Shades of old Lucknow

If you want a whiff of old Lucknow, you could turn a corner at Qaisar Bagh and enter the gracefully restored home of filmmaker, artist and musical impresario Muzaffar Ali

If you want a blast of new Lucknow, you can arrive at the swank new modern airport at Amausi, then drive through wide boulevards with massive stone railings, monumental parks and memorials created by Mayawati on a scale that would make Lutyens eat his heart out. But if you want a whiff of old Lucknow, you could turn a corner at Qaisar Bagh - the crumbling complex of 19th-century town houses, home to Awadh's taluqdars - and enter the gracefully restored home of filmmaker, artist and musical impresario Muzaffar Ali. A tranquil oasis of terracotta-washed walls, courtyards and terraces in the chaos and clamour of the new city, it embodies the essence of tehzeeb, and of Awadhi music and poetry.

Muzaffar Ali's consuming passion for Awadhi culture has led to a major revival in Sufi literature, principally in the Jahan-e-Khusrau concerts that have been running successfully within the precincts of Humayun's Tomb in Delhi for 12 years and have travelled the world from Tunis to Tokyo. Last weekend, in a memorable homecoming, he presented the music festival in the spectacular setting of the Dilkusha gardens against the ruins of a Palladian-style hunting lodge built for Nawab Saadat Ali Khan in 1805. Dancers from Turkey, Ustad Shafqat Ali Khan from Lahore and home-grown talents such as Malini Awasthi performed to a rousing reception, for it is in these parts that the genius of the 13th-century mystic, poet and linguist Amir Khusrau unfurled - he was born in a village in district Etah before moving to Delhi to become the principal disciple of Nizamuddin Auliya. The cadence of the Awadhi dialect was the well-spring that Khusrau drew on to create new linguistic and musical idioms. Muzaffar Ali's obsessive exploration of this resonant tradition will soon be out in a splendid volume of scholarly essays (The Leaf Turns Yellow: The Sufis of Awadh; Bloomsbury, Rs 3,995), each page illuminated by calligraphy and photographs under his supervision.

Together with his dynamic architect wife, Meera, he has also created the Kotwara fashion label, which takes its name from the village that formed part of his ancestral taluqdari estate. On a sunny spring morning, they drove me to this rural backwater in Lakhimpur Kheri, 160 km northwest of Lucknow. I had imagined a journey of potholed roads and impoverished villages, though it is true that apart from Lucknow, Noida and the ruling Yadav clan's pocket borough of Etawah, most districts in Uttar Pradesh get electricity for only a few hours a day. In fact, the roads were in excellent repair, and the landscape verdant, from the dense mango groves of Sitapur to tractor trolleys ferrying the sugarcane harvest to the sugar factories at Hargaon and Gola.

Located in the Terai belt this is, in fact, one of the richest regions of Uttar Pradesh, close to the wildlife sanctuary at Dudhwa and adjoining the politically prominent districts of Shahjahanpur and Pilibhit, represented in Parliament by Jitin Prasada and Maneka Gandhi. Sleepy Kotwara itself is picturesque in the home-of-the-gentry genre of Chekhov or Ray's Jalsaghar - a series of palaces in an architectural style Muzaffar Ali describes as "Awadhi Kasbah baroque". Several of his films and television serials were shot here; nearly everyone is the village has had walk-on parts.

Muzaffar Ali himself has fought - and lost - three elections here, but he isn't the type to be daunted by failure or aborted projects such as his unfinished film Zooni. Under the couple's guiding hand, Kotwara is a renewed hive of activity: pit looms have been dug in the old garage to revive dhurrie-making with yarn from nearby Khairabad; a large team of local women are being trained in embroidery and tailoring; the art school is getting lessons in photography and glass painting; and 10,000 scented red roses have been planted in the gardens. Above all, a dilapidated 1920s guest house is to become a dining hall and restaurant. He is determined to give old Awadh a facelift by introducing a new kind of tourism. "Rajasthan and Kerala have done it," he says. "Now it's UP's turn to show its traditions."