With a population of 7.2 million, Gujarat's largest city, Ahmedabad, is often mistaken as the state capital. This could either be for its size or the ‘shocks’— as Spodek (2011) terms its paradoxes—it portends. Ahmedabad abounds in paradoxes. A city that Gandhi chose to make his home from 1915 to 1930 had attained notoriety for its frequent and brutal episodes of violent ethnic conflict by the turn of the twenty-first century. In the period from 1950 to 1995, Ahmedabad and its neighbour Vadodara accounted for nearly 80 per cent of the total deaths in Hindu–Muslim violence in Gujarat (Varshney, 2002). Notwithstanding the series of violent conflict and natural calamities in the new millennium, such as the devastating earthquake in 2001, and floods in 2000 and 2006, Ahmedabad has withstood economic and industrial retrogression over the years. It could be because of what many call ‘resilience’—a word almost synonymous for enterprising Gujarati merchants known for ‘their ability of “bending with the wind”’ (Maloni, 2008: 193; also Frontline, 12–25 March 2005).

In hindsight, Gandhi's decision to adopt Ahmedabad as his temporary home was pragmatic, stimulated by the financial sustenance that the citizens could provide. It was also likely to have been rooted in the anxiety over imminent violence between caste and religious groups. Powerful institutions which he went on to establish in Ahmedabad, such as the provincial branch of the Indian National Congress and the Textile Labour Association (TLA), served as effective centres of governance and peace-building by way of creating and sustaining associational ties between Hindu and Muslim workers (Spodek, 2011; Varshney, 2002) as well as between upper-caste Hindus and Dalit workers (Jaffrelot, 2017). By the early twentieth century the textile industry in Ahmedabad had reached its pinnacle. In 1961, a year after Gujarat's secession from Bombay State, one-third of the residents of the city were migrants from the Indian states of Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Maharashtra, working as labourers in the mills. However, the mid-60s pronounced the beginning of the decline of the textile mills and rising unemployment and, by the 1980s, the mills had collapsed as a result of domestic restructuring of the textile industry in India, producing a bulk of unemployed, skilled workmen.