional area of the ‘old city’ (see Map 1). The establishment of additional textile mills drove the expansion beyond the city walls, mainly to the eastern side, in proximity of the railway station.

Table 1

Ahmedabad Mills and Mill Workers 1861 – 1931

Source Jan Breman, Working Class, pp.14 and 62.

Most industries were established on open lands surrounding the city, as were the shacks of thousands of migrants workers. Most of these newcomers settled in makeshift slums in the fields surrounding the factories, so in the span of a few years entire areas of former rural lands had become semi-urbanised settlements. Significantly, being totally unregulated and unplanned, these new areas were devoid of any kind of infrastructure or basic amenities. Over-crowdedness, pollution and an overall state of degradation was the normal in these areas during the early days of industrialisation.

This dynamic affected deep modifications in the social fabric of the city. Considering that from 1905 to 1931 the number of mill workers grew from one tenth to one fourth of the total population, and that the vast majority of these workers were migrants, it demonstrates how the expansion of textile mills had a disruptive impact on the on the social balance of Ahmedabad Table 2. Migration, demographic growth, social stratification and spatial segregation represented three faces of the same process of urban change.

Table 2

Population of Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation 1901-2001

Source: Census of India 2001 Ahmedabad District Handbook

The majority of migrants came from the countryside and had no experience of life in an urbanised environment. From a certain point of view, migrant labourers were not – and were not perceived as – ‘citizens’ in the full sense of the term. Migrants were mostly from the countryside, separated from their roots, living and working in a difficult, and at times hostile, environment. They tended to organise their living space in a non-urban way, which resembled a rural village rather than an urban neighbourhood. As a consequence, urban elites and administrators started labelling migrant labourers, and the urban poor, with multiple stereotypes of non-urban existence, such as keepers of cattle in the houses, or as being neglectful of personal hygiene. From this point of view, the process of industrialisation, and the demographic growth that accompanied it, created a contradicting dynamic of change from both a cultural and social perspective. Whilst migration contributed towards creating a population of new urban dwellers and industrial labourers, as soon as they entered the city, the newcomers found themselves marginalised. At the same time, urban elites, who profited from the fast expansion of the industrial sector, looked upon the mill workers with suspicion. Migrants were, on all counts, strangers.

Living in slums and chawls, or working in a textile mill became symbols of cultural segregation as well as spatial segregation. So mill workers were subjected to exploitation on two different levels. Inside the mills, migrant-labourers were at the bottom of the production process, working without regulation or any kind of security.Footnote ¹¹ Outside the mills, migrants were amassed around the industrial estates, living in village-like, filthy quarters. In 1931, the Royal Commission on Labour in India visited the working class neighbourhoods of Ahmedabad. Their report provides us with a vivid description of the labourers’ neighbourhoods –the chawls – at the time:

Still at the beginning of the 1930s, notwithstanding the active presence of the workers union and the many social initiatives conducted in the city under the auspices of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Anasuya Sarabhai in the industrial areas to the East of the walled city, the living conditions of migrants-labourers were such that there was little to see of an organised, urban settlement.

The rise of new industries and mushrooming chawls also represented an important challenge on the political level. In particular from the early 1920s, urban authorities recognised the scope of the economic and social transformation enacted by industrialisation, and sought to enclose these dynamics in the overall policies of urban planning. In this sense, the rise of industrial areas in Ahmedabad must be read along with the development of other areas, mainly residential neighbourhoods meant for the middle and upper-middle classes. From the 1920s onwards, the Ahmedabad Municipality realised new Town Planning Schemes on the northern and western sides of the old city. In this way, it responded to the challenges of industrialisation by reorganising zoning within the city. So, while areas on the East were gradually becoming industrial districts, the Planning Schemes sought to foster expansion of new, well serviced, neighbourhoods on the western side of the River Sabarmati.Footnote ¹³

This picture highlights a contrasting image of the city, where both the rich and the poor were gradually moving to live in suburbs. If, at a spatial level, a centrifugal force was driving the expansion of the city, at a social and cultural level, the development of the textile industrial sector, the formation of a network of social activists and the parallel rise of a local political elite during the 1920s redefined terms of mutual recognition between different groups in the city.

This is the context in which a group of social workers, inspired by Gandhi, Anasuya Sarabhai and Shankerlal Banker, and the local political administration, headed by Vallabhbhai Patel, tried to respond to such dynamics and to manage urban change both in its spatial and social dimension.Footnote ¹⁴

Map 1.

Urban development as the battleground for political contestation

In his 1968 history of Ahmedabad, Kenneth Gillion described the first construction phase of the city's infrastructures and the improvement of the sanitation system.Footnote ¹⁵ Across the nineteenth century, a process started in the city, where “the political, social, and economic changes [. . .] were making for a different kind of urban environment”.Footnote ¹⁶ Altogether, Gillion describes a city that is gradually moving from a traditional type of urban organisation into a “modern” one, and shows how these dynamics took place mainly in connection with an increasing involvement of local elites in the political administration of the city.Footnote ¹⁷

In continuity with these dynamics, Ahmedabad entered a further phase of change in the early decades of the twentieth century, when the development of a mechanised industrial sector brought masses of workers to settle down in the outskirts of the city, and when the struggle for Independence contributed towards further involving urban economic elites in the city politics.

In fact, the management of urban growth increasingly emerged as the battleground of the fight between local leaders and colonial authorities. The Indian National Congress considered the control of local administrations all over India as part of the strategy to challenge the colonial government, and local elites of Ahmedabad confronted the colonial administration on matters regarding “the restructuring that the government was carrying out in the city”, so that they could appropriate “it to bring about their own reorganization of the urban centre”.Footnote ¹⁸

The arrival of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in the city, and his engagement in urban politics and society along with Vallabhbhai Patel, must be understood in this context of fast transformation and changing balances. For both of them, the years in Ahmedabad represented a fruitful opportunity to experiment, on a local level, with those practices of social mobilisation and political contestation that they would then apply on a larger scale in the struggle for independence. Gandhi and Patel took active part in the public life of the city, and in different ways both of them addressed the issues that industrialisation and migration were raising. Soon after coming back to India from South Africa, Gandhi decided to establish his ashram in Ahmedabad. He lived in the city from 1915 until the end of the Salt March in 1930, and this period represented a key phase in the elaboration of his political strategies, as well as in the formation of his ideas regarding social work and peaceful mass mobilisation. During the time he spent in Ahmedabad, Gandhi became actively engaged in organising the working classes inside and outside the mills. His leadership and his ideas deeply influenced a series of protests that the workers conducted in the early 1920s in order to advance their instances regarding wages, working hours and conditions. Moreover, Gandhian principles of negotiation and arbitration, to substitute strikes and violent confrontations, underpinned the creation of the first trade union in the city, the Majoor Mahajan (Textile Labour Association, 1920).

Vallabhbhai Patel acted at a political level, engaging with the administration of the city. He entered the Ahmedabad Municipality in 1917, and his first assignment was that of president of the Sanitary Committee, a key position in the Municipality and also in relation to the expanding working class neighbourhoods. After his mandate in the Committee, Patel was again elected and became the president of the Ahmedabad Municipality (1924–1928), a position from which he promoted reforms in the government of the city as a means to contrast the colonial power. He began his reformative work by dislodging certain British functionaries from key positions in the administration and substituting them with Indian functionaries.Footnote ¹⁹ In this way, Patel progressively secured more control for the Indian elected members over the Municipal machinery; at the same time he gathered a group of young activists under his leadership and in the name of the opposition to the colonial administrators.

Although acting in different fields, both Gandhi and Patel showed a similar understanding of the dynamics that were transforming the urban landscape. In 1927 Sardar Patel, addressing the conference on Local Self-Government in Surat as president of the Ahmedabad Municipality, commented:

Such a statement shows how the masses of poor and migrant workers were perceived by the established sectors of the society. As Patel clearly pointed out, the living conditions of migrants within the city were not only a matter of poor services and infrastructures, but were determined by their behaviour. Hence, the way poor citizens conducted their lives was the primary cause for the unsanitary conditions in the working class neighbourhoods. Moreover, Patel's words represent an important first step to marking the strong relationship between migration, urban poverty, and a discourse on citizenship. The issue of including the newcomers in the urban social fabric was not only a matter of political and civic rights. Mill workers and migrants were generally marked as rural people, and that became the symbol of their marginalisation. According to this perspective, the first concern was that a large portion of the urban population did not conform to a given model of urbanity.

Although the city was structurally unprepared to bear the consequences of the fast demographic increment, through Patel's words the matter appears to be closer related to the migrants’ behaviour and to involve the use that these people were making of private and public spaces. In the prosecution of Patel's speech, such a view emerges more clearly: “people spit where they like, they ease themselves where they like, and generally consider themselves free to cause nuisance, irrespective of time and place”.Footnote ²¹ In this rebuke, the importance lies more on people's habits than on the lack of infrastructure and civic amenities. Rural migrants were not fully recognised as citizens, and the difficulties caused by the expanding city were largely ascribed to the newcomers’ incapacity to live in the urban space and to their tendency to organise the space in a rural manner.

While the progressive consolidation of a municipal administration and of local political elites fostered a structural reorganisation of urban space, industrialisation and migrations challenged the traditional structure of urban society. The way newcomers were either integrated, or segregated, within the urban space represented an answer to the process that was transforming Ahmedabad. Hence, discussing integration in early twentieth century Ahmedabad implies looking at the process through which migrants became, or were made to become, ‘citizens’.

From this perspective, industrialisation in Ahmedabad can be understood also as a dynamic that led to the urbanisation of thousands of people and of the space around them. The history of the working class and industrial relations in Ahmedabad has been investigated by many authors, who have thoroughly illustrated the process of assimilation of labourers in the new industrial realities, and their struggle to secure better conditions inside the mills.Footnote ²² However, the rise of a working class in Ahmedabad must be understood not only in the relationship between the workers and the factories, but also as a critical element in the transformation of the whole urban landscape. In order to outline the role that these dynamics had on the redefinition of conceptions and practices of citizenship, the focus must shift from the relations between industries and workers to those between workers and the city, and to the process through which they were progressively assimilated in the urban environment.