The andaaz is Lakhnavi no more by Randeep Wadehra

Shaam-e-Awadh: writings on Lucknow edited by Veena Talwar Oldenburg

Penguin. Pages: xvii+271. Price: Rs. 395/-

A medieval city with ancient roots that has somehow lost its way en-route to modernity, its confounding contrasts have unfailingly fetched it enduring odes from the likes of Shakeel Badayuni, disdain from Ghalib and ridicule from various westerners and anglophiles. Lucknow’s élégance and grossièreté, scents and stench have co-existed for ages; its claims to Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb often belied by sectoral violence.

In this volume passages from Kipling and Allan Sealy’s works conjure up medieval Lucknow’s sights, sounds and smells while R.W. Bird exposes the avarice and venery of the British. Articles/stories by Oldenburg, Fisher, Jasanoff, Premchand et al show that profligacy, debauchery and decadence had reached such an extent that during the first war of independence Lucknow’s tawaifs showed greater character and courage than noblemen. Other accounts of the “mutiny” depict treachery, misery, cruelty and daring. If Mir’s grave under a railway track symbolizes the ascendancy of the colonial power then La Martiniere emerges as an interesting motif suggesting the rise and fall of the colonial culture. It, along with the local convent schools for girls, became the harbinger of the best and the worst in western education and values. If Lucknow’s elite felt proud while sending its progeny to these schools, the Muslim populace and clergy looked askance at them.

A passage from Shivani’s Diddi translated by Ira Pande depicts the now endangered composite culture of Lucknow even as Vinod Mehta lightheartedly outlines how the genteel Awadhi ethos was rudely overlaid by the robust mercantilism of Punjabi and Sindhi refugees; other writers paint Lucknow’s present and future in sombre hues. The Pulitzer winning journalist Bearak’s account of Begum Wilayat Mahal illustrates the old aristocracy’s twilight years whereas Nasima Aziz underscores the dawn of new aristocracy. She is not sure whether this augurs socio-economic resurgence or intensification of the old culture of extravagance in high places. The extract from Naipaul’s A Million Mutinies Now explores the ghettoized psyche of the old city’s Muslims that has prevented them from joining the mainstream, leaving them to wallow in poverty and nostalgia. Mrinal Pande looks at the bureaucratic and political decay in today’s Lucknow citing, among other things, the murder of faux poétesse Madhumita by a politician, and a police DIG doing the Radha farce. But it is her analysis of the Mayawati phenomenon that holds one’s interest. Will the dalit firebrand usher in a new era of crime-free egalitarian polity or be consumed by the still-in-vogue Nawabi propensities? The excerpt from Dalrymple’s The Age of Kali focuses on the extinction of a culture and the rise of the ruffian. He meets student leaders who admit to being reluctant collaborators in promoting violence in campus politics, abetting the brutalization of the socio-political ethos. Suleiman Mahmudabad, who quit politics ruing the fall in moral values and the spread of politico-administrative vitiation, tells Dalrymple, “Everything is beginning to disintegrate.”

Pessimistic? Perhaps. The political culture is undergoing metamorphosis with subaltern classes staking claims to assorted levers of power. Would Mayawati’s brand of social engineering result in economic empowerment of the state’s poor or will it be the reign of the thugs a la Mulayam Singh Yadav regime? No answers have been provided here. This anthology could have done with a couple of articles drawing the road map to Lucknow’s, nay, the state’s extrication from the double whammy of corruption and violence, triggering off political-economic-cultural rejuvenation.