[Guest post by Gaurav Dikshit]

Sharab, shabab aur kabab. Of these three shauqs of Lucknow’s nawabs (as in the “nawabi by nature”) it is shabab – youth – that Lakhnavis cherish the most, for they know by instinct that it is fleeting. The sense of loss lies at the heart of Lucknow, and the subtitle of Veena Talwar Oldenburg’s anthology Shaam-e-Awadh – “Memories of a dying city” – captures the decadence that has defined the city for much of its existence.

Perhaps it was the brutality of the British reprisal after the Revolt of 1857 that broke forever Lucknow’s trust in modern civilisation. The nawabs had given their people the idea that life was a picnic. They hadn’t built palaces for themselves, they’d built (with help from that maverick French genius, Claude martin) quaint, amusing structures – Bhoolbhullaiya, the labyrinth; Dilkhusha, the pleasure house; Kaiserbagh, a residential complex that accommodated enough open space for holding a mela, or a mass wedding of mangoes. Shatranj, patangbaazi, kabootarbaazi, sher-o-shaayri, raas leela, boating on the Gomti, idling in the orchards – this was all the elites cared for and encouraged by example. And everything had to have nazakat, be it the twitching of the eyebrows or the courtesan’s jibes at a henpecked taluqdar. Also, tehzeeb demanded that in this atmosphere of merry-making and sensuous speculation, sacrifice and pain wasn’t forgotten. So Mir Anis led the Muharram processions with his wrenching marsiyas, with the dying Meer following, longing for his lost city of Delhi.

This long-ago “Shia Muslim” culture, and the Mutiny that brought it to a bloodied close, is an inseparable part of Lucknow’s memories, and two-thirds of Oldenburg’s anthology is concerned with it. But the early and mid-twentieth century, when an arc of the progressive and independence movements had transformed the intellectual life of the city, is looked at only in passing. There is no essay, for instance, on the Urdu writers of the period, the range of poets from the fiercely Communist Kaifi Azmi to the destructively romantic brothers-in-law Majaz Lakhnavi and Jaan Nisar Akhtar. Or the liberal, epic sweep of Qurratulain Hyder’s fiction – that brought the “college girl” into Urdu literature – while the storyteller Naiyer Masud retreated more and more from all canons, honing his singular vision so much that it turned universal.

The chapter from Naipaul’s A Million Mutinies Now is too well known, but it contains a unique glimpse into the city’s memories of the Raj. Naipaul’s guide, whose name the writer changed to Rashid because of his “radical views”, does a curious thing for a man of his liberal education and temperament. When he takes Naipaul to the Residency, where the British were besieged for five of the most horrific months of their empire, he lets go of his outrage: “Bastards! Bastards! The British were such bastards”, he exclaims. Lucknow’s civilisation was barely a century old when it was crushed by the British in 1858. A body had been crippled in the first flush of its youth. This desecration has grown into a kind of legacy, and Lucknowwallahs carry in their heart an affinity with loss, a nostalgia that is quite instinctive and unsentimental. The iconic chronicler of the city’s court and street culture, Abdul Haleem Sharar, wrote that he would “as usual” return to Lucknow after each of several attempts to make a fortune elsewhere.

Oldenburg’s nostalgia-laced preface is a pleasure. It also has the interesting news that her family owned the Carlton hotel, a marvellous piece of architecture that stood amidst such thickly-leafed expansive greenery that it was almost another Dilkhusha. Half of this majestic hotel was recently razed by the Sahara group to build what is now one of Lucknow’s appalling malls. Oldenburg’s pain is widely shared. But she must remember, Lucknow may be a dying city, but like all great cities, it will never die.

Shaam-e-Awadh: Writings on Lucknow
Edited by Veena Talwar Oldenburg
Penguin India
Rs 395

Previous guest post by Gaurav Dikshit: Absent of the Absent: The Elusive Stories of Naiyer Masud