Spatialisation of selves: Religion and liveable spaces among Hindus and Muslims in the walled city of Ahmedabad, India

- Rethinking liveability in terms of associational life of neighbourhoods.
- The relationship between religion and liveability in Indian cities.
- How religion negotiates normatively religious differences.
- Creation of liveable neighbourhoods by Hindus and Muslims.

The paper examines the processes of constructing liveable neighbourhoods in the walled city of Ahmedabad, in the context of 2002. Godhra carnage and subsequent anti-Muslim riots throughout Gujarat, India. The walled city of Ahmedabad have been perceived as riot prone and highly segregated place where Hindus and Muslims have been living separately since the city was built in early fifteenth century. The paper attempts to unpack this relationship between religion and liveability in Indian cities, particularly how religion negotiates normatively religious differences that appear to be incommensurable having high potentiality of violence and yet create sustainable liveable spaces. The paper adopts an ethnographic approach towards understanding the role of religion in the making liveable urban spaces that are socially and culturally sustainable focusing on individual narratives and experiences in order to capture its different meanings and notions, especially at the local micro-level. The narratives, as argued in the paper, articulates the spatialisation of self and their particular cultures through the production of neighbourhoods. The existence of 'my place/places' or neighbourhoods ensure the survival of these particular cultures as well as the demarcation of 'their place/places' suggest not the intolerance of the other but recognition of the other and its culture, albeit on the outside. It is this continual negotiation that enables recognition of the self as well as the other making these divided spaces liveable.