Ahmedabad: The mill industry was still booming in the Manchester of the East when the Ahmedabad Cotton Brokers Association (ACBA) founded Cotton Chawl in 1934, right next to the thriving Panjrapol, Hutheesing ni Vadi and a cluster of Jain organizations in the Kalupur area. The purpose was to felicitate the stay of middlemen (adatiya in Gujarati) associated with the trade.Over the next 84 years, the chawl has seen rise and fall of mills of Ahmedabad, changing equations in the Walled City areas, and the migration to the western city parts. The planet marks the World Heritage Week from November 19. Ahead of that, a team from the postgraduate programme in architectural history and theory (AHT) put together an exhibition at Cotton Chawl on Sunday titled ‘Cotton Chawl ni Vartao’ or tales of the Cotton Chawl.Gauri Bharat, associate professor, the faculty of architecture, CEPT University , who led the project, said that the motive was to track the change in unique urban residential cluster.“We chose this specific location as overall architecture is still in the same shape and one can find persons who are born and brought up here,” she said. “It was a learning experience for students to understand how the community responds to change.” The students documented what households and the chawl looked like over the decades. “And we made sketches and models to demonstrate the evolution,” she said. “The students also designed a fictitious newspaper chronicling the change.”Historians point at the emergence of chawls across the city of pols in early 1900s as mill workers needed en masse shelters. This specific chawl was and still is managed by the Panjrapol and Jain mahajans — the reason why it has retained majority of its characteristics and residential composition.Mahendra Shah, one of the former residents of the chawl, said that his entire family was raised in the chawl and one of his brothers, now a doctor in the US, still has the memory of the area alive as one of his passwords. “Stalwarts of the freedom and social movements visited the chawl and motivated youth to assume leadership roles,” he said. “Much has changed in all these years — right from the concept of space to shared toilets.”Arushi Gopal, an AHT student and participant of the project, said that the students worked at the chawl for about three weeks. “The residents here don’t remember the year of an event — they remember events associated with it, such as opening of a cinema, the release of a film, wedding in the family and so on,” she said. “People are more conscious of the concept of privacy now.”

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