When Kacharabhai Bhagat, a Dalit spinner from Laxmi Cotton Mills, was elected as the TLA candidate to the city municipality in 1924, it set in motion a decades-long involvement of the union in municipal politics. One of the key intentions of this book is to understand the changing claims asserted by workers like Kacharabhai Bhagat upon the city. To do so, it is necessary to first outline the broad narrative of Ahmedabad's history through the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This serves as a frame on which to map the questions of political and spatial claims that we go on to address in greater detail. In the following sections, I lay out in a broadly chronological order the key events, movements and ideological shifts that have shaped the city's political field from the 1920s onwards. Paying particular attention to the dynamics of the workers’ districts, I discuss the consolidation and disintegration of the Congress–TLA nexus, the arithmetic of caste politics, deindustrialisation and the emergence of Hindu nationalism.

THE CONGRESS AND THE TLA:COLLABORATIONS AND CONTESTATIONS

In the early years of the twentieth century, Ahmedabad assumed great prominence in the Indian freedom movement, helped in part by Gandhi's decision to make the city his base in 1915. At this point, Ahmedabad was the centre of a flourishing textile industry, fuelled largely by Indian capital as well as robust urban governance institutions that were being given a new direction by the Congress Party and ‘indigenous elites’. The city's significance to the Congress Party is visible in the close relationship that Vallabhbhai Patel, one of the architects of the Indian National Congress, had with the civic body. Sardar Patel's political career began in the Ahmedabad municipality, when he was elected councillor from Dariapur in 1917. It was under his leadership that the first urban planning schemes were enacted, the walled city opened up and westward expansion facilitated.

British influence over Ahmedabad was limited—the city's commerce, industry and, to a large extent, administration remained with the traditional Indian elite. Positions of customary influence, the nagarseth, the sarafs, and so on, allied with the colonial authorities. Urban reorganisation schemes—‘decongesting’ the urban core, laying down roads and pathways, and conversion of land-use patterns—emerged as a flashpoint around which tensions appeared between the colonial authorities and the local leadership of Ahmedabad.