Lucknavi Liasions
| Lucknow is a functioning anarchy that refuses to slide into chaos. A developing, mini-Delhi sans broad roads, Uttar Pradesh’s capital, also the prime minister’s constituency, now resembles a dismembered jhanki (tableaux). Ill-planned avenues and buildings ram their way through crumbling but proud edifices; a haphazardly uniform urban pattern evolves out of a panoramic layout. Many rare buildings have vanished while protected asi monuments are in danger of falling down. Some of them are still strikingly neoteric, almost bourgeois in intent and concept. A Borges-type labyrinthine, the Bhulbhulaiya, haunts the Bada Imambara – its plush ceiling invokes early ’60s restaurant decor. The Romanesque arches, Egyptian designs and amazingly 20th century brickwork of Dilkusha (an early 19th century building) shocked a newly-arrived European delegation of architects. They were reminded of a 20th Century Fox set, being unaware that Lucknavi tastes have long seeped into Indian cinema.
Remember Leena Chandravarkar’s rust cenna sharara, Asha Parekh’s dupatta tied to the chignon, Sharmila Tagore’s jaali blouse, even Helen’s slit lehngas, in the ’60s and the ’70s? The classical, wheatish, gudas badan, sensational (sansanikhez) Lucknavi beauty struck a rugged stance in a sophisticated manner. She defined the Lucknavi ada evident in Urdu shairi, the Dussheri mango, jinsiyat (sexology), Hindi scriptwriting, Begum Akthar, the UP school of hockey, tennis and humour, Hindustani detective fiction – and private attitudes. The decapitating, ‘aliberal’ Lucknavi response to English writing in India? Khafifa adalat mein ullu ke patthe, raage gul se bulbul ke par baandhte hain (a famous, early 20th century couplet by Braj Narain Chakbast that translates loosely as ‘The owls (fools) of the lower-law-court that represents the real world, tie the wings of the ‘metal world nightingale’ with floral veins’!). Rs 1,000 for getting the present connection right.
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| The subconscious boundary of the city’s stylistic terrain has been marked, traditionally, by Urdu literature. Recently dream and reality coalesced in the imperceptibly Lucknavi short stories of Dr Naiyyer Masud (English translation by Katha). The sixth-sense world of the Sheeshaghat (glass wharf) was revealed, a world where the essence of camphor takes on a forlorn presence of its own. Where inconsequential, ordinary places in Hindi-Urdu belt houses hides domains of fear, incest and voyeurism. It’s hard to recall any other literature that so positively symbolises, in contemporary terms, the Indian attitude of sensual mystery. Not mystery so much as design if you consider this: faced with the threat to Indian culture, King Wajid Ali Shah forcibly elevated the lowly, temporal, oblique, Avadhian arts – Thumri, Rekhti, Dadra, Tappa, Hazal Goi, Kathak (only a form of storytelling then) – to stylised power. He transmuted Lucknow into an outpost of Asiatic modernity, pitting Hindustan’s material diversity against western corporeal imports after all, loha lohe ko kaat-ta hai (only iron cuts iron). The stiff upper lip never knew what hit it in 1857. A lesson there for cultural nationalists and socialists battling chic ‘videshi’ with counter-clockwise, spiritual ’swadeshi’. A reprimand to Nehruvians and Leftists for failing to place secular nationalism in the achkan and the garara. And you thought Lucknow was only Chikan and Pehle-aap.
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| An Indian writer in English, sceptical about Lucknow being the world’s last integrated culture, went to Ameenabad. She found Hindus and Muslims eating tunde kebabs, then bowing their heads to one god in a Shahi Masjid named after a Brahmini. In Aliganj, she stumbled upon a Nawabi Hanuman temple with a crescent atop the kalash. This year, the power and frenzy of Moharram, held amidst Shia-Sunni tensions, dumbfounded a woolly-eyed communal harmonywala. And then he discovered women of a famous, orthodox Muslim Taluqedari house observing Navratra. In closed-down courtesan quarters old madams (some still involved with dance and music, their daughters studying in convents) play bridge with retired colonels, reminiscing about the old days when the kotha did duty as a finishing school. The secret of A.B. Vajpayee’s victories – in Lucknow although Atalji is not a Lucknavi Vajpeyi – lies in the city’s Kanyakubja Brahmin constituency. Yet the feral, meat-eating, pro-Muslim habits of the Avadhian Kanyakubja Brahmins (who top the Brahmin hierarchy) are legendary. In April this year, Hindu traders diffused a communal issue in the old city. Asked about Lucknaviyat, I prefer to keep quiet. A nagging doubt persists whether the coeval, informed Indian mind is capable of perceiving its own reality.
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| Responding to a bet, a North Indian politician known for his ferocious appetite ordered 2 kilos of Jauzi after consuming a huge quantity of tunde kebabs. Two hundred grams later he began panting, shouting that the devil had seeped into the wheat-based saffron bonbon. With the controversial Ambedkar Park, ex-chief minister Mayavati tried emulating the opulence of past rulers. She ended up with an epitaph to Mandalite dreams. Its tawdry grandeur typifies the unformed style and unfinished agenda of the political classses that emerged in the ’90s. This potential capitalist dynamo of a city was partly de-industrialised during the nep years. A violent, parvenu takeover of culture slammed creativity into silence. But since this is not a cynically stagnant city, a volatile, khamosh Lucknow simmers, like its Dampukht mode of cooking, below the surface. A resilient inventiveness keeps throwing up computer freaks, VJs, connoisseur bureaucrats, dynamic women professionals and entrepreneurs in a new middle class. Only in Lucknow could I hold Sham-e-Avadh, a programme of book-reading, music and dance of my book Lucknow: Fire of Grace. And get away with a fusion of English prose, Urdu Ramayana, Avadhi poetry and Sufi dance on the ‘Haveli-numa’ poolside of a 5-star hotel.
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| While performing his ‘Shakespeare’s villains’ in a city auditorium, Steven Berkoff made a trademark quip Luck-now; do you have? Later, a gentlemen remarked within earshot of Berkoff – ‘Shakes-a-peer’; this is what Steve does all the time! |
~ by amareshmisra on January 7, 2009.
Posted in Outlook diaries
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