The strategic implementation and expansion of the Disturbed Areas Act initiated a bifurcation of the urban property market and a process by which city dwellers could be corralled into communally homogenous enclaves. The legislation as a mechanism for crystallising spatial segregation moved in tandem with widening social distance in Ahmedabad. Affective dimensions of social life and emotional practices facilitated (and even justified) segregation. The idiom of disgust, for instance, as Ghassem-Fachandi has argued, was employed rather effectively not only to other the Muslim, but also to legitimise violence. We are then confronted with a historical moment at which it is virtually impossible for Muslim citizens to acquire property or secure a home outside of the so-called Muslim areas. For the Muslim working poor, access to housing was especially difficult—as property relations ruptured in their older areas of residence (predominantly in the walled city and the erstwhile mill districts) during every successive episode of violence, it grew increasingly arduous to rebuild their lives and homes in their former neighbourhoods. For some it was the memory of the loss they experienced in these areas, for others it was the hostility of their former neighbours and for yet others it was the sheer impossibility of finding new homes in the already congested ‘safe’ areas in the inner city. The only alternative left, both in terms of security as well as access, was to move to areas that had significant Muslim populations, and it was in these areas that property relations were tentatively forged anew.

Vatva's location at the intersection of the working-class city and the segregated city offers a particularly productive lens with which to approach the forms and patterns of spatial and social exclusion. The forms of proscribed living that are pervasive in the area, however, are continually shifting and historically contingent. This chapter pixelates the landscape of Vatva to trace property and housing dynamics in a situation of segregation and to consider how formal and informal pressures align to make the ‘ghetto’ an unstable socio-spatial form in Ahmedabad.

THE ‘GHETTO’ IN AHMEDABAD

The study of the ghetto as a space of segregation has long been a subject of academic inquiry.