Old Ahmedabad

Old ahmedabad is beautiful.

Hazrat Pir Mohammad Shah is great saint.

It is located at Panlornaka area.

The library in this is campus is very nice worth watching and having thousands of ancient books

ahmedabad is not real ahmedabad now karnavati change of ahmedabad

and karnavati not ahmedabad because kanravati not important in history only live people but not progress in thise year real karnavati devlopment of king ahmedshah so no problem of ahmedabad city name

Assalam.. Hello Ahmedabad,

I am here from Delhi, working on Delhi Map.

I love my city Ahmedabad

I love my fiancee Uzma

some thing about pol architecture

Three hundred years after it was founded, the city got a unique architectural feature - Pols - which can still be seen in many parts of old Ahmedabad.

A Pol is a small residential unit consisting of a single street with a group of houses, which is usually protected by a massive gate at the entrance. When the gate is closed, the entire street becomes one big house often inhabited by people of the same trade or even by relatives.

A compact housing cluster with dead-end streets forms a distinctive residential pattern within a Pol. In earlier days, the Pols were self-sustaining for a certain period of time since each house had its own underground storage for water, and food grains were stored in the safest part of the house. At times, two different Pols opened for ventilation at the same point and they also had a common service bay for drainage, water supply and garbage collection.

These Pols formed a kind of micro-neighborhood, which developed further as population density increased in the city.

But in 1714, when communal riots broke out, these Pols also acquired a religious identity. After the riots, Ahmedabad's population sought greater security by living together in closely associated groups within the Pols. Whereas earlier, religious segregation occurred naturally because of occupations, this was the first time that a conscious attempt was made by religious communities to live together, to seek security in numbers.

In recent times, it has been the Pols that have taken on a distinct communal character. This primarily has to do with the fact that invariably people from the same trade also follow the same religion. For instance, those in the business of clarified butter are Hindus and moneylenders are Muslims.

In such a scenario, the Pols, which were meant to enhance community living as well as provide security to the occupants, have proved to be fatal for many victims of communal riots. For instance, the small back service streets (called Chhini) ended up being literal dead-ends during the riots of 1969 and 1992.

Moreover, thanks to the structure of the Pols it is easy to throw a plastic bottle full of petrol or even a 'kakra' - a crude missile made out of rolling a cloth ball with pieces of metal dipped in petrol and then lit - from one Pol area into another. Not only do such home made weapons inflict maximum damage because of the density of the population, it is impossible for the police to trace the people who indulge in these violent activities.

Hence, even though the Pol and Chhini were architecturally useful structures, they now play a significant role in fanning communal violence in the city.

The proximity of the houses brings another critical issue to the fore - the central courtyard is vulnerable to attack from all the sides, both in Muslim dominated areas like Jamalpur and Hindu dominated areas like Khadia, where communal riots have broken out in recent times.

if old amdavad would not there then

there will not amdavad which is today