historical place's

On his return from South Africa, Gandhi’s first Ashram in India was established in the Kochrab area of Ahmedabad on 25 May 1915. The Ashram was then shifted on 17 June 1917 to a piece of open land on the banks of the river Sabarmati. Reasons for this shift included: he wanted to do some experiments in living eg farming, animal husbandry, cow breeding, Khadi and related constructive activities, for which he was in search of this kind of barren land; mythologically, it was the ashram site of Dadhichi Rishi who had donated his bones for a righteous war; it is between a jail and a crematorium as he believed that a satyagrahi has to invariably go to either place. The Sabarmati Ashram (also known as Harijan Ashram) was home to Mohandas Gandhi from 1917 until 1930 and served as one of the main centres of the Indian freedom struggle. Originally called the Satyagraha Ashram, reflecting the movement toward passive resistance launched by the Mahatma, the Ashram became home to the ideology that set India free. Sabarmati Ashram named for the river on which it sits, was created with a dual mission. To serve as an institution that would carry on a search for truth and a platform to bring together a group of workers committed to non-violence who would help secure freedom for India.

By conceiving such a vision Gandhi and his followers hoped to foster a new social construct of truth and non-violence that would help to revolutionize the existing pattern of like.

While at the Ashram, Gandhi formed a school that focused on manual labour, agriculture, and literacy to advance his efforts for self-sufficiency. It was also from here on the 12 March 1930 that Gandhi launched the famous Dandi march 241 miles from the Ashram (with 78 companions) in protest of the British Salt Law, which taxed Indian salt in an effort to promote sales of British salt in India. This mass awakening filled the British jails with 60 000 freedom fighters. Later the government seized their property, Gandhi, in sympathy with them, responded by asking the Government to forfeit the Ashram. Then Government, however, did not oblige. He had by now already decided on 22 July 1933 to disband the Ashram, which later became asserted place after the detention of many freedom fighters, and then some local citizens decided to preserve it. On 12 March 1930 he vowed that he would not return to the Ashram until India won independence. Although this was won on 15 August 1947, when India was declared a free nation, Gandhi was assassinated in January 1948 and never returned.

Over the years, the Ashram became home to the ideology that set India free. It aided countless other nations and people in their own battles against oppressive forces.

Today, the Ashram serves as a source of inspiration and guidance, and stands as a monument to Gandhi’s life mission and a testimony to others who have fought a similar struggle.

Lukshmi Vilas Palace, the magnificent residence of the royal family of Baroda was built by Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III in 1890 with Major Charles Mant as the chief architect.Until the 1860s the family still occupied the old Nazarbaug palace, a tall building with an encrustation of pavilions and kiosks on the roof which the French traveller, Rousselet, found very disquieting: 'The mass of buildings, planted on the summit of an edifice almost entirely of wood, whose foundations were soaking in a damp soil, betokened great audacity on the part of the architects, and still more confidence on that of the king'.

Mant's design aimed to 'combine native detail with the ordinary requirements of a modern palace and arrangement of rooms'. Reputed to have been the largest private dwelling built till date and four times the size of Buckingham Palace, this beauteous structure features an Indo Saracenic style of architecture.

Thus Mant stuck more or less to the traditional arrangement of an Indian palace - with three distinct and separate parts for the public rooms, Maharaja's private apartments, and the ladies' quarters respectively but incorporated many new rooms to suit the Baroda family's increasingly western life-style  stately dining rooms, billiard rooms, and great apartments for distinguished European visitors. Similarly, he attempted to incorporate the best elements of many periods of Indian architecture with some of the functional touches and decorative flourishes of different European schools. The sheer size of the palace (the frontage was over five hundred feet long) made it possible to include all these elements without creating stylistic havoc.

Mant rejected from the start any idea of a dry symmetrical pattern, and allowed the styles to melt into one another. The exterior of the Maharaja's apartments were dressed up in the garb of Hindu martial architecture, with most of the detail borrowed from the fortress of Bharatpur. The public apartments, however, moved more into a Moghul style, while the ladies' quarters ended in a forest of domes and canopies copied from the Jain temples of Gujarat. However, even amongst this Indian tour de force, Chisholm noted:'In regard to detail an architect inspecting the forms critically will see evidence of European feeling in much of the ornament and massing of the forms. There is a thought of Venice in many of the arches, and a more decided feeling of Gothic in others, and towards the south end of the building a distinct leaning to an earlier and somewhat purer type of [classical European] art.'