COLUMN: THE FIRE OF LUCKNOW

Out of the three principal centres of Indo-Persian civilisation that evolved from a fusion of multiple Vedic and Arabo-Persian cultures over centuries, Delhi and Lahore continue to be celebrated, while Lucknow is both celebrated and mourned. During the last millennium, all these cities enjoyed their share of primacy, glory, splendour and opulence, but also experienced bloodletting, conquests, loot and plunder.
Delhi and Lahore regained their significance and survived during and in the aftermath of colonialism. Lucknow could never fully recover from the colonial shock — perhaps also paying the price for being one of the fiercest battle grounds during the 1857 War of Independence against the British.
The region comprising Awadh, which includes Lucknow, is a part of the state of Uttar Pradesh (which was earlier called United Provinces of Agra and Oudh) created during the British Raj. Awadh has a legendary religious and intellectual significance in Indian history. But compared to Lucknow, the cities of Delhi and Lahore had longer histories, bigger cosmopolitan spaces and wider cultural markers to draw upon.
Lucknow had one long period of glory, which was decimated by the British. That period spanned from 1722 to 1856 when Lucknow, which earlier was the capital of the Mughal province of Awadh, became Awadh as a local Indian sultanate. Those 134 years of Awadh inscribed indelible marks on South Asian culture and history.
In post-Independence India, the city remains the capital city of the state of Uttar Pradesh but efforts to erase the historically inclusive and secular cultural milieu of Lucknow continued by constantly invoking communalism, not only incrementally but also systematically. For Lucknow, the journey from Wajid Ali Shah to Yogi Aditya Nath must have been excruciatingly painful and terribly tedious.
In the 19th century, the British particularly vilified three local rulers in India. They humiliated Bahadur Shah Zafar in Delhi, the emperor whose Mughal empire had shrunk to a city but whose two sons and eldest grandson had to be killed to establish British supremacy. The second ruler was Maharaja Ranjit Singh of Punjab, who had contained the British to the left bank of the Sutlej river until he was alive. It was only 10 years after the death of the maharaja, in 1849, that Punjab could be annexed by the British East India Company.
The third ruler who was ridiculed was Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, whose state was indomitable in terms of both society and culture. He was a musician par excellence, a fine poet, a benevolent ruler and quite popular among his subjects. His wife, Hazrat Mahal, played a significant role in the 1857 War of Independence, after the Nawab had been exiled from Awadh.
The British and those local writers who were inspired by their brush with European modernism or those who decided to collaborate with the new colonial rulers, portrayed the emperor, the maharaja and the nawab as decadent, debauched, devious and disingenuous.
Since the victor writes the history of the vanquished, the three local Indian rulers still hold the same reputation in the imagination of not all but many native South Asians today that was propagated by the British. This remains the case even after alternative accounts of history have been made available by a range of Western and South Asian historians and writers over the last many years — beginning from Bari Alig’s seminal work Company Ki Hakoomat [The Rule of the Company], first published from Lahore in 1937.
This year, Jhelum Book Corner has published an incredible tale of Lucknow in two large volumes. It is a meticulously organised collection of writings by the late Maulana Muhammad Baqar Shams. His grandson, Vaqar Haider, who is now based in New York, has painstakingly collected, chronicled and compiled the two volumes of Shams’ writings, titled Dastan-i-Lucknow [The Lucknow Story] and Dabistan-i-Lucknow [The Lucknow School]. From ancient history to pre-Sultanate days to the rule of the nawabs in the Sultanate of Avadh to the British Raj followed by independence, the collections bring us to the 1980s.
Written in an idiomatic and lucid language, these two volumes bring together incredible details of the Awadhi habitat with Lucknow at the centre. Nothing seems to have been missed in the areas of knowledge, sociology, culture, art or sports. Scholars and their scholarship, religious schools of thought and their leaders, physicians, traders and businesspersons, artisans, artists, poets, linguists, writers, musicians, academics, theatre and its performers and jesters etc, are not only introduced to the reader, their contribution and skills are also mentioned and commented upon. There are some other good works but Shams has written the most comprehensive social history of Lucknow.
In English, the books on Lucknow’s art, culture, music, history, political economy and architecture that are worth looking at, in my opinion, include King Wajid Ali Shah of Awadh (two volumes) by Mirza Ali Azhar, published in 1982 by the Royal Book Company in Karachi, Amaresh Misra’s Lucknow: Fire of Grace — The Story of its Renaissance, Revolution and the Aftermath, first published in 1998 by Harper Collins Publishers India, and a coffee table book on the city’s history and architecture, Lucknow: City of Illusion, edited by Rosie Llewllyn-Jones under the supervision of Ebrahim Alkazi and published by Prestel in 2006.
The fire of grace is perhaps now out but it has left some glowing embers behind.
The columnist is a poet and essayist.
His latest collections of verse are Hairaa’n Sar-i-Bazaar and No Fortunes to Tell
Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, October 13th, 2024