“The Other Lucknow” captures the syncretic traditions of the city

Guru Dutt’s immensely popular film Chaudhvin Ka Chand opens with a Shakeel Budayuni song sung by Mohammad Rafi and composed by Ravi. The song  Ye Lakhnau Ki Sarzameen sums up Lucknow and the essence of its famed cultural heritage. Perhaps, no other city in the sprawling Hindi-speaking region evokes such nostalgia, romance, devotion and attachment as Banaras and Lucknow do.

So far, for nearly a century, we used to go back to Abdul Halim Sharar’s classic “Guzishta Lakhnau” that vividly describes the city’s cultural and social life, customs, traditions and history in great detail. This was serialised in the form of articles between 1913 and 1920 in Urdu literary journal “Dilgudaz” that Sharar had launched in 1887. Later, the articles were brought out as a book with a rather longish title “Hindustan mein mashriqi tamaddun ka akhiri namoona: Lakhnau” (Lucknow: The last example of Oriental culture in India). However, the world knows it simply as “Guzishta Lakhnau” (The Lucknow of the Old). National Book Trust published a Hindi translation in 1971 titled “Purana Lakhnau” (The Old Lucknow) with a scholarly introduction written by eminent Urdu critic Mohammad Hasan.

Born in 1860, Abdul Halim went to Matiaburz when he was nine years old. Matiaburz was the place near Calcutta (now Kolkata) where the deposed Nawab of Lucknow, Wajid Ali Shah, had shifted in 1856. How close his family was with the Nawab can be gauged from the fact that his maternal grandfather had gone to London to present Wajid Ali Shah’s case before Queen Victoria.

When still in his teens, Abdul Halim started writing and adopted the nom de plume ‘Sharar’ (spark). His book is a treasure trove of information about the history and culture of Lucknow which was a truly unique city representing the famed Ganga-Jamuni culture.

Wajid Ali Shah, the last Nawab, was an accomplished poet, musician, dancer, actor and dramatist. Urdu drama owes its beginning to him and dance-dramas like “Inder Sabha”, which he commissioned, where Indra, the king of Hindu gods, would sit on a throne wearing a dress that resembled that of the Nawab himself and fairies would sing thumris in Braj bhasha while conversing in chaste Urdu. What better picture of a syncretic culture can we find elsewhere?

Sharar divided the book into three parts and devoted the first two parts to the history of Awadh and Lucknow and that of the nawabs of Awadh. The third and the last part is the one that introduces us to the way people of Lucknow dressed, talked, ate, sang and danced, set new standards of cultured behaviour and etiquette, gathered to celebrate religious and social festivals at fairs, and offered an example of harmonious communal living. It was also a great centre of the Shias.

Now, Vani Prakashan, which is essentially a publishing house of Hindi books, has come out with a book on Lucknow in English in collaboration with the Ayodhya Research Institute, an autonomous organisation of the Uttar Pradesh government. Titled “The Other Lucknow: An Ethnographic Portrait of a City of Undying Memories and Nostalgia”, it is the outcome of a research project headed by social anthropologist Professor Nadeem Hasnain, who has put the book together.

The book appropriately opens with a poem that the Jnanpith award winning poet Kunwar Narain, who spent most of his creative life in the city, has written on Lucknow. It has been reproduced in Hindi which lends a special flavour to the book as the rest of it is a collection of articles, reports and analysis written in English. It is a sort of counterfoil to Sharar’s book as it brings the story of Lucknow in its fullness up to the present times.

“The Other Lucknow” is in a class of its own as it can equally serve a tourist as a guide book and an intellectual who wants to know and understand the history, culture, politics, arts and crafts, business and trade, literature, music and dance, architecture and religion – both past and present.

The book opens with a scholarly article “A Short Cultural History” by noted scholar Sandria Freitag followed by an excellent survey of the city’s social fabric underling its diversity. The survey is based on field research and informs us that Kashmiri Pandits, Bengalis, Punjabis, Sindhis, Malayalis, Oriyas, Maharashtrians and Assamese have also become an integral part of Lucknow’s population. It also offers a detailed description of the religious and caste communities residing in the city. In addition to paying close attention to the mohallas, mandis, bastis, landmarks, arts and craft, music and dance, religious places, Ram Leela, qawwalis and danstangoi, the book brings out the city’s Bollywood connection.

It concludes with an article on Dalit imaginations, laying bare the story of the mega monuments and parks created by former Chief Minister Mayawati to commemorate Dalit icons.

One is not surprised to read, as quoted by Nadeem Hasnain to begin his introduction, what William Russel, correspondent of The Times, London wrote in 1858 about Lucknow: “Not Rome, not Athens, nor Constantinople, not any city I have ever seen appears to me so striking and so beautiful as this.”

The writer is a senior literary critic

Corrections & Clarifications:

This article has been edited for a factual error.

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Metroplus / by Kuldeep Kumar / July 09th, 2016