The crumbling city

Book review of A Shadow of the Past: A Short Biography of Lucknow

A wistfulness pervades Mehru Jaffer’s A Shadow of the Past: A Short Biography of Lucknow  like the gentle purvaiya breeze, a gift of the Gomti river, known to inspire many a poet. Unlike nostalgia, which can turn a narrative into hazy, soft-focus frames, Ms Jaffer’s explorations of memory, recorded history and conversations with friends sharpens images of the past; her yearnings for a city that once was, heighten its colours and textures.

A Shadow of the Past  bustles with the arrival of trade boats along the banks of the Gomti; it tells of monarchs who rebuild provincial Lucknow into a cosmopolitan hub teeming with artistes and poets and revolutionaries. At the outset, one meets Asaf-ud-Daula, the reluctant Nawab of Lucknow, who chooses the city as his capital in 1775. At 26, the young heir, whose love for classical Persian poetry and folk music surpasses his political ambitions, decides “…to govern poetically.” To deploy this charming, if somewhat unusual mode of governance, Asaf-ud-Daula commissions architects to redraft a city that must rival the splendour of Delhi. He builds the Daulat Khana, his permanent residence, which has now crumbled, but, writes Ms Jaffer, “…the Bada Imambara, Asafi Mosque, royal water tank and bath, and the Rumi Gate remain the pride of the city and are great tourist attractions.” 

Although A Shadow of the Past is dotted with Lucknow’s palaces and forts, its shrines and mosques, its libraries, the book does not dwindle into a travel guide. Its buildings are not picturesque. They are the dismal (and dismayed) bystanders in a city they no longer recognise, a city whose elegance has been replaced by garishness, whose passion for revolution, once uttered by its poets in Urdu couplets, has been strangulated by sectarian violence.

Lucknow is in decay; Ms Jaffer notes this decay with a matter-of-factness that is sometimes inflected with humour. The by-lanes of Chowk Bazaar, an eighteenth-century marketplace fragrant with spices and fresh jasmine through which art collector and engineer Colonel Antoine-Louis Henri de Polier once wandered, now lie bereft of exotic merchandise: “Most of the shops are tucked between drains overflowing with filth, constantly released from homes in the overcrowded neighbourhood. There is no rice sold on Chawalwali Gali inside the Gol Darwaza, and all the eateries have disappeared from Bawarchiwali Gali. Most of the former cooks now run catering businesses instead.” 

A Shadow of the Past: A Short Biography of Lucknow

Author:  Mehru Jaffer

Publisher: Aleph Book Company

Pages: 144; Price: Rs 399

Ms Jaffer rues the passing of an age of couplet makers, mild-mannered but ardent in intent, by providing an impressionistic sketch of three friends walking from Lalbagh to Charbagh, talking, arguing, and invariably losing their way through this city of lush gardens. These are the poets and activists Asrarul Haq Majaz “Lakhnawi”, Ali Sardar Jafri, Syed Sibte Hasan. Lucknow in the late 1930s is beset by a problematic trend — several Indian families in the city have named their dogs Tipu, a practice popularised by English families to denigrate the eighteenth-century ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore, Tipu Sultan. The young friends, their blood fired by dreams of freedom, are incensed. Jafri, who presided over the first meeting of the Progressive Writers’ Movement in Lucknow in 1936, writes of an anticipation, a prolonged waiting for revolution: Inqalāb aaegā raftār se māyūs na ho/ Bahut āhista nahīñ hai jo bahut tez nahīñ (Revolution will come, don’t let its pace distress/ what seems not to hurry is not slow). 

A Shadow of the Past is peopled by many romantics, irresistibly drawn into the intellectual magnetic field that is Lucknow. There is Sughra Fatima, female scholar and host to women-only literary meets within the Firangi Mahal in the 1940s. There is Insha Allah Khan “Insha”, a nineteenth-century poet and Urdu grammarian, who, in 1807, wrote Darya-e-Latafat,  a Persian treatise on the grammar and rhetoric of the Urdu language. This is the Lucknow of Hasrat Mohani, who coined the timeless slogan . Inquilab Zindabad (long live the revolution) in 1921 — a phrase that articulated with fierce grace the Indian independence movement’s resolve. This is also the Lucknow of Munshi Newal Kishore, founder of a printing press in 1858, “…a Hindu in love with the Muslim way of life.” He launched an Urdu daily, the Avadh Akhbar,  in 1859 and published a serialised version of Ratan Nath Sarshar’s Fasana-e-Azad in the newspaper. 

This is the Lucknow of those with glorious destinies and purpose; of idealists who couch their fervour in couplets sculpted to perfection. 

Ms Jaffer, in her enthusiasm to introduce as many Lakhnawis as she can, within the space of what is, (as the title suggests) a “short biography”, often rushes through these introductions. She offers several truncated histories of Lucknow and its people, amusing anecdotes, stories nestling within stories. There is plenty of information, but her narrative isn’t as introspective or as languorous as one might expect of a book about a leisure-loving city. Her gaze is wistful, but it doesn’t linger.