Demography and Population Movements in Gujarat

Abstract

Gujarat, the westernmost state of India with its landmass reaching out into the Indian Ocean, forked by the gulfs of Kutch and Khambhat to form a large coastline, has had a history of maritime trade going back to four millennia as well as of migrations from within and outside the subcontinent. The state has been known historically for its culture shaped by mercantilism, industrialization and entrepreneurship and most recently for its unabashed march towards economic liberalization, as the self professed and popular model of economic growth and good governance. It has historically had a high number of immigrants and migrants that came as traders, nomads, missionaries, travellers, merchants, refugees and with the development of industries particularly since late 1800s, as work related migrants. It is a highly urbanized state with 31.10 per cent of its population living in urban areas. This high level of urbanization is nowhere more visible than in the district of Ahmedabad where 80.2 per cent of the population lives in urban areas while 19.8 per cent lives in rural areas. This highly urbanized state has come to be characterized in recent times for its economic growth but also for the violence in 2002. Violence however is not without precedent in Gujarat. Communal violence in the state has led to the highest per capita of deaths due to such violence in the country and the highest number of casualties in a single cluster of riots (Parekh, 2002). In trying to find meaning and explain the events of 2002 broadly two images of Gujarat have emerged, one of the state with a culture of syncretism that has been interrupted since the 1980s by right wing mobilization and another as a state prone to violence with repeated instances of caste and communal conflict. To look at Gujarat, this chapter, therefore, employs the contending lenses of citizenship as well as displacement in that while one marks or at least formally signifies membership or inclusion – the other marks physical exclusion. There is a rich body of scholarship on the state including those by anthropologists or sociologists that has been added to by academic attention to Gujarat after the violence of 2002 and while this chapter does not share the expertise of those disciplines it examines and draws on existing scholarship by them on the state to lay out the context for subsequent chapters.