Tenth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

On 16 June 1819, an earthquake, 8.2 on the Richter scale, rumbled under the Rann of Kachch in British India. Tremors traveled six hundred miles southeast to the sultanate city of Ahmedabad causing minarets of the medieval Jumma Masjid to come crashing down. But the city’s socio-cultural structure held intact under the pressures of severe environmental havoc. Nearly two hundred years later on 26 January 2001, an almost identical quake, 7.7 on the Richter scale, hit the Rann and Ahmedabad yet again. In its modern avatar, the unevenly urbanized and severely ghettoized city took a heavier toll. Since the 1950s the city had increasingly become characterized by Hindu-Muslim violence and efforts to ghettoise Muslim neighborhoods. Years of religious strife peaked with ethnic cleansing in 2002, irreversibly changing the lived geography of the city. During the 2001 earthquake, architecture responded differently to seismic stress between the mostly Muslim-occupied walled city and the Hindu modern suburbs. While the Rann continues to sit atop one of the world’s most important regions of intracratonic activity, does the land’s perturbed geology reflect in the violent spatial fracturing between Hindu and Muslim communities? Studies in post trauma psychology, disaster resettlement, post-colonial nationalism suggest traces of PTSD and heightened survivalist tendencies, which often manifest in violence after a natural disaster. This paper juxtaposes this broader seismic history of Ahmedabad with urban sectarian divide to take a close look at the connections between natural disasters and community violence.