I first came upon Vatva as part of an enthusiastic team of volunteers for the Aman Ekta Manch – an umbrella-NGO initiative setup in the wake of the Gujarat carnage of 2002 to oversee relief and rehabilitation work in the affected areas. Spread on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, Vatva is an industrial wasteland that was once a village.
We arrived in Vatva after it had been ravaged by the violence that had consumed much of Gujarat after the unfortunate and controversial 'Godhra incident' of 27 February 2002. The colonies, buildings, shops and streets wore the telltale marks of communal frenzy: burnt remains of beauty parlours, ruins that were once mosques, rubble that was once residences.
As we settled into our work at the Qutb-e-Alam Dargah refugee camp, we were wary of our curiosity, having been warned by supervisors against developing the tendency of 'riot tourism'. But we heard the stories, nonetheless – from the residents and from the landscape. Our work was limited mainly to three colonies in Vatva, centred around the tomb of the Sufi saint Qutb-e-Alam. These colonies were religion- and caste-specific ghettos – Saiyidvada and Navapura were Muslim; the residents of Vaghrivaas were Vaaghris; and Bharwaadvaas was a colony of Bharwaads.
What rendered these colonies different from the usual idea of ghettos was the 'soft borders' where they met. To the outsider, their limits and boundaries seemed invisible. I remember walking towards the camp from the rubble that was once Navapura and ten minutes later, running into a wall that displayed half torn pictures of Hindu deities to discover that I was in Vaghrivaas (see picture). And yet, these unseen boundaries exercised a definite constraint on the colonies' residents.