Heritage Walk Ahmedabad, Start Historic Walk

However walking is remedy and also the Ahmedabad heritage walk provides one with the perfect excuse to walk…walk…and walk a lot of to your heart's content. Walking, in our times has turn into a luxury. And why not? For who wouldn't fall in love with the antiquated slim lanes of older Ahmedabad whereby lie Ahmedabad's famous 'Pols' and where a number of the houses and temples are over 3 centuries old!

The Heritage Walk Ahmedabad starts at 8 A.M from the Kalupur Swaminarayan Temple and ends at the Jama Masjid (the walk is popularly called mandir to masjid!). The walk is overall a half of a conservation drive to save lots of the invaluable heritage of the old city and is chaperoned by conservation enthusiasts volunteering as our guides. It is conducted by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) in association with the Foundation for Conservation and Research of Urban Traditional Architecture (CRUTA).

Heritage walk Ahmedabad

Our journey of Heritage Walk Ahmedabad (as I'd like to decision it) started inside the slim serpentine lanes of the 'Pols' of Ahmedabad. The 'Pols' are distinctive feature of the old town Ahmedabad. In essence, they resemble a gated housing society where all the houses belong to people of a explicit family, caste, profession, religion etc. Many of the pols were engineered between one hundred to 300 years ago with the oldest being aptly titled the 'Mahurat Pol' engineered around 1714 ('Mahurat' suggests that 'inaugural'). These pols were engineered by community members to shield their respective groups in times of communal attacks and alternative such disturbances and therefore every pol had an entrance gate that was manned at nights and secret passageways for emergency escapes. A typical pol would carries with it clustered interconnected houses together with at least one temple, a well (in many cases) and a 'Chabutra' (bird feeding tower). There are over 600 such pols in Ahmedabad.

As we walked through the pols, I found myself in conversation with a civilization of the past through the ravishingly beautiful recent 'havelis' with intricate wooden carvings and massive over-hanging verandas, the various temples with ancestry dating back to 400 years and a approach of life that has been preserved over generations.

The distinctive 'Chabutras' or bird feeding towers and therefore the British built iron poles with a directional arrows stating the direction of the underground sewer are a number of the most unique options of the pols of Ahmedabad.

As our eager group walked through marveling at the previous homes and temples I realised that although abundant of the good wall built by Mehmud Begada in 1487 that fortified the previous city has come down, the culture and conventions of what life should are about a number of centuries ago has lingered on here…

Through the walk have a tendency to discovered gems like a four hundred-years-old underground Jain temple (photography strictly prohibit. Why was it underground? To avoid wasting it from being demolished by Aurangzeb's generals! Even additional intriguing was the 400-years-previous Kalaram Ji Temple that was perhaps the sole different temple in India that had a statue of a dark complexioned Lord Rama.

Amidst the overdose of temples we tend to stumbled upon a temple of another kind - The Calico Dome. You'd surprise what the remains of a wierd dome-like structure is doing in the middle of a heritage precinct. Believe me, the instant I saw the dome I thought of Jamal from Slumdog Millionaire selling the dome to the 'gora' tourist as some type of a UFO or perhaps remains of a Begin Trek movie set… However actually this used to once be a showroom house for Calico Mills and stands out for its distinctive 'geodesic' design which was inspired by the nice American futurist and architect Buckminster Fuller. Unfortunately a lot of the structure was consumed by the 2001 Gujarat earthquake. The Calico Dome is considered to be a reminder of the golden era of Ahmedabad's once famous textile industry.

The walk starts sharp at eight and lasts until 10:30am at the splendid Jami Masjid. It's one of the foremost magnificent structures in all of India and was said to be the biggest mosque within the Indian subcontinent till Shah Jahan built Delhi's Jama Masjid in 1650. It was built by the city's founder Sultan Ahmed Shah in 1424.

It was arduous to believe that simply a few kilometers away across the Sabarmati was another front of this city that boasted of contemporary buildings, flyovers and looking malls. I thought of the people who would be going to the newer part of the city for work every day. Won't it's some sort of a time-travel every morning and evening for these of us!