Place · Sultanate walled city · India

Ahmedabad / Karnāvatī / Āshāval

Also known as Ahmedabad, Karnavati, Karnāvatī, Ashaval, Āshāval, Ashapalli, Āshāpallī

Three cities on one site: the 8th-century Bhil settlement Āshāval (also Āshāpallī), ruled by the Bhil chieftain Āśā; the 11th-century Solanki foundation Karnāvatī, laid out on the Sabarmati by Karṇadeva I of Anhilwara after his conquest of the Bhil king; and the Sultanate city founded in 1411 by Sultan Ahmed Shah of the Muzaffarid dynasty that absorbed both. Now a UNESCO World Heritage City — the first in India inscribed for a living urban fabric rather than a single monument — with its Sultanate mosques, pols, Mughal palaces, stepwells and twentieth-century Gandhian institutions all still in use.

See Ahmedabad / Karnāvatī / Āshāval on the map, with its connections →

Dynasties & capitalsCraft & industry

Function: Authority & administration
Patron dynasty: Delhi Sultanate
Tradition: INTACH Gujarat Chapter heritage listing (2014); UNESCO inscription file; Chauhan & Bose, Ahmedabad: A City in the World; R.N. Mehta on early Āshāval.
Confidence: Established / referenced
Location: 23.023, 72.571

Worth knowing

Āshāval was named for Āśā, chieftain of the local Bhil tribe; Karṇadeva I of the Solankis took it in the 11th century and renamed it Karnāvatī. Gujarat passed from the Solankis to the Vāghelas of Dholka in the 13th century and to the Delhi Sultanate in the 14th. In 1411 Sultan Ahmed Shah founded Ahmedabad on the site — Bhadra Fort, Jami Masjid and the Ahmed Shah Mosque are from his reign. His grandson Qutbuddin dug the Hauz-e-Qutub (now Kankaria Lake) in 1451, and Mahmud Begada later fortified the city with a ten-kilometre outer wall of twelve gates and 189 bastions. Humāyūn briefly occupied it in 1535; Akbar annexed Gujarat in 1573 and the Mughal century that followed produced Āzam Khan's Palace, Shāhī Bāgh and Moti Shāhī Masjid. The pols — gated residential clusters with shared courtyards and their own wells — are still inhabited. The city was Maratha from 1757, divided between the Peshwas and Gaekwads, and British from 1817; India's first textile mill was set up here in 1861, the Sabarmati Ashram in 1917, and the Dandi March set out from its riverbank in 1930.

Connections (15)

Craft tradition ofChampaner-Pavagadh
Gujarat's sultanate architecture is built in trabeate stone with carved jālis and almost no arches, because the masons were the same families who had built the region's Jain and Hindu temples and they applied what they knew to a new plan. Champaner and Ahmedabad are the two largest surviving examples, and the result is unlike Delhi's sultanate building in every structural respect while serving exactly the same purpose.
Site adjacencyDādā Harīr Vāv, Ahmedabad
Dada Harir's well and Rani Sipri's mosque were both built in Ahmedabad around 1500 and both were commissioned by women of Mahmud Begada's household, in the same Gujarat sultanate idiom — a style built out of Solanki temple carving applied to Islamic plans, with jali screens, carved brackets and minarets that are really pilasters. It is the most thoroughly hybrid architecture in India and it was produced by Hindu masons working for Muslim patrons within living memory of the conquest.
AnalogueGaur (Lakhnauti)
Ahmedabad and Gaur are the two great sultanate cities of the Indian periphery, built in the same century in the same political situation — a provincial governor turning independent — and in completely different materials. Gujarat had stone and a temple-carving tradition to absorb; Bengal had only brick and terracotta. One is a living city and the other is a field.
In the same set asJaipur walled city
Ahmedabad in 2017 and Jaipur in 2019 are the two Indian cities inscribed as cities rather than as monuments, and they are opposite kinds of city: an organic sultanate town of pols and gates that grew for five hundred years, and a planned grid laid out in 1727 to a shastraic scheme with uniform bazaar frontages. Both required a nomination that could bound a living place.
Dynastic founding ofRani ki Vav, Patan
Patan, the Solanki capital Anhilwara, is where the Karnāvatī story begins. Karṇadeva I of Anhilwara campaigned east across the Sabarmati in the eleventh century, defeated the Bhil chieftain of Āshāval and founded Karnāvatī on the river's east bank as a Solanki outpost. Solanki rule from Patan held until the thirteenth century, after which the Vāghelas of Dholka took the city. The site that Sultan Ahmed Shah refounded in 1411 was therefore already an old urban layer twice renamed, and Ahmedabad's walled core overlies the Solanki plan of Karnāvatī.
Site withinSabarmati Ashram
Gandhi founded the Sabarmati Ashram on the west bank of the Sabarmati in 1917 and ran it for thirteen years, making the city his base for the civil disobedience movement that reshaped the twentieth-century subcontinent. From here he set out on the Dandi March of 1930. The ashram also made Ahmedabad the headquarters of the Gujarat Vidyapeeth (1920) and of the textile-mill worker organising that produced the Majoor Mahajan Sangh. Industrial Ahmedabad and nationalist Ahmedabad are, by 1920, one city with one river between the mills on the east bank and the ashram on the west.
Site withinSarkhej Roza
Sarkhej Roza is the Sufi complex on Ahmedabad's southwestern edge, built in the Gujarat Sultanate idiom of trabeate stone and pierced jālis around the shrine of Ahmad Khattu Ganj Baksh, the fifteenth-century Chishti Sufi who advised Sultan Ahmed Shah on the founding of the city in 1411. Mahmud Begada later added his own tomb, his queen's tomb, a tank and pavilions here, so the complex also carries the royal necropolis of Ahmedabad's most assertive Sultanate builder. Le Corbusier compared its proportions to the Acropolis.
Site withinAhmedabad Pushti havelis
Ahmedabad Pushti havelis lies within Ahmedabad — the two sites sit about 0 km apart, well inside the city's historical boundary and part of the same urban or peri-urban landscape. Ahmedabad Pushti havelis is one of the specific sites that give Ahmedabad its layered character, and reads differently when seen as a stop within the larger city rather than as an isolated monument on an open map. The surrounding neighbourhoods, roads and other heritage ensembles belong to the same single urban fabric.
Site withinAdālaj Vāv
Adālaj Vāv lies within Ahmedabad — the two sites sit about 16 km apart, well inside the city's historical boundary and part of the same urban or peri-urban landscape. Adālaj Vāv is one of the specific sites that give Ahmedabad its layered character, and reads differently when seen as a stop within the larger city rather than as an isolated monument on an open map. The surrounding neighbourhoods, roads and other heritage ensembles belong to the same single urban fabric.
FoundedVikram Sarabhai
Vikram Sarabhai founded the Physical Research Laboratory at Ahmedabad in November 1947 as a cosmic-ray and theoretical physics institute, operated from the Ahmedabad Education Society's premises until the current M.G. Road campus opened in 1954. He also founded the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad in 1961 with Harvard Business School collaboration, and the Nehru Foundation for Development with his sister Mridula in 1965. The three institutions together made Ahmedabad — a textile-mill city until the 1940s — one of the subcontinent's major research cities within one generation.
Site adjacencyStatue of Unity
The Statue of Unity sits on an island in the Narmada's Sardar Sarovar reservoir about 150 kilometres south of Ahmedabad in the Narmada district of Gujarat. The 2018 inauguration of the 182-metre statue — the tallest in the world — made Kevadia a tourism destination within the greater Gujarat regional landscape centred on Ahmedabad.
Site adjacencyRann of Kutch
The Rann of Kutch sits 400 kilometres west of Ahmedabad in the Kutch region of Gujarat along the Pakistan border — part of the same Gujarat regional landscape of which Ahmedabad is the political capital. The salt-desert landscape has shaped Gujarat's western identity for millennia; the annual Rann Utsav tourism festival since 2005 has connected the Rann to Ahmedabad's regional economic circuit.
Site withinIIM Ahmedabad campus
IIM Ahmedabad sits in the western part of Ahmedabad, on the 60-hectare Louis Kahn campus built from 1962 — within the modern city's institutional ensemble that also includes Vikram Sarabhai's PRL and the Nehru Foundation. The institutional cluster made Ahmedabad the subcontinent's most consequential post-independence planned scientific and management city.
Site withinDādā Harīr Vāv, Ahmedabad
The Dada Harir Vav stepwell sits within Ahmedabad in Gujarat, 15 kilometres east of the walled old city in the Asarwa area. The 1499-1500 CE octagonal five-storey stepwell commissioned by Harir Sultani, a eunuch and nurse to Sultan Mahmud Begada's harem, is one of the finest surviving Sultanate-era baolis in Gujarat. Its Sultanate-period construction places it within the Muzaffarid-era Ahmedabad heritage network alongside the Sarkhej Roza and the Jama Masjid of Ahmad Shah.
Successor capital ofGandhinagar
Gandhinagar replaced Ahmedabad as the capital of Gujarat state in 1970 after Gujarat's 1960 separation from Bombay State. Ahmedabad had served as the Gujarat capital from 1 May 1960 to 24 March 1970; the planned city of Gandhinagar on the Sabarmati 23 kilometres north was designed by Prakash M. Apte from 1965 under Chief Minister Hitendra K. Desai. The 1983 Secretariat shift and the 1992 Akshardham complex consolidated Gandhinagar's role; Ahmedabad remains the commercial-cultural capital while Gandhinagar is the administrative capital, together forming the Gandhinagar-Ahmedabad Ahmedabad Metropolitan Region.

On these journeys

Sources

Historic City of Ahmadabad — UNESCO

Open Ahmedabad / Karnāvatī / Āshāval in the repository →