The Other Lucknow (An Ethnographic Portrait of a City of Undying Memories and Nostalgia)

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There are few cities in the world that evoke the same nostalgia among its inhabitants, visitors and historians as Lucknow. Perhaps, Delhi and Calcutta are the only two cities in South Asia on which more has been written. In the case of Lucknow, most of the published scholarship focused on 1857, historical monuments and the Nawabi palace life and culture. This fascination with the Nawabi era is largely responsible for the neglect of various other aspects of Lucknow such as its social fabric (castes, sects, occupational groups and communities), the subaltern and the marginalised sections of the society, problems and plight of the artisans, Sunni-Shia violence, local landmarks, vanishin/dying skills, its Bollywood connection, people from outside the state of Uttar Pradesh who have made Lucknow their home and have enriched it, several other issues and the virtual metamorphosis of Lucknow This study is an attempt to grapple with the present but not severing ties with the past because the wholesale loss of memory makes a city characterless.

The present study maintains that the nostalgia and the undying memories must be there in the face of modernization. In the process of transformation, Lucknow should not be allowed to become a 'city of amnesia'. There has to be a closer association between the 'tradition' and the 'modernity'. In a way, this study may also be seen as an 'ethnographic portrait' of Lucknow in the tone and tenor of 'auto ethnography".

These two Urdu couplets aptly express my inner feelings regarding Lucknow. From carly childhood to becoming a senior citizen, I have made a fascinating journey in Lucknow spread over almost six decades. Though Lucknow has changed a lot over this period but the Lucknow of my childhood lingers in my memories. I had a good fortune in spending the formative years of my life in a typical, traditional 'Lucknawi' neighbourhood of Old Lucknow. Though not a native of the city (as my parents had their ancestral villages in Eastern Uttar Pradesh) my father chose Lucknow to settle down immediately after his retirement from government service in early 1950s and I fell in love with Lucknow and its culture. In the past forty years I have been teaching, researching and writing on different area of my discipline of social anthropology but I kept the dream of writing something on Lucknow alive.

Thus, Lucknow is not merely an academic work for me but also a part of my personal life and world. When I look at myself, I find that I am largely a product of the socio-cultural milieu of Lucknow. That is how this book came about. In a way, some parts of this book are like 'autoethnography'. To my mind only two cities of South Asia- Calcutta and Delhi, can compete with Lucknow in terms of nostalgia, undying memories and attention. This book should be taken as a humble tribute to Lucknow from an aashiq (lover).

“Not Rome, not Athens, nor Constantinople,

not any city I have ever seen appears to

me so striking and so beautiful as this.”

When these words were written by William Rusell, correspondent of The Times, in 1858, Lucknow was already in decline. In retaliation to the revolt in 1857, the British had already demolished and destroyed a number of buildings, roads and gardens and were in the process of reshaping Lucknow mainly for security reasons for any future eventuality. Had he seen Lucknow in 1855-56, he would have been dumb founded by all accounts. That is how Lucknow is remembered and continues to linger in the memories of many especially of the old elite.

There are few cities in the world that evoke the same nostalgia among its inhabitants, visitors and historians as Lucknow Lucknow has been famous for its Urdu poets and poetry, tehzeeb especially ganga-jamuni tebzeeb, adab-o-akhlaq, kathak, muharrum, cousine and handicrafts. But this description is not completely free from over emphasis and stereotyping Scholars have placed Lucknow as a space primarily constituted by coming together of Awadhi and Persian ways of meaning making, but open to influences form several other quarters. Lucknow, past and present, shows influence from the Kayastha groups who formed the backbone of the Nawabi and later, colonial bureaucracy, Kashimiri Brahmins, who served the Nawabs court, and various Shia and Sunni cleric-scholar-poet refugees from Delhi who came in search of patronage. Lucknow has also competed for the title of the Muslim city par excellence' with Delhi and Hyderabad and occupied a central place in the world for Shia Culture.

**Contents and Sample Pages**