Gujari Bazaar – the 600 yr old market

I reached Ellis bridge in Ahmedabad on a really hot afternoon in March this year. I was seeing for the first time the Gujari Bazaar. I had heard about it many times before. I had read about it before I came here. This self-managed bazaar was locally called the ‘Ravivari’ or Sunday market. It had more than 1200 registered traders, most of them selling used items and a few selling new goods.The livelihoods of nearly 20,000 households were linked directly and indirectly with this market.

One would think that anything 600 years old would look old. It didn’t. With the way people went about in the bazaar, this did not look like a part of a period film. It just looked like a crowded bazaar that belonged to the present. However, it was a present that was part urban and part rural. As I entered the bazaar from one end of the Ellis bridge, there was a line of street vendors selling fruit on what seemed like high wooden platforms until I realised that they were camel carts (without the camels).

Ahmedabad was a city that had continued to be both urban and rural with nomadic tribes living in some neighbourhoods, with artisan communities settling here from other parts of Gujarat, with the city bearing ways of living that reflected traditional customs alongside contemporary needs that it was never quite urban in the way western societies define ‘urban’. It reminded me of the “urban-rural continuum” that Kerala had been known to have (in discussions about vernacular architectural traditions) with no discernible boundaries between the paddy fields and urban infrastructure.

The question that came to my mind was: How does a bazaar sustain for 600 years? For anything to sustain, it must be resilient enough. We do know that. How was this resilience built into our traditional bazaars? Was it in the nature of the people who sold their wares? Was it in the relationships and networks on which the buying and selling rested, that the resilience was embedded? Was it in the indigenous credit systems? How much of these still survived? Why had this bazaar not gradually faded away or been buried into the history of the city of Ahmedabad?

As I think about it now, knowing that it was a 600 year old bazaar had been so much in my mind before I reached there and after I got there, that I could think of nothing else for some time. As John Berger says in his book, The Ways of Seeing – “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled” What I also knew from before was that this vibrant bazaar was in the centre of controversy – the Sabarmati Riverfront development project threatened to displace the bazaar that had been a source of livelihood for several vendors. The Gujari bazaar had a long, long history, but a short-lived future.

The historical background of the bazaar tells us that it was started in 1414 by Sultan Ahmed Shah, the Founder of Ahmedabad. At that time, it operated on Fridays and spread from Teen Darwaza to Bhadra Taar office. The 1941 communal riots had forced the closure of the bazaar for some time. It reopened a few months later, first near the Siddhi Sayyed mosque and later near the old Civil court. It was in 1954 that it was finally shifted to the Sabarmati riverfront at its present location.

Today, the Gujari bazaar is seen as a marketplace that belongs to the ‘Intangible Cultural heritage’ of the city of Ahmedabad. It has been included by the Centre for Environment Education (CEE) in its ‘Project Parampara’ which is a documentation initiative supported by the Ministry of Culture. There are three films on the Gujari bazaar which can be accessed at http://www.paramparaproject.org/traditions_gujari-bazar.html which highlight the role of the Gujari bazaar association and the linkages between artisans and traders who have participated in the bazaar for many generations.

The short-lived future of the Gujari bazaar has been discussed in public meetings and efforts continue to be made by not-for-profit organisations and educational institutions in the City to propose alternatives to the displacement of tradition and livelihoods. In December 2009, a Public hearing was held in Ahmedabad to discuss displacements experienced by the poor and included the case of the Gujari bazaar. This is a link to the Report of Public hearing on Habitat and Livelihood displacements.

The verdict of the jury had said that the Gujari bazaar was a heritage activity of the city and its shifting needed to be re-examined by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation with the participation of the traders. A forum of concerned citizens of Ahmedabad called ‘Our Inclusive Ahmedabad’ had organised this Public hearing and continues to battle with the government for the rights of the vendors.

If an informal, temporal marketplace has been a part of a city for six hundred years, why would we want to let it go? It's time perhaps to reflect on sustainable development as Indians understood it in the past. What cultural processes and planning processes did they deploy that we can learn from? What can we remember from what we know from our past that will help us design a better future for our cities?

Here is a link to: www.gujaribazaar.org which discusses the Livelihood and Community-related aspects of the bazaar and the efforts of management and design professionals from IIMA and NID towards working with the Ahmedabad Gujari Association in the recent past.

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