Walter Benjamin on the Banks of the Sabarmati: Boosterism, Hindutva, and the Murmurings of Utopia

In his seminal work, the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin points to the revelatory correspondences between disparate historical epochs in which the past flashes into the present. It is the affinities between present day Ahmedabad, India, and nineteenth-century Paris that are explored in this article, with the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project standing in for the Parisian arcades. Founded on such utilitarian promises as providing flood mitigation and recreational space, the Riverfront Project has, in fact, functioned as what Benjamin refers to as a “dream house” of commodity fetishism, as the architectural equivalent of a welcome mat for foreign investment. Moreover, the project is emblematic of a massive reshaping of India’s built environment, which has simultaneously diverted attention from Prime Minister Modi’s increasingly muscular Hindutva politics and the displacement of subaltern groups. Nonetheless, drawing on Benjamin’s concept of utopia—aspirations congealed in material artifacts—this article perceives, latent in the Riverfront Project, the possibility of constructing a counternarrative to the current constellation of political and cultural forces.