A scientist and a teacher came together recently to narrate select letters written to and from Lucknow, over a period of nearly 150 years, by both the famous and the commoner, to depict the resounding, and changing, cultural ethos of the city of Nawabs.
"Lucknow in Letters: endeavours, achievements and tragedies", presented here recently by Saman Habib and Sanjay Muttoo, is a multilingual reading of letters from and to Lucknow in the 1850s.
The letters, collected from private sources and museums, newspaper reports and essays provide a glimpse of the living experience of the city since the 'Ghadar of 1857'.
The letters, which were accompanied by rare manuscripts, original letters and pictures of those who wrote them, came together to provide a life-like narrative of the events in Lucknow of a long-gone era - from the mutiny to the subsequent rebuilding of the city, the plague of 1903 to 1936 floods, the freedom movement and the pain of Partition.
The presentation, hosted by Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (INGCA), is a heart-rending glimpse of what shaped the city over the course of time and includes mails by everyday people living life while some of them also had their senders in important personalities like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mirza Ghalib and Rabindranath Tagore - all accounting their connections to Shahar-e-Awadh.
The concept, says Saman, was conceived by her in February last year when she was writing letters to her relatives in Pakistan, who had migrated there during Partition, while the first staging took place after three months - in May.
"There are families in Lucknow which have preserved the letters from older times. In older days, letters happened to be a huge event in families, when all members of the family would read a letter that would reach to them from far-off places. But that is a gone era now... So we thought that explaining that whole concept to people it would be a good idea to collect letters and make a narrative out of it," Saman, a senior scientist at the Central Drug Research institute in Lucknow, told PTI.
"The idea was that we not only read it but also come up with pictures - of the letters, the people writing them, buildings of that time, etc. So as to understand the city, to know it more and relive the whole experience. Its not a history lesson, listening to letters and watching visuals is an experience.
"Letters are firstly an authentic documentation of all occurring of the time. Plus, it depicts the 'zabaan', the language of the city as used by people. And as we transcend the era sifting through letters we can notice a palpable change in the language and customs too. Then, the social class and language. Who is writing and in what language... I think many things come out with that," she says.
