FIRST STOP: GUJARAT
Please alight for seaports, stepwells and salt flats
Car 3 is now reserved for Jain pilgrims
Car 4 is for Asiatic lions only
The buffet car is now serving Gujarati thalis and sweets. Please form an orderly queue.
ગુજરાતમાં આપનું સ્વાગત છે - Welcome to Gujarat
GUJARAT—‘Land of Gurjars’
Guj: ગુજરાત gujarāt. From Skt/Pkt: gurjara, ‘Gurjara people’; and Skt: rashtra, ‘land’, ‘country’, ‘region’.
Gujarat takes its name from the Gurjaras, who emerged as a major political force in north-western India during the early medieval period. They may have included groups that entered India from Central Asia, but they also seem to have absorbed pastoral, military and landed communities already established in western India. Their origins remain disputed.
Between the sixth and tenth centuries, Gurjara rulers controlled large parts of present-day Rajasthan and northern Gujarat. The most powerful were the Gurjara-Pratiharas, whose empire eventually stretched across much of northern India, with Kannauj as its capital.
As Gurjara power spread southwards, the region became known as Gurjara-rāṣṭra—the ‘realm of the Gurjaras’. In everyday speech, the name shortened and shifted until Gurjara-rāṣṭra became Gujarat.
The name survived long after the Gurjara kingdoms disappeared. But the Gujarat shown on today’s map is much newer.
From Princely States to Gujarat
At Independence, the territory that later became Gujarat contained more than 200 princely states, from Baroda and Junagadh to domains so small that they scarcely register on a modern map. After a brief and uneasy union with Marathi-speaking Bombay State, the Maha-Gujarat movement secured a separate Gujarati-speaking state in 1960.
Modern Gujarat is one of India’s most industrialised and politically influential regions. Yet its identity has never been confined to the land within its borders. Gujarat possesses the longest coastline of any Indian state, and for centuries its ports faced west towards Arabia, Africa and the wider Indian Ocean. The old anxiety about crossing the kala pani—the “black waters”—sits awkwardly beside the history of Gujarati merchants, sailors and migrants who repeatedly crossed them. Today, Gujaratis form one of India’s largest and most economically influential overseas communities.
But to understand modern Gujarat, we begin not with ports or airports, but with two inland cities that frame the state’s modern identity: Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar.
AHMEDABAD — A City of Many Names
‘Ahmad’s City’ [Ashaval, Karnavati, Amdavad] Guj: અમદાવાદ amadāvād From Ahmad Shah and Per: abad, ‘settlement’.
Gujarat’s largest city has carried three major names: Ashaval, Karnavati and Ahmedabad. Each belongs to a different city built beside the Sabarmati: a Bhil settlement, a fortified royal town and the capital of a Muslim sultanate. Later, its cotton mills earned it a fourth, unofficial name: the Manchester of India.
The earliest settlement was Ashaval, also recorded as Ashapalli, by the ninth or tenth century. Tradition connects the name with Asha, a Bhil chief, and palli, “village” or “hamlet”. On the banks of the Sabarmati, a tribal settlement was becoming a town.
According to later tradition, the Solanki king Karna then established a fortified centre nearby, probably in the eleventh century, and called it Karnavati—“Karna’s city”. Temples, tanks and stepwells followed. The new name announced royal power, but it did not erase Ashaval at once. The settlements grew beside one another.
The decisive change came in 1411. Ahmad Shah I, ruler of the Gujarat Sultanate, founded a new capital on the Sabarmati and named it Ahmedabad. The name combines Ahmad with Persian ābād, “settlement” or “prosperous place”. Walls, gates, mosques, markets and palaces rose around the new city. Ahmedabad remained the sultanate’s capital until Akbar conquered Gujarat in 1573.
The city’s buildings still show what happened next. Islamic arches stand beside stone carving shaped by Gujarati Hindu and Jain craftsmen. Screens of pierced stone filter the hard sunlight. Stepwells sink below street level. Ahmedabad was not simply ruled by one community after another; its architecture was made through their encounter.
By the nineteenth century, cotton transformed the city again. Mills rose beside the Sabarmati, chimneys replaced minarets on parts of the skyline, and Ahmedabad became known as the Manchester of India.
Then the riverbank became the setting for another kind of power. Gandhi established the Sabarmati Ashram here in 1917. It stood between a prison and a cremation ground, on exposed land troubled by snakes, floods and fierce heat. Gandhi chose the site deliberately:
This is the right place for our activities … for on one side are the iron bolts of the foreigners, and on the other the thunderbolts of Mother Nature.
From here he organised campaigns, trained followers in communal living and non-violence, and in 1930 set out on the Salt March.
After Gujarat became a separate state in 1960, Ahmedabad served as its capital for a decade before the government moved to Gandhinagar. The ministries left, but the city remained Gujarat’s commercial and cultural centre. In 2017, its historic walled city became the first Indian city to be inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List, recognised for its mosques, temples, gates and “densely-packed traditional houses (pols) in gated traditional streets (puras) with characteristic features such as bird feeders and public wells.”
Ahmedabad still carries the old nickname “Manchester of India.” Many of the great cotton mills have closed, but textiles remain part of the city’s identity. Arvind, founded here in 1931, now produces more than 60 million metres of denim fabric each year for markets around the world.
The contrasts are everywhere: glass towers beyond the old city walls; carved mosques beside crowded markets; textile factories and design studios beside centuries-old pols. Through the middle runs the Sabarmati—the river that shaped the city, carried its industries and gave Gandhi his most famous ashram.
GANDHINAGAR — A Capital in the Trees
‘Gandhi City’ Guj: ગાંધીનગર gāndhīnagara From (Mahatma) Gandhi and Hin/Skt: nagar, ‘city’.
When Gujarat became a separate state in 1960, Ahmedabad served as its temporary capital. But its crowded streets and rapid industrial growth made it a difficult home for an expanding government. The state chose instead to build a new capital on open land 25 kilometres to the north.
Construction began in 1966. The city was named Gandhinagar, after Mohandas Gandhi, Gujarat’s most famous son. Its principal planners, H. K. Mewada and Prakash Apte, had both worked on Chandigarh, and the family resemblance is clear.
Gandhinagar was laid out in thirty numbered sectors, each with its own shops, schools, housing and parks. Broad roads crossed at right angles. Government offices stood apart from residential districts. Trees were planted along the avenues and around the public buildings. Where Ahmedabad had grown through centuries of trade, migration and conquest, Gandhinagar arrived on the drawing board.
At its centre were the Legislative Assembly, the Secretariat and the offices of the new state government. The city was intended to feel calm, spacious and rational: a capital built for administration rather than commerce.
The greenery softened the geometry. Parks, tree-lined roads and planted sectors became one of Gandhinagar’s defining features. At Indroda Nature Park, visitors find woodland, animals, botanical collections and fossil displays—including dinosaur remains discovered in Gujarat.
The name tied this modern planned city to a very different Gujarat: the Gujarat of Gandhi, the Sabarmati Ashram and the independence movement. Ahmedabad had been shaped by sultans, merchants, mill owners and nationalists. Gandhinagar was shaped by planners—and named after the man who spent his life speaking truth to power.
For more on Indian place names and history - see Place Names Wallah
For a journey through tribal India & Sri Lanka see - Headhunting with Marguerit