The violence and calm of that morning could not have been more poignantly juxtaposed T In 2003, with bulldozer operators around me in Bhuj complaining noisily about the difficulty of carting away the stones of a city rent by an earthquake in 2001, 1 sat quietly piecing together a 19-century panorama of photographs that had escaped my attention even after months of fieldwork in Bhuj (see pages 118-119). Composed beautifully sometime in the late 1870s, this extraordinary panorama depicted the entire sweep of Bhug's historic lakefront against a late morning sun, its sepia romanticism replete with all manner of associations, and perhaps with -I thought-a senous message for me from behind its stored outlines. How different a picture it presented from the work of those machines outside.
It struck me, as I grappled that morning with my ideas, that my photograph should be seen as a serious and very temporal statement about a city's fragility, that it is a work of inter on its own, a highly critical inscription which marks a photographer's interpretation of his world It reveals, through its architectural sweep, the rationales which govern the way a cry should be designed, down to its very minutiae. Its photographer might well have been sensitive the import of recording a slice of Bhuj as he went about unhurriedly composing his equally responsible that morning.
Surprisingly, although the scene in that photograph has not changed much in the intervening 150 years, its stillness becomes all the more poignant when compared with Bhuy's rapid transformation over the past forty years. Even by the time the earthquake occurred, Bhuj had grown ten-fold into a bustling town, with all of the problems typically attendant with city growth in India. Much of this urban transformation, we recall, has at the core of its motivations a public-sector attitude to planning, whose ongina lie in the ideology of Nehruvian socialism. Owing to this, the city's development seems to have plodded unimaginatively along for decades, answerable largely to the wheels of bureaucracy But Bhuj's complexion seemed to change markedly ally-after India's economy opened up to capitalism in the early 1990s, when development began to be motivated by the compulsions of a real estate market and a powerful builder lobby.
The arguments for this book lie, unhappily, in the turbulent slipstream of such ideological shifts. In watching the idiosyncrasies and drama of change unfold round me, I have often found myself asking serious questions about the value of my own research, questions which go beyond the art historical and ethnographic method to their practical application. When I first began work on it, this compilation of words and pictures had been intended for residents of the city to read as a pictorial catharsis, to make some sense of their hopelessly fractured world. My manuscript was to be solely a collage of interviews, with short segments on Bhuj socio-political history by a clutch of contributing authors.
**Contents and Sample Pages**
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