Sentimental Capitalism in Contemporary India: Art, Heritage, and Development in Ahmedabad, Gujarat

Sentimental Capitalism in
Contemporary India: Art, Heritage,

and Development in Ahmedabad,
Gujarat
Dia Da Costa
Department of Global Development Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada;
dacosta@queensu.ca
Abstract: Using a critical cultural politics approach and deploying the concept of
sentimental capitalism, this article problematizes the burgeoning creative economy
discourse while analyzing spaces of art and heritage production in Ahmedabad, India. I
situate the Cotton Exchange exhibit (April 2013) in an erstwhile mill in recent histories
of mill closures, genocide, creative economy initiatives and development aspirations of
revitalizing degraded space. I argue that in remaking place, art mobilizes sentiments—
here, nostalgia and hope—while erasing violence and inequality. Sentimental capitalism
is at work in the exhibition by mobilizing artisans as entrepreneurial agents not
victims of capitalism; constructing art’s aura of grassroots participation and artisanal
empowerment while obscuring displacement and exploitation; and fostering cult-like
regard for art’s intrinsic and instrumental value as non-profit and its capacity to engender
opportunity, recognition, and even property. While another spatial politics is possible, in
Ahmedabad today, art is being mobilized to obscure dispossession and exploitation in
the name of urban revitalization and heritage production.
Keywords: creative economy, sentimental capitalism, art and artisans, heritage production,
Vibrant Gujarat, India
Introduction
“The trouble is I enjoyed some of the art”, I said to the curator of Cotton Exchange
Exhibition. “That’s good!” he enthusiastically responded. “No, that’s troubling. For
me.” I insisted. “This [exhibition] is one of the few ways in which the public would
be interested in visiting and more importantly be able to simply walk into closed
textile mills. But there is so little reflection on colonialism or capitalism except for
the fact of a defunct mill being used for an art exhibition”, I continued. “Yes, it’s a
bit nostalgic, isn’t it” the curator said graciously accepting my contrarian view.
“Yes very nostalgic.” I emphasized, in an unrelenting mood. “But not only that.
It does not seem to connect the heritage of textile mills in this city, to this city.
To its unemployment, or communal violence, or anything else.” This exchange
took place in April 2013 in the city of Ahmedabad, India at the precincts of the
Rajnagar Mill.
This article examines how artistic production has been mobilized for
development, understood here as revalorization of degraded land and space.
It contributes to recent critical research on South Asian urban geographies
(Anjaria and McFarlane 2011; Roy and Ong 2011) by focusing on the relatively
Antipode Vol. 47 No. 1 2015 ISSN 0066-4812, pp. 74–97 doi: 10.1111/anti.12103
© 2014 The Author. Antipode © 2014 Antipode Foundation Ltd.
Sentimental Capitalism in Contemporary India 75
neglected question of cultural production, here defined as artistic production,

institutional and everyday meaning-making processes, and their intersections.
I ask not just how art represents places and urban transformations, but what art
is mobilized to do to remake place by questioning the ways in which art constitutes
a materializing force in the city. To understand how art is mobilized, instances like
the Cotton Exchange Exhibition (CEE) cannot be treated in isolation. I situate this
exhibition in a broader context of the rising significance of planning, commodifying
and marketizing the creative economy—UNCTAD and national governments define
creative economy expansively as any form of production involving human
creativity, bearing symbolic meaning, and potentially containing intellectual
property attributable to individuals or groups. This includes forms of cultural
production as varied as film, software, theatre, architecture, design, heritage,
memory, and everyday life (eg rituals and customs). Rather than viewing the
creative economy discourse as a fully formed idea emanating from the de-industrializing
North and replicated in places like India (Florida 2002), I examine the particular
histories and struggles involved in constructing creative economy in particular cities,
in this case, Ahmedabad.
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the United Nations Conference on
Trade and Development labelled the creative economy a “feasible development
option” because this sector continued to grow at 14% through the crisis (UNCTAD
2010). The creative economy has become a sector through which Indian officials
claim global “superpower status” (Sethi 2005), desperately competing against
China’s current lead (The Hindu 2011). Between 1996 and 2005, India’s creative
economy has apparently had 21% growth rate and according to the Eleventh Five
Year Plan this sector accounts for 45–48% of India’s employment (Government of
India 2008). While the latter statistic is quite likely an inflated estimate, stated
without explanation in the report, the politics of such statistical manipulation and
expansive definition is not particular to Indian reports on the subject (Tremblay 2011).
At its extreme, UNCTAD (2010) recommends micro-credit options, wherein individuals
go into debt to become artistic entrepreneurs, mining memory, everyday life, and
traditional skills to start small businesses—a proposal that I view as Everyday Life,
Inc. Ahmedabad city officials and professionals have enthusiastically nurtured art
and heritage resulting in the city successfully competing against other Indian cities
for nomination for inclusion on UNESCO’s heritage city list.
This article is part of a broader project in which I make the argument that this
powerful and celebratory global and national creative economy discourse
(mobilized with great savvy in Ahmedabad) needs to be problematized. I do so
by constructing and deploying the analytical concept of sentimental capitalism.
By refusing to grant unprecedented and universal status to the creative economy
discourse, the concept of sentimental capitalism ascertains historical precedents
and contemporary shifts, identifies contextual specificities, and takes a cultural
politics approach to thinking about the relationship between cultural production
and development planning over time. Art and heritage production in the CEE
provides an instance through which we can examine the particular construction
of Ahmedabad’s creative economy. Through this case, I demonstrate that the civil
optimism of the creative economy coexists with the sheer brutality of contemporary

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capitalism and cultural nationalism in India. Thus, it is important to consider not

just utopic and dystopic representations of the city, but also how cultural
production is mobilized in the actual reconstruction of the city.
Take for instance Rajnagar Mill where CEE was held. This mill is one of 64 textile
mills that closed since the mid-1980s partly because Ahmedabad’s industrialists
relied on cheap labour and increased workloads instead of raising productivity
through technology (Breman 2004:144). Greatly facilitated by liberalization
policies, composite mill production transitioned to decentralized powerloom
production. Jan Breman calculates that with mill closures, close to 125,000
households were directly affected, one-fifth of the city’s population at the time
(Breman 2004:255). Already working for inadequate wages and associated with a
conciliatory union, mostly low-caste and Muslim workers became redundant, and
with little or no compensation joined the city’s already sizeable informal sector
and became petty commodity producers. Closures and its associated caste and
religious affirmations, exclusions, and insecurities significantly intensified the
communalization of life and death in Ahmedabad (Shani 2007).
In 2008, the Gujarat High Court allowed the sale of mill-lands, generating
expectations of compensation for some workers (Indian Express 2008). The
National Textile Corporation (NTC) was to auction thousands of acres of prime real
estate in Ahmedabad, which, on occasion, sold at three times the starting price
(Nair 2011). While most mill-lands were sold for residential or commercial
purposes, some like Rajnagar mill where I saw the exhibition were slated for re-
opening as functioning mills, with NTC investing in a “Rs. 5 billion modernization
process” (Indian Express 2010). Still others are being converted into museums
(Indian Express 2010). This suggests that there are various and intersecting vehicles
for revitalizing degraded land—judicial, financial, and even artistic.
Unlike widely publicized land sales, media coverage on worker compensation
after land sales is minimal. Informalization of labour for former millworkers has
meant declining living standards, longer working hours, reduced incomes and
social identities determining access to jobs (Breman 2004). While mill closures
dramatically degraded labour and land, another critical event marks a turning
point. In 2002, there was a pogrom in Gujarat under the Bharatiya Janta Party
(BJP)-led government. One of the epicentres of violence was Ahmedabad. The
proximate cause of the violence was that a train caught fire, killing 58 Hindu
pilgrims. At the time, assumptions about Muslim perpetrators were widely broadcast.
A state-orchestrated genocide of Muslims followed, publicly justified as revenge
(Human Rights Watch 2002). Close to 2000 Muslims were killed, Muslim
women raped, pregnant women brutalized, foetuses impaled, hundreds of
thousands displaced, and Muslim businesses and homes destroyed. This was
at once a spectacular and popular genocide, capturing Muslim property with
impunity, normalizing killing of Muslims by middle classes, lower castes,
denotified tribals, adivasis, and Dalits alike under the leadership of state officials
(Macwan 2002).
A variety of disparate grievances came together in the mid-1980s—mill closures,
disillusionment with unions, shrinking job opportunities, and threats to caste
privilege owing to governmental policies favouring minorities (Shah 1998; Shani 2007).

In a time of uncertainty, the BJP deflected caste tensions into anger towards
Muslims, thereby bringing Dalits and adivasis into the Hindu fold. Neighbourhood
patronage networks normalized access to resources and welfare based on
religious and caste divisions to produce ordinary “riot networks” that could
mobilize extraordinary genocide (Berenschot 2011). Moreover, caste-Hindu
conceptions of vegetarian virtue, sacrifice, and exclusionary national belonging
were mobilized as affective modes of belonging for low and middle classes and
castes alike (Ghassem-Fachandi 2012). Over the course of two critical events—mill
closures and the pogrom—economic distress, political mobilization, and
desperately complicit citizens produced an inter-penetrating degradation of land,
place, and people in Ahmedabad.
Considering the degradation, I explore how artistic practices help remake cities
and become complicit in erasing violence and exploitation in Ahmedabad. Focusing
on the CEE held in the city’s eastern periphery, I address the following questions:
first, is the CEE an isolated artistic intervention in Ahmedabad? In fact, I demonstrate
a long history in which cultural production has been used as resource for
“development” in India. Equally, I describe the contemporary confluence of
governmental, non-governmental, business, and artistic initiatives mobilizing
spatial transformations and urban revitalization. Furthermore, creative “heritage”
production discursively links the city’s riverfront, walled city, and eastern periphery
with its closed mills, casualized production and squalor. This is done through
initiatives like Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation’s (AMC) annual Heritage Week
of which the CEE was a part.
Second, how do artistic practices articulate with Ahmedabad’s economies of
inequality, dispossession, and death? Building on existing accounts, I argue that
art and heritage are among the Gujarat government’s means to address its “crisis
of representation”, particularly palpable in its “Vibrant Gujarat” campaign
(Desai 2012a; Ibrahim 2007). This high-profile campaign conducted every other
year since 2003 combines exhibitions of state-of-the-art urban planning projects,
seminars, dances, kite-flying festivals, memory walks, and boat rides with an explicit
goal of attracting capital investment to an aggressively rebranded Ahmedabad
(Desai 2012a:43–44). While notably failing to rectify the exclusion of Muslims in
the rebranding process, the campaign seeks to change perceptions of an
inhospitable, violent place to construct a vision of a place bustling with creativity
and lively energy. Investment flows into Gujarat have subsequently increased,
apparently restoring the faith of prospective entrepreneurs concerned about
Ahmedabad’s loss of capital investment after 2002. Rather than a causal argument
wherein artistic practices work towards a coordinated outcome of capital investment,
gentrification, or rebranded city, I demonstrate the discourses, sentiments, and
senses being mobilized through artistic practice and heritage production and their
effective, if inadvertent relation to processes seeking to change degraded places into
valorized destination.
My analysis deploys a cultural politics approach which foregrounds the mutually
constituted relationship between cultural production and the discursive and
material legacies of colonial capitalism in contemporary development. In the
second section, I show how Ahmedabad’s revitalization projects intersect with

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artistic practices and heritage production. In the third, I focus on CEE as an

exemplary case of art constructing heritage and diverse artists inadvertently
participating in constructing Ahmedabad’s creative economy. In this context, the
concept of sentimental capitalism problematizes the ahistorical optimism of
creative economy as a revitalizing force by highlighting prior articulations and the
contemporary particularity of using art to do things. In the fourth section, I illustrate
three key characteristics of sentimental capitalism through examples from the CEE
to show the significant ideological, discursive, and spatial transformations that art
is being mobilized to affect. The conclusion raises questions for future research.
The Cultural Politics of the Creative Economy

A cultural politics approach examines the contested meanings and practices
through which a powerful discourse gains traction in a given time and place. Such
an approach refuses to treat a dominant discourse as an all-powerful text and
bounded force seamlessly replicated in particular locales (cf Escobar 1995). While
critics have pointed out the fallacies of Florida’s creative economy discourse based
on generalized theories (Cunningham 2009), there are few contextually specific
accounts of how the creative economy discourse actually takes shape in the so-
called global South. This is the first critical account of how the creative economy
discourse is mobilized and takes shape in India. It contributes to South Asian urban
geographies that attend to transnational processes of urban change by considering
the contested and unfinished quality of powerful discourses, imaginaries, and
fantasies subject to navigation in practice in particular places (Anjaria and
McFarlane 2011; Roy and Ong 2011).
In his book, The Expediency of Culture, George Yudice (2003:332) argues that
artistic production is a “resource” under neoliberal capitalism, requiring a
conceptualization of “artists as service providers who extend the reach of capital”
to poor communities and enable them to “yield value for cultural institutions”.
According to Yudice (2003:1), art lines up with institutional mandates of
“management, conservation, access, distribution, and investment”, largely coopting
conceptions of “culture” that signify struggle and agency.
Within capitalist development, artistic practice can effectively blur boundaries
between transgressive aesthetic expression and the violence of capitalist valorization
or xenophobia (Benjamin 1968:241). As David Harvey (2001:395) pointed out, even
art and politics that revels in being unalienated labour can be commodified since
capitalism cultivates uniqueness, authenticity, even opposition in search of
monopoly rents. Monopoly rents arise when social actors have exclusive control
over unique items, like the owners of heritage homes in Ahmedabad’s walled city.
As Harvey explains, for monopoly rents to materialize into income, the uniqueness
of the item, location, resource or activity must be trade-able (ie be viewed as not
so unique that it has no exchange value). As my discussion of Debashis Nayak in
the next section demonstrates, in Ahmedabad, innovative experts are mobilizing
institutional discourses and legal changes to make unique history and daily practice
legible and trade-able as heritage, creativity, or art. While there is currently no
documented evidence of art and heritage resulting in gentrification in Ahmedabad,

such outcomes have unfolded elsewhere (for Harlem, see Ross 2009:42; for
Salvador, see Yudice 2003). As such, exploring what kinds of “resources” art and
heritage are made to be in Ahmedabad requires attending to institutional
experts mobilizing art while considering ways in which art inadvertently reinforces
place-making projects. Since the affective power of art can dissimulate the work of
ideology, it becomes imperative to explore the mobilization of sentiments as
“resource” for rent.
Nonetheless, as Michael Denning (2004:94) argued, in “a labour theory of
culture”, we must also guard “against the reduction of culture to commodification”.
In his words, “culture is a kind of work, rooted in our senses and in our politics …
it thus always goes beyond the ideological functions emphasized in the political
definitions of culture” (2004:95). A cultural politics approach is useful to
understand these complexities because it focuses on the particular constellation
of sedimented histories, forces, material relations and discursive practices that
produce contested meanings, and through these contestations rather than prior
to them, accomplishes the rule of a discourse in a given time and place (Da Costa
2010; Li 1999; Mitchell 2002; Moore 1999). The CEE exhibition involves
interventions by a variety of powerful actors who aspire to give a practical reality
to lofty visions. Considering the challenges of bringing such fantasies to fruition,
shows that the creative economy in Ahmedabad is a struggle rather than a
foregone conclusion.
Using this approach, I argue that art is being used to mobilize affect and
sentiments—here, nostalgia and hope—as a vehicle for place-making, with the
aspiration of rejuvenating degraded land and place. By affect, I mean what
Raymond Williams (1977) and Lauren Berlant (2011) describe as the visceral sense
of social structures, ideologies, histories, and policies that constructs their ongoing
vitality, intensity and resonance in social life. Although my argument largely focuses
on the discursive apparatus, evidently, the aspiration to revitalize land and space is
not easily accomplished. Studying the affective power of art as constitutive of
emotion, ideology or hegemony necessarily implies that affect is a contested site
of meaning-making and place-making, bearing transgressive potential. The
affective power of art is thus also apparent in moments when powerful discourses,
ruling ideologies, and scripted intentions are interrupted and taken in unexpected
directions. Since the affective power of art is not the exclusive property of officials,
artistic consultants, and professionals who script its production, discursive
domination of creative economy is not guaranteed. Ultimately, the creative
economy itself is “a site of contestation … its boundaries carved out through the
articulation of struggles that are simultaneously material and symbolic”
(Moore 1999:656). Taking account of what art is doing and made to do allows
us to attend to art’s affective power and consider that senses, subjectivity, and
bodies are spaces of becoming social in ways that make us “neither dupes” nor
“gods of [our] own intention” (Berlant 2011:105).
The concept of sentimental capitalism is central to providing a contested and
spatialized account of the creative economy discourse. It refuses the universal
aspirations and claims of unprecedented newness of this globally circulating
discourse. As I demonstrate below, the powerful officials who mobilize art and

80 Antipode
heritage interact in practice with particular “sedimented histories”—longstanding

national and regional histories of using cultural production as resource.
Remaking Ahmedabad: Art, Heritage, and Urban

Development
A number of emerging spaces of art and heritage are concentrated in
neighbourhoods on the eastern bank of the river Sabarmati (see Figure 1).
Sabarmati runs through Ahmedabad, with the old walled city, the erstwhile
industrial belt and working-class areas on its congested eastern bank, with the
worst incidents of communal violence (Breman 2004). The Rajnagar Mill is located
on the north-eastern periphery (Asarwa area) adjacent to several other textile mills.
By contrast, the “modern”, high-status, planned, residential, and university area is
largely located on the west bank. The latter was a result of town planning since
the 1920s when colonial intervention combined with mill owners, Congress
Figure 1: Map of Ahmedabad; adapted, with permission, from Breman (2004:x)

nationalists and (patidar) caste elite interests to infiltrate Municipality politics and
control land in a burgeoning industrial city (Raychaudhuri 2001). Patidar control
over Municipality politics went together with growing textile mill fortunes since mill
interests and patidar interests coincided.
Notably, this led to significant philanthropic initiatives in the 1930s through
which caste- and class-dominated town planning was deflected through charity,
and turned into hegemony (Raychaudhuri 2001:715). Ahmedabad’s mill elite
simultaneously exploited the labour force, led nationalist and union activism, while
complaining about worker inefficiency and indiscipline. In the 1940s, 1950s and
1960s, mill owners kept wages down while investing vast profits in other industrial
and non-industrial activities, including patronizing the arts in Ahmedabad, rather
than in productivity-raising mill technology (Breman 2004:83). Howard Spodek
notes that “[i]n 1943, [wartime] profits reached 125 percent of the capital value
of the Ahmedabad mills” (2011:126). Politically, the sister of Ambalal Sarabhai
(mill owner and President of Mill Owners’ Association), Anasuya Sarabhai led the
hegemonic Textile Labour Association with a Gandhian approach towards
protecting worker rights, while emphasizing labour’s civic responsibility, self-
improvement, non-violence, and “reconciliation rather than conflict with capital”
(Breman 2004:72; Patel 1984).
Owing to philanthropic initiatives of prominent industrialist families, Ahmedabad
has several nationally reputed cultural institutions—from the Darpana Academy of
Performing Arts (1949) to the National Institute of Design (1961) and the Centre
for Environmental Planning and Technology (1962). These families founded
institutions that nurtured creative talent on terms relevant to a new nation-state.
Regional and national elite patronage of cultural institution building piloted the
construction of taste, distinction, and categories like tradition, classical, modern,
and folk (Grau 2013; Naregal 2010).
With mill closures, AMC disintegrated due to a politically disinterested and
financially disinvested mill-owning class. AMC’s crisis came to a head when World
Bank financed programs for infrastructure and services in the mid-1980s had to be
cancelled because AMC could not raise its share of project funds (Spodek
2011:204). In 1994, Keshav Verma, a municipal commissioner, saved the day. He
led numerous demolition drives, road-repair initiatives, as well as beautification
and expansion of green areas (Spodek 2011:240). AMC reconfigured its elitist
purpose, this time by building a global city, involving local businesses, NGOs,
and experts from Ahmedabad’s institutions and beyond to work on numerous
urban revitalization projects, including heritage protection. In the past decade,
Ahmedabad has amassed national and international awards for being a most
livable, walkable city, with affordable housing, sustainable transportation, and
innovative urban development (Mathur 2012).
The Sabarmati Riverfront project initiated in 1997 is a prominent project in
rebranding Ahmedabad as world-class city, worthy of capital investment (Desai
2012b). It aims to redevelop 18 precincts on the east and west banks and construct
a walking path along the riverfront, currently inaccessible to most middle-class
residents. This plan is celebrated for its exemplary vision, efficiency, sustainability,
and good governance. As Navdeep Mathur (2012:64) notes, however, the project

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has turned the “self-organized and self-employed [living and working on its banks]
into charity and welfare-seeking dependents”. Estimated to cost $300 million
(Mathur 2012:66), the project would reportedly necessitate resettling between
4000 and 14,500 households, depending on which reports one reads
(Desai 2012b:53). Widespread displacement became possible by representing the
pre-project river as polluted by the poor rather than by the planned discharge of
city sewage, thereby taking away access to land, livelihood, and schooling in the
city centre from those living on its banks (Mathur 2012:67). As Renu Desai
(2012b:50) notes, the project has been greatly modified over time, owing to citizen
activism, financial and political calculations, and timeline pressures. Ultimately,
flexible governance has co-opted the poor by including them in project-mapping
and financial planning, while the exclusionary foundations of seeing informal
settlements as illegal remain unquestioned (Desai 2012b:52–53).
Significantly, many heritage production initiatives are spatially located along the
Sabarmati and the adjoining walled city on the east bank. Since the mid-1990s,
AMC has worked with architect entrepreneur, Debashis Nayak, who heads a trust
called CRUTA Foundation (Conservation and Research of Urban Traditional
Architecture). Under Nayak’s watch, AMC initiatives have linked revitalization of
degraded urban space, tangible heritage (buildings, neighbourhoods, monuments)
and intangible, living heritage (eg everyday cultural practices in particular
neighbourhoods). Thus, a variety of activities from street plays to daily life in the pols
(walled city neighbourhoods) are marked as part of the city’s vibrant heritage.
Notably, the heritage discourse militates against new ownership and land
speculation, alongside encouraging changed land-use for tourism and entertainment.
As head of AMC’s heritage cell, Nayak makes it attractive for heritage home owners to
desist from selling properties to speculators, thereby preserving the overall aesthetic of
the area. Towards this end, he has mobilized banks to grant renovation loans for
homes older than 15 years (thereby redefining “heritage” as older than 15 years)
and is working towards creative legal changes that allow heritage home owners to sell
“air rights” above properties instead of losing homes (Subramanian 2010). Petitions to
the heritage cell of AMC typically come from owners “for change-of-use—to convert a
haveli into a guest house, for instance, or to set up a restaurant in its courtyard. These
are usually granted” (Subramanian 2010).
Apart from preserving buildings, through CRUTA, Nayak has helped AMC
memorialize its living heritage in pols through walks, auto-rickshaw tours, children’s
books and street theatre (AMC et al 2006:87). Since 1996, AMC has regularly
celebrated World Heritage Week, hosting various events from dance recitals to
street theatre, sufi music concerts, photo exhibitions, heritage walks, and seminars
in and around the walled city. In 2007, one of the events was a kathak dance recital
by a Brazilian dancer who depicted “feelings about demolition of Heritage
Buildings” (AMC 2007). Although CEE was located at a distance from the walled
city, it was advertised as part of Heritage Week. Nayak is also Director of the Centre
for Heritage Management at Ahmedabad University (which sponsored CEE).
Speaking about CEE, Nayak discursively links the valorization of disparate city
spaces as heritage: “through this exhibition, we want to begin an interface about
the industrial heritage of India … The idea is to connect Amdavadis [residents] with

the mill heritage, by bringing together the Manchesters of West and East” (Gupta
2013). Heritage production aims to revalorize a variety of devalued spaces as
embodied advertisements of heritage, talent, and innovation to residents, tourists,
and officials alike.
Furthermore, while displacing working-class populations from the riverfront, the
Cultural Mile Precinct will have an eight-museum cluster on themes including
Gujarat’s Tribals, Textile and Design, and a history museum depicting India’s
journey “right from its days of freedom struggle to its current culture of Incredible
India” (Unnithan 2013). The latter proposal came to AMC from a Canadian
museum professional, George Jacob, who champions “inclusive museums” and
believes that “cities with a soul can attract creative minds”.
The Bhadra Plaza Development Project links the Cultural Mile to initiatives in the
walled city. This is a collaborative project of AMC, CEPT University, Vastu Shilpa
Consultants (the private design and architecture firm of Balkrishna Doshi, founder
and director of CEPT University), Doshi’s Vastu Shilpa Foundation, and the
Archaeological Society of India. The Plaza plan includes a pedestrian bridge across
the Sabarmati. Monuments such as Bhadra fort, Siddi Sayyeed mosque, Teen
Darwaza, and Jumma Masjid are conceived as a single redeveloped zone that
connects “Cultural Mile” on the west bank to the “Heritage Square” within the
walled city on the east. The zone will also include a multi-storied parking lot, a
shopping arcade, and a designated spot for registered vendors. The stretch
between Teen Darwaza and Bhadra Fort, currently a densely populated, largely
Muslim area, bustling with traffic and vendors, including meat and fish shops is
to be replaced with fountains and palm trees in a vehicle-free zone. This area is
explicitly re-imagined as an inclusive space populated by foreigners, middle-class
residents, and folk artists (see Figure S1, available online: http://antipodefoundation.
org/supplementary-material/). Even as this bridging project spatially unites west and
east, it encroaches on present Muslim lives and livelihoods, and erases non-vegetarian
tastes (Ghassem-Fachandi 2012:227–229).
Finally, there are ambitious visions of Ahmedabad in 20 years. Ahmedabad’s well
known architects involved in the Riverfront Project (Bimal Patel) and the Bhadra
project (Rajeev Kathpalia) participated in an international exhibit called Our Cities,
Ourselves (OCO) in 2011 (The Times of India 2011). Re-envisioning six sites in
Ahmedabad (locations connecting west to east, the walled city and the eastern
periphery), these architects depict a city where streets are neither choking with
vehicles nor people (Dilip et al 2011). While depicting images of Hindu worship
on riverbanks, mosques are conspicuously absent. The odd street vendor looks
distinctly of Indian streets, but belongs to the overall aesthetic order of the future
(see Figure S2, available online: http://antipodefoundation.org/supplementary-
material/). Even the flyover does not clash with the futuristic vision of a pedestrian
paradise. The Shreyas flyover is depicted as space of heritage, art and everyday
creativity, covered in Warli painting, a tribal form popularized through craft
policy (see Figures S3 and S4, available online: http://antipodefoundation.org/
supplementary-material/). Spaces beneath the flyover are conceived as “potentially
vibrant community spaces” where people converge to watch cricket on flat-screen
televisions (Dilip et al 2011:8) or engage in “multifarious community and cultural

84 Antipode
events like street play, community meetings, folk performances, political rallies and
so on” (Dilip et al 2011:9).
Although city authorities acknowledge the difficulty of bringing this vision to
fruition considering “the complexity of the city and its socioeconomic needs”, the
municipal commissioner noted that this vision could inform AMC’s medium- and
long-term planning (DNA Correspondent 2011). Likewise, the Rajnagar mill has
not yet reopened and the construction of Bhadra plaza has been postponed
awaiting the complex process of relocating vendors (The Times of India 2013).
Quite obviously these mega-visions are fantasies. They may be aligned with
India’s desperate bid for competitive cultural advantage in the global economy
but they are not seamlessly accomplished in practice. Nonetheless, the fantasies
are also outcomes of prominent architect entrepreneurs who attempt to synergize
interests and mandates across municipal government, educational and research
institutions, heritage foundations, architectural firms, and art, design, and
development professionals.
Nostalgia at the Rajnagar Mill

Situated within these broader processes, CEE is an outcome of an art-exchange
project underway since 2011 involving 13 artists from the UK and India. As part
of Heritage Week, the exhibition was facilitated by the Centre for Heritage
Management of Ahmedabad University and the National Textile Corporation
responsible for auctioning and modernizing mills. Two cultural organizations
jointly undertook CEE: A Fine Line, UK and Arts Reverie, Ahmedabad, both founded
by CEE curator Barney Hare Duke. These organizations facilitate a “programme of
work as creative producer[s] and consultant[s]”.1 The press-kit describes CEE:
“Telling stories of travel the works explore the linked cotton heritage between India
and the UK and more specifically the two great cotton centres of the world,
Ahmedabad and Manchester”.2 In short, the links between “two great cotton
centres” are emphasized, rather than exploitation and colonial rule.
Beyond institutional connections, what does this art exhibit do to mobilize affect
among targeted audiences? A working-class woman viewing the art said she lived
in the nearby tenement housing. She said that this was her first time inside the
factory, despite the fact that she frequently visits the temple within the mill
compound. The art exhibition and its unlikely visitors incited her curiosity.
Accompanied by three children, she ventured to explore the unfamiliar factory
adjacent to the familiar temple. Like me, the woman took part in the memory walk
which converted the mill compound into a temporary art gallery with art exhibited
on walls, floors, machines and mid-air in a seemingly forgotten factory. Unlike me,
she did not follow the CEE map, since she entered through the temple area at the
other end of the prescribed memory walk.
The first exhibit at the main gate included a patchwork embroidered quilt by
Hariyaben Uttamchand Bhanani, re-interpreting a newspaper article that depicted
Gandhi as a “petite” figure during his visit to Lancashire in 1931. In a clear
contestation, Bhanani depicts him towering over the mill owner and protesting mill
workers (see Figure 2). Poignantly, the caption describes workers “cheering”

Figure 2: Hariyaben Uttamchand Bhanani’s Gandhi towering over the mill owner in Lancashire
Gandhi, even though Lancashire workers protested his leadership of the boycott of
British mill-cloth.3 Artist Bobby Painter’s brightly painted steel trunk placed at the
entrance also prominently featured a portrait of Gandhi. These were among the
few signifiers of politics in the exhibition, relegating protest to a pre-independence,
nationalist past. Notably, there were no reflections here on Gandhi’s orthodox
Hinduism, his paternalism towards Ahmedabad’s unhygienic, liquor-loving, and
undisciplined workers (Breman 2004) or on his efforts to reconcile irreconcilable
interests of indigenous capital and labour (Patel 1984). The next exhibit was inside
the factory. To get there, visitors walked past heaps of rusted iron lying outside
storage rooms, where no art was exhibited.
The curator admitted to the nostalgia of the exhibition, as noted in the opening of
this article. Keeping in mind the institutional production of CEE, here, nostalgia is a
“resource” and strategy of elite officials, artists, and professionals. Nostalgia is also
apparent in that no art was exhibited at the temple—currently, the most functioning
and lived space. Rather, artworks showcased silent machines, vast empty rooms,
mill-workers’ memories, expressive and creative artisanal skill, and occasionally,
high-profile protests by Gandhi, not those by workers. A journalist in the English-
language DNA newspaper circulated the exhibition’s mobilization of nostalgia by
urging city residents to brave the inconvenience of going to the eastern periphery
for the “new perspective” which is said to:

86 Antipode
give you an experience of time-travel to an era when Ahmedabad was the Manchester of
the East and the average textile mill-worker led a coveted life; when the Mahajans
created and equitably distributed wealth; and when trust, faith and harmony in the
community were the core societal values. The art installations are interspersed with huge
rusted machines and corroded equipment, to bring alive the times when workers were
spinning cotton and weaving happiness for their future … Allow your imagination
to soar, soak in the multiple senses and the result will be better than an expensive
multi-dimensional period film (Shah 2013).
This journalist perceives and constructs the exhibition as an inexpensive, heady

experience of a stunningly romanticized time of coveted lives, equality, and
harmony. Additionally, the writer invites young, upper- and middle-class residents
to learn about the city’s modern heritage, about which “a whole generation has
absolutely no understanding” (Shah 2013). Apart from noting mostly elite
presence during my visit, I was unable to find out who went, and how “soaking
in the multiple senses” affected visitors. But anthropologist Jan Breman’s
(2004:219) painstaking research with former mill workers suggests that when they
talk “about the machines—the way their bodies shook with the vibrations—[it is] less
as nostalgia for what they miss than a complaint that their work no longer has any
value”. In this context, art momentarily drenches degraded space and formerly
useful population in nostalgia, in an effort to re-make their present value as unique
modern heritage. This is not to preclude the possibility that former mill workers
might mobilize nostalgia as a resource on their terms—an important question
emerging from the analysis here.
For my part, the art moved me, despite myself. I was haunted by white shirts
tailored too long hanging from high ceilings of a huge empty hall whose original
purpose as space I could only speculate (see Figure 3). According to the caption
accompanying Alison Welsh’s installation called “Another Peace”, the artwork
“emphasises the absence of human presence in the contemporary textile mill
environment, common to both Lancashire and Gujarat”. But the mill environment
is far from lacking in human presence, in Ahmedabad at least. Apart from a vast
Figure 3: Alison Welsh’s “Another Peace”

population of informal workers, Ahmedabad’s industry itself is not quite as dead as

the nostalgia would have us feel, especially around regions like Asarwa (Breman
2004:145). However, notably, some of the deadliest incidents of communal
violence in 1985 and in 2002 have occurred within Ahmedabad’s erstwhile textile
hub. Whose peace, I wanted to ask.
To me, an appropriate caption might have conveyed the ways in which times
past hang around too long in the present, with people waiting around for time
to move them into a different present. However, perhaps the hanging shirts were
an obvious and more political metaphor for the lynched dead, and the peace of
death in an economy of exploitation, displacement, and violence. Regardless of
which interpretation resonates with which viewers my point is that I was moved
even though the caption did not square with my ideological representations of
Ahmedabad. The eerie hangings stayed with me. The affective power of art lies in
this kind of capacity to touch (or make feel), sometimes, but not always, in
alignment with discourses and scripted intentions of artists, cultural entrepreneurs,
city officials, and journalists. It is possible that elite CEE audiences actually
experienced a sense of nostalgia for the “trust, faith, and harmony in the
community” in Ahmedabad’s industrial past. But it is also possible that affective
art moves elite bodies in dissonant ways. Arguably, my tastes are cultivated to align
with elite mobilizations of nostalgia about a harmonious past under capitalist
ideology (Bourdieu 1984). Nonetheless, in practice, the CEE’s actual ability to
mobilize nostalgia cannot be assumed to neatly accord to the kind of class-based
distinction and normative aesthetic framework that Bourdieu’s critical sociology
primes us to expect (Brown and Szeman 2000).
I was compelled to pause to take in the details of quaint ceramic reproductions of
classic multi-storied tiffin boxes and “billy-cans” in which English workers brewed
tea (see Figure 4). In this piece by Stephen Dixon called “Clocking On” artefacts
of daily use were arranged in a circle, the accompanying caption noting that the
formation “recreates the circular format of the factory clocking-on”. Jumping space
by representing time as circular, this piece goes seamlessly from tea break in
Figure 4: Stephen Dixon’s “Clocking On”

88 Antipode
England to lunch hour in India to tea break to lunch hour, humanizing factory work
while belying the exploitation, asymmetry and hierarchy of the working day
altogether (Marx 1990 [1867]). While I was alert to these implications, at that
moment I found myself bathing in nostalgia, but it was not one that spelled
harmony. I could hear the noise in a dead silent room full of machines, but it
conjured a sense of suffocating working conditions rather than regard for a vibrant
lost heritage.
Before I came across the journalist’s description, it was already apparent that
artistic minutiae mobilized nostalgia among upper and middle-class visitors like
myself. I can draw no conclusions about what working classes felt in the presence
of the exhibits, based on the lone woman who spoke about enjoying it. However,
she is not the targeted audience of this exhibit. By comparison to her serendipitous
visit, my visit was facilitated through targeted invites from CEE to elite institutions
and Facebook event pages. This is not surprising because as I have shown, the city’s
elite have been using artistic and heritage production to revitalize the city in recent
decades. But, perhaps they are not only expedient mobilizers of art. Artistic practice
is also mobilized to do things to the elite, soak their senses, cultivating aspirations
and imaginaries of what a globally competitive heritage city looks like. Another
crucial dimension of mobilizing affect through art involves advertising the humble,
often under-privileged backgrounds of enterprising, creative artists who recast
Ahmedabad’s degraded mill spaces as the city’s industrial heritage. I turn now to
art as vehicle for mobilizing hope.
Sentimental Capitalism
The creative economy in India must be understood in light of the fact that, at least
since the 1950s, planning and marketing cultural production has been a part of
India’s development policy (Roy 2007). Sentiment has shaped discourses that claim
to be driven by scientific reason (Nehruvian development) and those that claim to
be driven by the invisible hand of the market (neoliberal policy). Examples from
CEE and the three features of sentimental capitalism described below help
distinguish it from sentimental development nationalism by delineating what kind
of resource cultural production has become today and towards what ends.
First, sentimental capitalism treats artists as enterprising agents not victims in
marked contrast to sentimental development nationalism which saved artisans of
dying cultural practices, for livelihoods, export, and national heritage display. Under
the leadership of socialist-feminist and Gandhian, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay,
starting in 1952, India’s All-India Handicraft Board gave funds and tremendous
publicity to handicrafts and cultural practices across the country, including
Gujarat’s textile traditions. A host of factors, including inadequate land reform
meant that neither the radical proletarianization imagined by socialism nor
the village republics Gandhi envisioned came to fruition. Exemplifying
sentimental development nationalism, the Board funded apprenticeships and
awards, helped develop craft design, connected crafts to emporia, and enabled
the transfer of artisanal skills across regions to protect skills dying due to severe
out-migration.

Although crafts policy was Chattopadhyay’s counter to the artisan-made-victim

of industrialization, Gandhian and socialist-feminist ideals could not be reconciled
under planned industrialization. While she viewed craft as work producing objects
of daily use, she also saw regional, national, and global craft markets as necessary
for making artisanal craft productive, income-generating employment. Under
sentimental nationalism, emporia displaying India’s crafts expanded market reach,
enabled artisanal survival, and made the nation a cultural superpower (Greenough
1995). Chattopadhyay was loath to commercialize craft, but craft markets had just
that effect. Meanwhile, promised credit and technological inputs were inadequate
(Jaitly 1994) and middle-men prospered by sub-contracting production to a vast
population of artisans in the putting-out system, increasingly employing women
in the 1970s and 1980s (Krishnaraj 1992:WS 8–9; Wilkinson-Weber 2004). The
sheer number of existing artisans meant that the system relied on extracting
absolute surplus value (derived from caste and gendered labouring) rather than
relative surplus value (derived from technological developments) (Krishnaraj
1992:WS-11). Moreover, Pupul Jayakar, Chattopadhyay’s contemporary and
Chairman of Handloom and Handicraft Export, was quite comfortable with selling
India’s art and culture as signs of diversity, heritage, and luxury in New York or at
highly publicized cultural diplomacy events known as “Festivals of India”, under
Indira Gandhi’s Prime Ministership (Nanda 2002:142–143).
The continuity between sentimental development nationalism and sentimental
capitalism is apparent in the ongoing marketization of cultural production as
means of artisanal development and heritage protection. Yet, the differences are
noteworthy. CEE artist weaver Shamji Vishram Siju from Kachchh, Gujarat captured
some of these differences when he spoke at the exhibition. Distinguishing his
father’s generation from his own, Shamji noted that his father won an award from
Indira Gandhi in 1974, awards that Chattopadhyay had instituted.4 Around the
same time, students from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad started
visiting his village. In 1965, a trader from Bombay further changed artisanal
production in Shamji’s village. Prabhaben Shah advised Shamji’s family on
improved weaves for the market, transforming barter and subsistence weaving into
a profitable business (Department of History 2012). In the mid 1990s, however, the
demand-driven business suffered from the competition of cheap fabric from
Punjab’s power looms (Department of History 2012).
It was around this time that Kala Raksha was founded in Kachchh by Judy Frater
with the aim of combining development and craft preservation. Since all four
Gujarat artists participating in CEE, including Shamji, were trained at Kala Raksha
it is important to understand this organization briefly. Through Kala Raksha, global
demand was further embedded in Kachchh artisanal production while rhetorically
casting crafts as heritage that lives through creativity. As the website notes, this is
a “grassroots social enterprise, dedicated to the preservation of traditional arts.
We envision this broadly, as holistic encouraging of the creative capacity of the
artist”.5 CEE curator Duke echoes this philosophy of enterprise and creativity at
the heart of heritage, “The cotton exchange project is based on the philosophy that
heritage cannot be preserved and frozen in time. It has to be continuous and adapt
to contemporary times” (John 2012).

90 Antipode
Yet it is striking that in this view of a creative, living heritage, political action
appears frozen in time. Apart from the two portrayals of Gandhi described earlier,
Shamji’s contribution to CEE also centres on Gandhi’s anti-colonial action. Shamji
wove three pieces depicting Gandhi’s famous refusal of the British Salt tax when
he marched to the coast to make his own. Apart from evading Gandhi’s
complicated relation to labour struggle, none of the art pieces dwell on the
contemporary realities of mill workers or artisanal workers, in Lancashire or
Ahmedabad. It is as if exploitation and political action itself belong to the past, while
history is emptied out of heritage.
Apart from artisanal creativity, Kala Raksha prides itself in getting rid of the
middleman, so that artisans determine wages and product prices. In contrast to
sentimentally pitying artisans and saving them from industrialization, Kala Raksha
is a distinctive example of sentimental capitalism. The discourse centres not on
the survival of artisans as much as artisanal creativity and agency in producing
heritage and managing social enterprises. The shift also finds expression in
governmental creative economy discourse about constructing artisanal “businesses
that are of the people” and “by the people” (Government of India 2011:283).
Notwithstanding continued exploitation of most artisans, the affect of class guilt
is now played out in crafts policy and NGO practices through a hopeful optimism
about poor artisans as agents managing their own affairs. The victim of the
past was a political agent of nation-building by and for all. The artisanal agent
today is an entrepreneurial participant in “grassroots social enterprise” rather than
grassroots social justice.
In the task of mobilizing hope for present livelihoods and living heritage, the
mobilization of nostalgia about the past (of factory work, barter, subsistence, and
political movements of nation-building) through art has absolute use value under
sentimental capitalism. Shamji who is on Kala Raksha’s advisory board, said at the
CEE talk that until the 1970s, his family of low-caste Vankars wove cloth on
demand, for those who needed shawls or turbans, priced by weight, in exchange
for the right to harvest. Now his family of six brothers employs 60 weaving families
(Department of History 2012). They weave in response to the market. Shamji’s
father appears to think like Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay. Shamji described his father
as asking, “Is it work if it is a product just hanging for an exhibition and not being
used like a shawl or a turban?” Shamji responded in a distinctly demand-driven
definition of craft work, “until people want what you make, your work and
livelihood cannot live on, remain alive”.6
Moreover, creativity emerged differently in traditional weaving and weaving for
CEE, Shamji said. Whereas weaving a shawl draws on honed practical knowledge
producing improvisations of thread and shade, colour and texture, the creativity
of weaving for CEE emerged conceptually. This division specified between mental
and manual creativity showcases artists who preserve heritage by harnessing
traditional knowledge towards non-traditional creative productivity. Another Kala
Raksha artist highlights this distinction, “Before I used to stitch to make patterns.
But now I think about what I want to say through my stitches” (Raniben quoted
in Sabnani 2011). This is not to say that Kala Raksha artists distinguish between
art and artisanship, craft and creativity in identical ways. But significantly, Kala

Raksha encourages the conceptualization of these discursive distinctions as part of

the valorization process (Biswas and Raksha 2010). The CEE brochure also makes
craft workers legible as artists and designers, not just artisans, valuing their capacity
to travel across the binary. Khalid Amin Khatri is described as the ajrakh (regional
block-print form) artist who “ran away to Mumbai” at 13 to escape boring
schooling, and recently returning to Mumbai for a solo exhibition which “firmly
marked the transition across the boundaries of craft and art”.7
Second, sentimental capitalism valorizes the cultural practices, enterprise, and
creativity of the poor, in particular through a fetishized emphasis on grassroots
participation and empowerment. Grassroots participation is a cornerstone of creative
industry built out of everyday skills, customs, artefacts, and way of life. Walter
Benjamin famously wrote that art under commodity fetishism and mechanical
reproduction transitions away from the cult of authenticity. The aura embedded
in forms like painting and its individualized reception and ritual social function gives
way to the political forms and functions of reproducibility, montage, and alienation
received by masses through photography and film (Benjamin 1968). Such neat
transitions cannot always be defended. In fact, under sentimental capitalism, the
cult of authenticity is an animated mode of alienation.
Under commodity fetishism, the social relations of exploitation between wage
labour and capital appear in mystified form as a relation among things (Marx 1990
[1867]). Under sentimental capitalism, the authentic status of the work of art
derives from making visible the handiwork, creativity, entrepreneurial market savvy
of the poor. Aura is not lost. In a twist of Benjamin’s words, the aura of such art is
given by manifesting closeness to the poor, however distant the work of art may
be from the conditions of such exploitation and violence.8 The form could vary.
Whether it is a film about the creativity, improvisational skills, and talent in slums,
with its slum actors, or artwork done by weavers from discriminated and under-
privileged backgrounds displayed in international exhibitions, the presence of the
(formerly) victimized, now enterprising and empowered constitutes the fetishized
aura that is integral to valorization.
Apart from institutional facilitation of such valorization, sentiment is an essential
ingredient through which the poor are enlisted in scripting such fetishism.
Mobilizing the touch, voice, and feelings of the ordinary resident, worker or poor
person marks a work of art under sentimental capitalism, without which it risks
losing authenticity, inclusiveness, or the touch of the “local”. Spectacular and
ordinary “inclusion” is a registered trademark of the valorization process. Cultural
performances by residents in the walled city pepper AMC’s Heritage Week events.
The senses, feelings, objects, and imaginations of textile workers in Manchester
and Ahmedabad produce the thick nostalgia of CEE installations. At CEE, Alice
Kettle’s embroidered textile sought to capture the “rules of life” in the Queen Street
mill in Lancashire with workers’ voices stitched on: “enjoyed every minute working
there”; “enjoyed the work and camaraderie but not the long hours”, “my father
was a loom sweeper and my 3 sisters were weavers”; “started work when I was
15 years old, worked 45 hours week and earned 30 shillings (see Figure 5). The
“authenticity” of CEE is projected through the cult of close encounters—with
Lancashire mill-worker memories and Kutch artisans” embroidered story-telling.

92 Antipode
Figure 5: Alice’s Kettle’s “Rules of Life”
Never mind if most artisans in India continue to be exploited, these artisans became
artists, they run a successful grassroots social enterprise and control their
production. Indeed, these artisans appear to transcend inequality by participating
in an exchange project, making art that soaks elite senses, apparently piercing the
effective barriers of cultivated distinction (Bourdieu 1984) through affect.
A third characteristic of sentimental capitalism is that it relies upon the promise that
creativity is intrinsically empowering for the poor, while simultaneously normalizing the
idea that creativity can be instrumentally empowering for the poor (i.e. source of income
and survival). As a corollary to the centrality of fetishizing grassroots participation,
the fact that the poor might be making money, gaining cultural capital,
opportunity, or credibility fetishizes art itself as an empowering, hopeful process
and space of optimism, even as broader, intractable conditions of exploitation and
violence are obscured. Art is not only that rare site for the poor to express creativity.
It is that uncommon opportunity for becoming other than poor (ie an artist).
Take the example of the Arts Reverie, the cultural organization in Ahmedabad
which facilitated the CEE. Arts Reverie was a separate project by the CEE curator,
Barney Hare Duke, who worked with arts consultants from Ahmedabad to refurbish
an old haveli in the walled city. It is advertised as a place “where artists and creative
art professionals can stay” to “reflect on”, “explore”, and develop the creative
process, while nurturing talent, “critical dialogue”, and test innovation and
enterprise. It is also meant to be a “centre” for research and new work, a “project that
connects artists into the cultural life of the city, the state and into India; regeneration
initiatives in the city; into local and international artist networks”.9 That’s just what
Arts Reverie enabled CEE artists to do. Most urban or rural artisans could ill afford to
rent such refurbished spaces in the walled city or avail of creative exchange projects,
unless sponsored to do so. Art Reverie thus serves those artisanal entrepreneurs
embedded in elite institutional, consultancy, and grant-making networks.
Instrumental and intrinsic value was articulated as “food for the soul” in a
different context by the Brazilian Culture Minister as a follow-up to Brazil’s Zero
Hunger program.10 Neither solely dreamy nor exclusively commodified, in combination,

dreams of creativity as food for the soul become an affective instrument that
ostensibly bears the promise of food for the poor. As George Jacob proposing the
museum cluster in Ahmedabad notes, “an investment in the non-profit sector of
contemporary museums has the potential to strengthen our social fabric and trigger
the need for infrastructural development, offering new destinations for both Indian
and foreign tourists looking beyond the ancient bastions of heritage” (quoted in
Unnithan 2013). Jacob captures the importance of representing new artistic
interventions as making money and a new social fabric out of nothing. This
emotional regard for non-profit and social fabric at the scene of displacement and
“cooptation by inclusion” (Desai 2012b) is not just an ideological misrepresentation
of powerful institutional processes, it is the commodity itself.
The emphasis placed on intrinsic and instrumental value makes art under
sentimental capitalism an intensified and modified political problem compared
with Walter Benjamin’s time. Benjamin (1968:241) said:
Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to
express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks
to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the
introduction of aesthetics into political life.
Under sentimental capitalism, the poor’s right and aspiration to have property
and businesses of their own is facilitated through artistic entrepreneurialism. Such
an aspiration not only seeks to displace the political aspiration to change property
relations, it also seeks to replace the sentimental work of art for nation-building.
Conclusion
In this article I have shown how creative economy is constructed in Ahmedabad by
attending to multiple mobilizations of art for heritage production and urban
revitalization by various constituencies. Rather than treat creative economy as an
unprecedented and universal global policy discourse, I used the concept of
sentimental capitalism to locate the formation of Ahmedabad’s creative economy
in regional histories of cultural production, philanthropy, industrial restructuring
and genocide. I argued that art in Ahmedabad is implicated in displacement on the
riverfront, changing land use in the walled city, and processes valorizing degraded
peripheries of the city. Art’s complicity is apparent in erasures and silences embedded
in memory walks, heritage and museum initiatives, and in the terms, discourses, and
affects mobilized by curators, artists, exhibitions and institutions.
The concept of sentimental capitalism foregrounds the affects through which art
becomes a materializing force for spatial transformation. Here, nostalgia and hope
are crucial productive affects mobilized to revalorize place by constructing heritage
out of Ahmedabad’s history of mill closures and genocide. Nostalgia works in
tandem with hope about a few talented, enterprising artisans who not only
travelled across binaries of craftwork and art/design, but also have the opportunity
to transcend class by affecting elite senses through art. As I have shown,
highlighting agency, enterprise, and a living heritage is crucial to CEE curator, Kala
Raksha artists, and AMC professionals alike.

94 Antipode
Notwithstanding these powerful mobilizations, the fantasies of vibrant, futuristic

cities, and the imaginaries of a harmonious past are contested in practice. The
vendors have not simply made way for Bhadra plaza, Rajnagar mill is yet to open,
and nostalgia for the past conflicts with sedimented histories of violence and
inequality. The difficulty of elite fantasies and mobilized affects gaining traction
demonstrates that another spatial politics can possibly emerge from the struggle
to materialize the creative economy in contemporary Ahmedabad. The significant
question of what working classes, displaced populations, or ordinary citizens make
of art under sentimental capitalism and the degree to which artistic practice
contributes to gentrification of mill neighbourhoods deserves future study. For
now, practices examined here demonstrate that art’s participation in obscuring or
mobilizing dispossession and exploitation in the name of urban revitalization and
heritage production has strong and spreading roots in Ahmedabad.
Acknowledgements
I am extremely grateful to Alexandre Da Costa, Vinay Gidwani, Farhana Ibrahim, Ishita Pande,
and three anonymous reviewers for detailed and critical feedback on earlier versions of this
paper. My sincere thanks also to Dakxin Bajrange, Renu Desai, Tanishka Kachru, and
Navdeep Mathur for animated conversations about these changes in contemporary
Ahmedabad. Finally, my thanks to Professor Jan Breman for permission to use an adapted
version of the map of Ahmedabad published in The Making and Unmaking of an Industrial
Working Class (Amsterdam University Press, 2004) and to Andy Kent for helping me navigate
the copyright terrain.
Endnotes
1
http://www.afineline.co.uk/
2
http://www.ahduni.edu.in/downloads/pdfs/chm/chm-cotton-exchange-exhibition-
press-kit.pdf
3
Field research notes at CEE, 14 April 2013.
4
Field research notes on Shamji’s talk at CEE, 14 April 2013.
5
http://www.kala-raksha.org/
6
Field research notes on Shamji’s talk at CEE, 14 April 2013.
7
Field research notes, 14 April 2013.
8
Benjamin said, “We define the aura [of natural objects] as the unique phenomenon of a
distance, however close it may be” (1968:222).
9
http://www.afineline.co.uk/index.php/3--productions/arts-reverie/
10
http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=60265#.UQADUieX-Sq
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Sentimental Capitalism in Contemporary India: Art, Heritage, and Development in Ahmedabad, Gujarat

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Sentimental Capitalism in

Contemporary India: Art, Heritage,

neglected question of cultural production, here deﬁned as artistic production,

© 2014 The Author. Antipode © 2014 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

capitalism and cultural nationalism in India. Thus, it is important to consider not

© 2014 The Author. Antipode © 2014 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

© 2014 The Author. Antipode © 2014 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

artistic practices and heritage production. In the third, I focus on CEE as an

The Cultural Politics of the Creative Economy

© 2014 The Author. Antipode © 2014 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

© 2014 The Author. Antipode © 2014 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

heritage interact in practice with particular “sedimented histories”—longstanding

Remaking Ahmedabad: Art, Heritage, and Urban

Figure 1: Map of Ahmedabad; adapted, with permission, from Breman (2004:x)

© 2014 The Author. Antipode © 2014 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

© 2014 The Author. Antipode © 2014 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

© 2014 The Author. Antipode © 2014 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

© 2014 The Author. Antipode © 2014 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

Nostalgia at the Rajnagar Mill

© 2014 The Author. Antipode © 2014 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

© 2014 The Author. Antipode © 2014 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

This journalist perceives and constructs the exhibition as an inexpensive, heady

Figure 3: Alison Welsh’s “Another Peace”

© 2014 The Author. Antipode © 2014 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

population of informal workers, Ahmedabad’s industry itself is not quite as dead as

Figure 4: Stephen Dixon’s “Clocking On”

© 2014 The Author. Antipode © 2014 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

© 2014 The Author. Antipode © 2014 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

Although crafts policy was Chattopadhyay’s counter to the artisan-made-victim

© 2014 The Author. Antipode © 2014 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

© 2014 The Author. Antipode © 2014 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

Raksha encourages the conceptualization of these discursive distinctions as part of

© 2014 The Author. Antipode © 2014 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

Figure 5: Alice’s Kettle’s “Rules of Life”

© 2014 The Author. Antipode © 2014 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

© 2014 The Author. Antipode © 2014 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

Notwithstanding these powerful mobilizations, the fantasies of vibrant, futuristic

© 2014 The Author. Antipode © 2014 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

© 2014 The Author. Antipode © 2014 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

© 2014 The Author. Antipode © 2014 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

© 2014 The Author. Antipode © 2014 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

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