Shaam-e-Awadh , livre ebook

Edited by Veena Talwar Oldenburg

Shaam-e-Awadh
Writings on Lucknow
Contents
Preface: Lucknow, City of Undying Memory
Dedication
Rapture and Ridicule: Impressions of Lucknow
Yeh Lakhna u ki Sarzameen Shakeel Badayuni
Ghalib s Verdict on Lucknow in Three Terse Stanzas
Tafzihul Ghafilin Abu Talib
From Kim Rudyard Kipling
From The Trotter-Nama I. Allan Sealy
Nawabi Lucknow: Through Western Eyes Veena Talwar Oldenburg
The High Noon of the Nawabi
Nawabi Dastaan Veena Talwar Oldenburg
From Dacoitee in Excelsis or, the Spoliation of Oude Samuel Lucas [Assistant Resident R.W. Bird]
The Coronation Michael H. Fisher
From Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East, 1750-1850 Maya Jasanoff
Shatranj ke Khilari Munshi Premchand
The Mutiny and Rebellion of 1857
Going! Going! Gone! Flora Annie Steel
1857-58: The City as Battlefield Veena Talwar Oldenburg
The Rebel Begum Michael Edwardes
A Lady s Diary of the Siege of Lucknow G. Harris
Loot! From Government of India Archives
From Following the Equator Mark Twain
That Famous Touch of Decadence
Rekhti-A Defiant Voice in Urdu Poetry Carla Petievich
Untitled Mir Anis Lakhnavi
Interior of an Opium Den in Lucknow The Oudh Punch
Afternoons in the Kothas of Lucknow Veena Talwar Oldenburg
A Monograph on Trade and Manufactures in Northern India William Hoey
Fragrant Feasts of Lucknow Margo True
Zakr Us Parivash Ka : Begum Akhtar in Lucknow Saleem Kidwai
Twentieth-Century Lucknow
Bats in a Dreary Lodge Where Life Imitates Poe Barry Bearak
From Sunlight on a Broken Column Attia Hosain
My Nani Remembers Mishi Saran
From Toad in My Garden Ruchira Mukherjee
From Diddi Ira Pande
Laughing in Lucknow Vinod Mehta
From The Age of Kali William Dalrymple
The Unabashed Birthday Bashes Veena Talwar Oldenburg and Mrinal Pande
From India: A Million Mutinies Now V.S. Naipaul
The Lucknow That Is Mrinal Pande
The Double Wedding of the Century: I was There Nasima Aziz
Footnotes
Rekhti-A Defiant Voice in Urdu Poetry Carla Petievich
Interior of an Opium Den in Lucknow The Oudh Punch
Acknowledgements
Copyright Acknowledgements
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For Santosh Mahendrajit Singh, beloved aunt and friend, whose ideas, humour and wisdom will always be with me.
Preface: Lucknow, City of Undying Memory
Veena Talwar Oldenburg
One of my earliest memories of my beloved native city-as a place of beauty, romance, heartbreak-is of wading off a small private pier on the Ghaziud din Hyder canal. Built by the eponymous nawab, the canal leaves the Gomti river at its easternmost point in the city and loops lazily along a south-westerly direction around the southern edge of the city. It rimmed the house and its once extensive gardens, orchards, and fields that I called home. The waters of the canal were pellucid with fish darting like quicksilver, and I scooped water in my cupped hand to drink. The canal also feeds La Martiniere Lake, the picturesque frontage of Constantia, the palace and mausoleum of Claude Martin. This mercenary soldier and amateur engineer willed his vast fortune to endow La Martiniere Boys School, Lucknow s most famous educational institution. When we girl students came from the sister institution for the annual Founder s Day Ball, always in white lacy frocks, the more daring would slip out into the night and make their way to the Big Pun, the bridge on the canal, for furtive groping and Hollywood kisses . Some just went out to smoke unseen on its cool, starlit banks. The river and the canal were to us what the Seine was to Parisians.
What has happened to these watery threads that ornamented the city tapestry reflects the fate of the city itself. The Gomti that periodically inundates the city, tears away at the already corroded fabric of the city. The disease, death and dislocation that follow have marked the memories of many Lakhnavis, while huge earth dykes veil its vistas in most parts of the city. The canal, now stagnant and curdled with sewage, is a malodorous breeding ground for mosquitoes. The press of population-now well over six million-has forced many residential colonies to spring up in the low-lying areas that the nawabs used as orchards, with dank and ugly habitations. Our own orchards were destroyed over a period of two decades to accommodate such architectural wonders as the Talkatora Power House, shoebox-shaped grain storehouses of the Food Corporation of India, and finally by the city development authority to build a huge housing colony-Rajajipuram-for Lucknow s teeming underclass. As I watched despairingly, bulldozers and crews of men with axes felled thousands of mango trees of intensely flavoured and luscious varieties-Lakhnaua safeda, Langra, Dusserhi, Chausa, Fajri, Totapari, Lab-e-rukh, and dozens of rare cultivars with sweet scent and vivid colours. Acres of guava, karonda, amla, mulberry, ber, and citrus were mowed down without demur. The grand bel tree-that had stood majestically in a field of its own and supplied us with its football-sized fruit-was savaged in an hour. The fields that produced seed for all the new dwarf varieties of wheat and lentils that made the Green Revolution were cordoned off by surveyors chalk marks. In a few days the orchard became a barren building site parcelled into twenty-five square yard plots for sale. Small, box-like brick structures mushroomed on this acreage to add an eyesore to the city s once verdant southern expanse. Our house stands like a lone and bewildered elephant in the concrete jungle. What happened to Talkatora is the microcosm of what happened, in those mindless decades of ill-planned and unlovely development, to the larger city that was once proclaimed the City of Gardens .
In a corner of the landmark Mayfair building-once the jewel of Hazratgunj, soon destined for the wrecking ball-is a small bookshop that all English readers of Lucknow consider their own. Ram Advani Bookseller, now a suave, grey-bearded octogenarian impeccably dressed in elegant Lakhnavi chikan kurtas, still sustains this small half-century-old haven for scholars and serious readers. I have been a customer since I was in kindergarten. Here, over cups of addictive tea from Sharma s stall in Lalbagh, or chicken patties and cold coffee from Kwality, generations have browsed, consulted, and discussed ideas in a quiet alcove upstairs. Today, we squint in disapproval at the supremely ugly, concrete, laughably modern church that has replaced the classic cathedral across the street and shudder at the din of the thick traffic that clogs the main artery of Hazratgunj. Kwality restaurant vanished from the building leaving dark, plundered spaces. The British Council Library, that rare well-stocked, air-conditioned retreat for English readers, has also crated its books and departed. The Mayfair Talkies building is now just a shell stripped of its lights and ornaments.
My regular visits to Lucknow arouse conflicting emotions. A walk in the Botanical Gardens, amid familiar old trees, its rose garden, cacti and bamboo collections, and ponds filled with lotuses and water lilies, arouses a sense of well-being. But swivelling a hundred and eighty degrees to view the Carlton Hotel, which was my second home and family business, where my fondest memories reside, is a heart-wrenching experience. This arcaded and elegant building, set amid gardens and a eucalyptus grove, with a nawabi fa ade and Victorian interiors, was completed in 1877 by the British to accommodate a flood of taluqdars who were to visit the city on the occasion of the durbar to celebrate the visit of the Prince of Wales. The hotel was built on the ten-acre site of the Karbala, from where thousands of graves hastily disinterred after the Rebellion of 1857 were moved to the new Karbala built in Talkatora, abutting our farm. The reason for this uprooting was the misconception that the dead bodies emitted a miasma that sickened British civilians and troops! The graveyard could not stay in the newly built Civil Lines with its spacious bungalows and palaces of the taluqdars recently admitted to the city, and the sprawling Carlton took its place. An equally strong belief held by the Shia nobility, whose ancestors bones had been sacrilegiously exhumed, was that whoever dared to profit from this unfortunate hotel would be avenged. Science has discredited the miasmatic theory of disease, but the bit about the supernatural curse may well have some power in it. The hotel was an instant success, being the finest hotel in the state for some decades. Its gala Christmas and New Year s Eve balls found the best coat-tails and achkans in town vying for praise. The cellar was legendary, the billiards room a class act.
The good times came to an end for the British owners when the Quit India movement began in 1942. They hurriedly sold the place, and my father, a young regular in the billiards room, consummated a bargain, seeking my grandfather s blessing only later. However, some three decades later our family was torn apart in an ugly dispute. To confound matters, in 1978, Lucknow s administration demanded an untenable amount to renew its expired ninety-nine-year lease. After prolonged wrangling and legal complications, a major part of the property was sold, to convert it to freehold. The new buyers were the then chief minister, Mulayam Singh, and Subroto Roy of Sahara, who made an offer no one could refuse. The plan, which was completed in 2006, has left only a small section of the original heritage building still standing, aggrieved and incongruous like a large mammal whose limbs have been hacked off. It is now a glorified baraat ghar , where weddings take place in the front lawn. A shiny steel-and-glass shopping mall, Sahara Gunj, has risen on its flanks that were once covered with beds of amaryllis which bloomed at Easter. Perhaps this is the harbinger of a virile, modern, glossy future that w