Museum as metaphor

In 1951, when Jawaharlal Nehru invited Le Corbusier to India to design Chandigarh, Ahmedabad's erstwhile mayor Chinubhai Chimanbhai commissioned Le Corbusier with the design of a museum and a cultural centre, later named Sanskar Kendra, in the city of Ahmedabad, Gujarat. The museum at Sanskar Kendra was envisioned as part of an extended cultural project at Ahmedabad. The cultural project never saw the light of day. In the end the built museum differed from Corbusier's vision of unlimited growth in the original plan in which gallery branches were to accommodate the possibility of the museum's expansion. ¹ Despite these disappointments, to persist with the Nehru-Chimanbhai comparison, what remains interesting is that the effort invested in the social and cultural capital of the city came from the elite business quarters of the city and not from an institutional figure of democratic authority. At this moment in history however, Narendra Modi, the former chief minister of Gujarat, seems to preoccupy political imagination for his self-proclaimed role in Gujarat's 'development' with the city of Ahmedabad as the face of such development. ² In local, national and global political spaces, Modi has promoted the rationale of such entrepreneurial governance by linking it to the intersections between good governance, capital accumulation and Hindu identity in Gujarat. The natural culmination as well as the authorship of these processes is inscribed on to the person of Modi. Such personhood is fashioned out of simultaneous invocations to humble beginnings, ³ and thereby his 'historic' as well as 'democratic' rise to power; to finding political and regional lineage 134in Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, ⁴ another 'able' administrator; and to the 'success' that seems to be Gujarat under his political leadership. Therefore, it is not surprising that in recent years an increased consciousness around the representation of Gujarat and thereby Ahmedabad, its most visible city, centres on the city's as well as the region's projection of itself as an important node in the network of global capital. ⁵ The most discussed and visible circulation of images of Ahmedabad as the face of Gujarat plays itself out in the promotion of the Vibrant Gujarat Summits. ⁶ The Gujarat government organized business summits to showcase investment opportunities in the region and to allow dialogue between the government, Gujarat-based companies and global investors. As many scholars such as Renu Desai have shown, the Vibrant Gujarat discourse produced an idea of the city ⁷ as well as the region where 'culture and commerce, trade and tradition, and enterprise and entertainment go hand-in hand' ⁸ and legitimized the Gujarat government both nationally and globally. The 2002 violence in the wake of the riots in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, under the aegis of Modi's leadership had severely affected Gujarat's standing as a business destination. ⁹ However, the perceived success of the summits as well as Modi's claim to having created the 'Gujarat model of development' now produces an eerie logic by which the good city of Ahmedabad needed to be exorcised of Muslim habitation. In this context, Muslimness is constructed as a deterrent to economic progress, encompassing disease, social and economic backwardness and a tendency towards violence and aggression accompanied by religious zeal. Development (a word that one frequently encounters in the city) in Ahmedabad is understood as counter to the threat that such Muslimness invokes. ¹⁰