Ahmedabad

The sultanate capital

In 1411 Ahmad Shah I, the second sultan of the independent Gujarat sultanate, founded a new capital on the east bank of the Sabarmati, beside an older town known as Asaval and close to the site associated with Karnavati, a town attributed to the Chaulukya king Karna. He built the Bhadra fort on the river and laid out the city around it. The Jama Masjid, completed in 1424, has a prayer hall of hundreds of carved pillars and shows the blending of mosque architecture with the stone-carving traditions of Gujarat that marks the city's buildings. Ahmad Shah's tomb and those of the queens stand nearby.

Under his successors, especially Mahmud Begada, the city filled with mosques and tombs. The Sarkhej Roza, a complex of tombs, a mosque and a tank around the shrine of the Sufi Ahmad Khattu, lies on the city's south-western edge.

Under the Mughals

Akbar conquered Gujarat in 1572–73, and Ahmedabad became the capital of a rich Mughal province. The Sidi Saiyyed mosque, built in 1573 at the end of the sultanate period, is famous for its carved stone windows, one of them showing an intertwined tree. Jahangir disliked the dusty city and called it Gardabad, the city of dust. Its merchants, Hindu, Jain and Muslim, traded textiles across the Indian Ocean, and Jain temples, such as the Hutheesing temple of 1848, show the community's continuing wealth. The city is divided into pols, gated neighbourhoods of wooden houses, each traditionally home to a particular caste or community.

The textile city

The Marathas took Ahmedabad in 1758, and the British in 1817. The first cotton mill opened in 1861, founded by Ranchhodlal Chhotalal, and by the early twentieth century the city's mills, financed largely by local capital, made it one of the main industrial centres of India.

Gandhi returned from South Africa in 1915 and settled in Ahmedabad, first at Kochrab and from 1917 at the ashram on the Sabarmati. In 1918 he led the mill workers in a strike for higher wages and fasted for them, and the textile workers' union that grew out of it became a model for his approach to labour. In March 1930 he set out from the ashram on the march to Dandi.

Modern Ahmedabad

Ahmedabad was the capital of Gujarat from 1960 until the move to Gandhinagar in the 1970s, and remains its largest city. It was the scene of serious communal violence in 1969 and again in 2002. The walled city was inscribed by UNESCO in 2017 as the first World Heritage City in India.