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Gandhidham: Utopia, Bureaucracy, and the Unwritten History of a Refugee City



Author(s)

Saaz Aggarwal

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DOI:10.17265/2159-550X/2026.10.005

Independent Scholar, India

Gandhidham, a planned town in Kachchh, western India, began as an attempt to give displaced Sindhis a new home after the 1947 Partition of India. Conceived by the merchant and nationalist Bhai Pratap Dialdas and developed through the Sindhu Resettlement Corporation (SRC), it joined housing and employment with education and cultural life. Its prospects were closely bound to nearby Kandla, which the Government of India was developing into a major port following the loss of Karachi.

Drawing on correspondence, land agreements, planning records, contemporary journalism, photographs and oral histories, this paper examines the relationship between these two undertakings. Successive land arrangements show how the SRC’s authority was redefined within the state’s plans for the region. Residents’ accounts reveal how families, workers and institutional leaders gave substance to the proposed town, while also questioning how fully its civic and cultural ambitions were realised.

The paper argues that the distribution of credit in Gandhidham’s history reflects both changing authority and the purposes for which its records were produced. Contemporary sources offer sharply different accounts of the same achievement; later institutional histories often separate the national port from the Sindhi initiative that helped build the adjoining town and participated in the harbour works. Bringing these accounts together makes visible the connections between refugee reconstruction and national development. Gandhidham’s “unwritten history” concerns how the work of displaced people, though documented and remembered, came to occupy so little space in familiar accounts of the city’s creation.

Gandhidham, Kandla Port, Partition of India, Sindhi displacement, refugee rehabilitation, Sindhu Resettlement Corporation, historical erasure, public history

Saaz Aggarwal. (2026). Gandhidham: Utopia, Bureaucracy, and the Unwritten History of a Refugee City. History Research, October 2026, Vol. 8, No. 10, 605-624.