Capital Vignettes: Book Review

Capital Vignettes: A Peep into Delhi's Ethos
RV Smith
Rupa, Rs 295

There’s no doubting RV Smith’s credentials as a Dilliwalla: one who knows his gola kabab from his shammi and his Niazi brothers from his Nizamis, and can tell a story about every one of the city’s streets to boot. Smith’s columns about Delhi have been a permanent fixture of the Statesman and the Hindu for many years now, and my impression was that his speciality is Old Delhi. And indeed, much of the book is taken up with tracing the half-remembered, half-legendary lives of nineteenth century figures who inhabited such-and-such a haveli in such-and-such mohalla of Shahjahanbad. It’s a pleasant surprise, then, to discover that Smith’s more recent geographical reference points are such unsung West Delhi localities as Mayapuri and Subhash Nagar. A roti-making dwarf in Ashok Nagar, an authorized opium shop in Karol Bagh, and Jat origin myths about Dwarka make for the some of the freshest writing in the book.

Unfortunately, Smith’s brief seems to involve being “historical”, tearing the reader away from this promising present into a deliberately hazy, rose-tinted past. Even people he’s seen first-hand are made to evoke tales of Mughal times: talking of a blind seer called Hafiz Nabina Doliwaley (who died in 1947) leads him seamlessly to the famous mystic Sarmad (who lived in the1600s), while Zulfiquar the kabab-maker (circa 1980) reminds him of the legendary Maseeta whom “even Mirza Ghalib respected”.

Other pieces combine textbook history with anecdotes strung around an ostensible theme. When this is something fairly concrete – for example, Queen Victoria’s connections to Delhi – it can be quite fun. In less than a page, we learn that the dal is called Malka Masoor as a tribute to Her Majesty’s “fondness for that lentil soup”, that Swami Shraddhanand’s statue in Chandni Chowk was a replacement for an older bronze one of Victoria, and that in her post-Albert years, the monarch had an affair not only with the now-famous John Brown but also a Munshi Abdul Karim who had been dispatched from Delhi to teach her Urdu.

But all too often, the “theme” dissolves into a series of madcap meditations, unfortunately delivered in all seriousness. In “Red Roses and Suraiya”, for instance, Smith ranges from “a hotel on Ring Road”, where the Garhwali guard makes him think of tribal warfare, the “lanky Negro” gives him “a whiff of Africa”, and the “fat Turk” triggers a lament about the death of “oriental beauty”, to a record shop in the Walled City where he manages to traverse three seasons, Baiju Bawra and Suraiya, in the space of one dream-like encounter. This kind of thing can be seen in two ways: as a charming form of storytelling that replicates the quality of post-dinner conversations with a sentimental grandfather, or as an attempt at stream-of-consciousness whose meandering could do with a ruthless editor. Readers of the latter variety are likely also to be bothered by the cringeworthy titles (“Ghoonghat of Rural Life”), the many typos and often non-existent syntax. If you’re willing to be indulgent, though, you might end up enjoying the ride.

An edited version of this review was published in Outlook Traveller magazine, September 2008.

Christopher Pinney Interview

"Visual history tells us about repressed histories"

Christopher Pinney, one of the first scholars to celebrate India’s adaption of photography, is now talking about how photography changed India, says TRISHA GUPTA

Christopher Pinney, anthropologist and art historian, is widely recognised as an authority on the popular art and visual culture of South Asia. He is the author of several influential books including Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs and Photos of the Gods: Printed Image and Political Struggle in India. Pinney, 49, was one of the first scholars to examine photography from its birth as an alien art through its assimilation into Indian lives. He currently teaches at University College, London and Northwestern University, Illinois. He was in Delhi recently to talk about his latest book, The Coming of Photography in India (forthcoming: Oxford University Press, India).

How did you get interested in India, and in particular, in India’s photography?

About India, I have a kind of Kiplingesque narrative. I was born in Sri Lanka. When I was six, we went to Europe by sea, and the boat stopped at Bombay. I have a distinct memory of walking ashore with my father at this beautiful sunlit place, between the rains of Sri Lanka and “the blasted hellish drizzle of England”… it must have lodged itself in my subliminal consciousness! The other reason for my interest in India was my grandfather, who had been in an artillery unit in North India, and was never as happy as he had been then. I got from him the sense that India was somehow very important. So, from early on, I had the idea that a life that didn’t involve spending time in India would be incomplete. But I actually came to India to work on the industrial labour question, inspired by reading the work of the great British labour historian EP Thompson. I had this idea that people were being plucked from the rural idyll of the village and thrown into the satanic mill. (In reality, it was the opposite: people were moving from a sixteen-hour working day as landless agricultural labourers to an eight-hour day in the factory.) The reknowned anthropologist Adrian Mayer, who’d worked in Dewas, suggested I go to Malwa. I found Patrana (name changed) on a map in a techno-economic survey of Madhya Pradesh in a library at the School of Oriental and African Studies — it was a newish small town with a big viscose rayon factory — and I thought, that’s the place for me.

Once I was there, I met factory workers in their houses and see the chromolithographs on their walls. I became interested in that aesthetic. People I met would show me their photographs. Also, I was constantly being asked to take photographs of villagers. Photography is like that — it’s an interface between strangers. I’d try to take pictures that reflected something of their personalities. It was an incident during that time that first made me take photography seriously. A neighbour of mine, Bherulal, wanted to be photographed. He was a quixotic sort of chap, and I wanted to capture something of that quality. So I got him to stand under his mango tree, so that his face was half in shadow. I thought the photograph that resulted was superb, and I had a 12 by 8 print made for Bherulal. But when he saw it, he started shouting, asking why I’d taken a picture with his face in chhaya. That was when it struck me that there was something here worth studying: a local aesthetic of legibility that was offended by shadow, by contrast.

Much of your work is historical. Would you say that the status of photography in India has changed, from the colonial period till the present day?

My first book, Camera Indica, was divided into two parts. The first part was about colonial photography, which I argued was about surveillance and identification, often involving the imposition of identities upon Indians that they may well have resented. So photography, in its early Indian incarnation, came out looking like a villain. The second part of the book was a celebration of local Malwa village photographic practices: overpainting, fantastical backdrops, artisanal collage and montage work which, to me, represented a postcolonial Indian resourcefulness. These photographers were extraordinarily witty and inventive, disrupting the normative space of Western photography, the desire to fix an identity within the frame. I return to many of these themes in my forthcoming book. Except that now I would argue that creativity, projection and what I call prophecy is a characteristic of all photography, not just small town Indian vernacular practice.

As you argued in Camera Indica, the studio becomes a place where rather than reiterating pre-existing identities, individuals could explore identities that did not exist in the social world.

Exactly. Photography lends itself to a kind of fantasy. You’re given a space in which to enact an identity. And photography’s peculiar magic is that it gives you a record of that moment, so that to ask whether that is or is not the real you is not an appropriate question. All photography has that potential — it allows you to come out better. Pictures are not just illustrations of things we already know. I’m interested in picture-making technologies as avant-garde projects that make worlds.

How does your new book, The Coming of Photography in India, develop this theme?

My new book is about photography’s arrival in India in the 19th century. One way to study this would be to say photography is a void into which all these pre-existing Indian concerns and practices flood in: caste, marriage, whatever. But then we learn nothing new about photography itself. And India remains a colourful footnote to the history of photography. I say, let’s start in India rather than in France. And look at the disturbance photography causes: throwing up new opportunities, prophesying new social formations.

Could you give an example?

Photography has certain demands it imposes on behaviour. For example, in the 19th century, it was extremely difficult to photograph large groups of people, getting them to stay still for the long exposure time. So couples and individuals got prominence in photography, fast-tracking the idea of the couple far ahead of what it was in society. So the camera actively intervenes in society: by privileging the conjugal couple as a unit (rather than say, the joint family or the gotra), it becomes part of the process of transformation. The trajectory of photography moves in a direction counter to the dominant tendency of 19th century society.

So you see the visual record as the source of an alternative history?

Visual history’s modality is akin to psychoanalysis — it tells us something about repressed histories that are important, but disavowed by standard textual history. In Photos of the Gods I pointed out the popularity of Bhagat Singh in popular visual history, in contrast to his near invisibility in textual history. There’s a question there about audience, about literacy. Nationalist historiography wanted to celebrate Nehru and Gandhi, not Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar Azad or even Subhash Bose. Even with a figure like Gandhi, the popular messianic assessment of him as Mahatma, as a kind of demi-god, is linked to the Gandhi images produced by SS Brijbasi and Co, the most important picture producer in India in the 1930s and 1940s.

Would you like to comment on the rising interest in popular visual culture, within academic circles as well as the art establishment?

On the academic front, Ashis Nandy made the important argument that after the Emergency, many critical thinkers and cultural practitioners lost faith in the Left to provide alternatives, and looked to popular culture. This zone of the non-modern was complex, difficult, perhaps problematic, but presented a reservoir of possibilities. As Nandy said of popular cinema, it asks the right questions but usually comes up with the wrong answers. As for the art world, yes, there’s a lot of interesting work now that draws on street art, popular film, chromolithography. The two names that come to mind immediately are Pushpamala N. and Atul Dodiya. It’s not a celebration of popular culture — in Dodiya’s work, for example, you can see a critique of the celebration of Gandhi or Ambedkar — but a recognition of the importance of engaging that field of cultural production, as ripe with possibilities.

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 37, Dated Sept 20, 2008

Film Review: Mumbai Cutting

Bombay Eleven

Read the Tehelka piece here. And the longer version below.

Bombay has always been the metropolis of choice for Hindi cinema. As any self-respecting Indian film-goer could tell you, when watching a Hindi film, if the locale was urban, it was safe to assume that it was Bombay. Strangely, though, films set in Bombay weren’t always interested in the specificity of the city. Film scholar M. Madhava Prasad suggests that this may have been because ‘Bambai’ was always invoked in opposition to the village, as “the generic metropolitan other”. While other cities were too specific, Bombay somehow managed to be “Bombay plus The City”. But having to bear this burden of symbolic city-ness meant that it was only in the 1970s, with a film like Deewar, that Bombay came into its own on screen, with identifiable locales, language and street culture.

Since then, of course, there’s been no looking back. The fetishization of “Bambaiya” speech, specifically through films set in the underworld, has been the cinematic obsession of our times. The gritty realist gangster flick created by Ram Gopal Varma continues to thrive, while giving rise to comic riffs that play on our underworld fascination, like the Munnabhai films. Varma and his Factory have also been responsible for a series of tributes to Bombay as the city of cinematic dreams: Rangeela, Mast, Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hoon, Naach. More recently, films like Life in a Metro have sought to rediscover a “middle class” Mumbai of office romance and failing marriages.

Mumbai Cutting makes this showcasing of Mumbai a self-conscious venture. Produced by Niyati Shah of White Cloud Films, the film consists of eleven shorts, with Mumbai as the common thread. Several films seek to capture something quintessentially Bombay by recourse to public hangouts: bars, cafes, clubs. Ayush Raina’s Bombay High revolves around the kind of seedy neighbourhood bar that probably doesn’t exist in any other Indian city – where small time gangsters share space with an after-office group that includes women. The only thing identifiably Bombay about Jahnu Barua’s badly-named Anjane Dost is an Irani Café that’s seems meant to serve as both locale and premise: but surely the meeting between strangers can happen in any city, anywhere in the world? Then we have Rahul Dholakia’s stylishly-shot Bombay Mumbai Same Shit, with Jimmy Shergill as a rich brat whose nocturnal wanderings weave the nightclub and the pavement together.

The two women directors, Revathi and Ruchi Narain, place women at the centre of their narratives. In Revathi’s tightly-edited Parcel, Mumbai appears as a series of insurmountable hurdles to a Bangladeshi woman en route to the Middle East – Sonali Kulkarni in a stellar performance. Narain’s quirky, part-animated Jo Palti Nahi Woh Rickshaw Kya shows an NRI woman’s relationship to Mumbai’s pleasures – and dangers – as mediated by auto-rickshaw rides.

Despite the genuine effort to depict different locations and social classes, several shorts end up recycling Mumbai clichés – mafia, the monsoon and local trains – without doing much with them. Sudhir Mishra’s The Ball has a child witness the gang murder of a man during an evening cricket match. Shot predictably in the thick of the city’s Muslim neighbourhoods (under the JJ flyover, going towards Bhendi Bazaar), the film never transcends its gimmicky opening. Manish Jha’s And it Rained, about two people brought together by the Mumbai monsoon is ambitiously dialogue-less, depending instead on Euphoria’s Jiya jaye na track, but ends up feeling like a music video. Kundan Shah’s Hero (also without dialogue) does better with its take on the daily battle to get on the local train: Deepak Dobriyal (of Omkara fame) plays the flagging commuter with an exaggerated Buster Keatonesque comic automaton-like quality that nearly works.

But for the large majority of Hindi film buffs, Bombay is not a lived space whose traffic lights and nakabandis we negotiate every day. It’s the mythical Bombay of mafia dons and glamorous starlets that we’ve seen on screen all our lives. So while some of these latter shorts are extremely watchable, the two that really succeed are the ones that set out, self-consciously, to play with the Bombay of popular lore and filmic memory.

The first is Anurag Kashyap’s Pramod Bhai 23, which does a brilliant job of showing you this mythical Bombay as it lives in the mind and heart of a 12-year-old juvenile delinquent. Mushtaq lives in a world defined by knowing someone who knows someone who knows Chhota Rajan, a world marked by traffic light encounters with a lady in dark glasses who’s definitely “Karan Arjun ki Ma”. The second is Rituparno Ghosh’s Urge, a gentle tongue-in-cheek look at Bombay’s place in the popular Indian imagination. The humour owes a lot to the self-referential treatment – the family seems straight out of a TV serial (clues are provided: the mother whines about having to give up her “last two serials”), and the Stardust-reading police inspector is clearly inspired to play detective by watching Bombay films. It is this ability to view the city bifocally, to see how the mythical Bombay feeds off the real one (and vice versa) that makes Mumbai Cutting a true benchmark in the long line of Mumbai films.

(An edited version of this article appeared in Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 34, Dated Aug 30, 2008)

Living Image: Old Delhi in literature

An essay for Time Out Delhi, on changing literary depictions of Shahjahanbad over the last century:

Photograph by Abhinandita Mathur

“Anything about which one knows that one soon will not have it around becomes an image,” wrote Walter Benjamin. While Shahjahanbad is nowhere near disappearing from the face of the earth, the death of its spirit has been much lamented in twentieth century writing, and there is no doubt that much of the throbbing, pulsating life that coursed through the city’s veins at the start of the century no longer exists, except in memory.

The creation of New Delhi in 1931 relegated Shahjahan’s once-magnificent city to the status of “Old” Delhi, which came to be perceived increasingly through the developmental lenses of “congestion” and sanitation rather than as an organic settlement with its own vision of what a city is. But even as political power and cultural patronage moved bag and baggage to New Delhi’s tree-lined avenues, the bustling galis and kuchas of the walled city – and the quieter bungalows of the Civil Lines – became for many a writer, a window into a “more authentic” Delhi.

Among the earliest twentieth century literary attempts to document the disappearing life of the walled city was Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi (1940). Set in the period 1911-1919, Twilight draws on a fund of memory to fill out a portrait of life in Delhi in loving ethnographic detail: the pigeon-flyers and the kite-fighters, the kababchis and the kulfi-sellers, the beggars and the healers, the poets and the qawwals. It is a love song to a dying world – a world that may have been feudal, flawed and untenable, but whose ideals one still cherished, whose purity one admired, and whose once-incandescent beauty was not easily forgotten.

Certainly, for someone who helped found the Progressive Writers’ Movement, Ali displays very little enthusiasm for the transformations of modernity. Instead, we read of the “grating noise” of trams, of engine smoke blackening the evening sky, of Chandni Chowk being disfigured by the demolition of the central causeway and the cutting down of shade-giving peepal trees, and most painful of all, the death of the old culture: “The richness of life had been looted and despoiled by the foreigners, and vulgarity and cheapness had taken its place. That relation which had existed between society and its poets and members was destroyed”.

Glimpses of a similarly conflicted relationship with a once-glorious but colonised past and a decolonized but forever corrupted, inauthentic, present appear in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day (1980). Moving between a 1970s present and a 1940s past, Desai’s allusions to “Old Delhi decadence” conjure up a contrasting vision of New Delhi as a place “where things happen”. But Desai allows for no easy choices. Hyder Ali and Raja, who represent Old Delhi, with their poetic flourishes and delusions of grandeur, are treated with as much ambivalence (“verses that… had thrilled her then with their Persian glamour”) as the diplomat Bakul’s smug efficiency (“smoothed” by “the bland oil of self-confidence”).

Desai’s Old Delhi, interestingly, is not the walled city but the Civil Lines, a European enclave of sprawling colonial bungalows to which upper-class Indian families started moving in the 1910s and 1920s. The Civil Lines of Clear Light, however, is a much lonelier place than the one remembered by Sheila Dhar (Raga’n Josh: Stories from a Musical Life, 1995), whose barrister grandfather spearheaded just such a move of her Mathur Kayastha extended family, from “the congested lanes of Chailpuri in the old city” to the “spacious and elegant” houses whose new Anglicized lifestyle awed relatives visiting from the walled city. “It was noted with envy and admiration that breakfast in these households consisted of eggs, toast and jam, instead of vegetable bhujia with paratha, and that even the women had begun to use spoons, though only little ones, to eat.”

And yet, for all the billiards, bridge and Scotch whisky that had replaced chess, ganjifa and keora sharbat, Dhar’s sparkling memoir of her 1940s childhood reveals many connections to an older style of Delhi life. The ustads who first taught Dhar classical music came from the walled city – Mohan Baba from Neel Katra, Bundu Khan from Suiwalan – and family outings were planned as if from Sheher – “walks by the Jamuna, trips to the Qudsia Gardens, picnics at Okhla in the mango season”.

By the 1950s, however, the separation between the old city and the new was complete. Madhusudan, the narrator of Mohan Rakesh’s seminal 1961 novel, Andhere Band Kamre (translated as Lingering Shadows [1993]), rents a room in Qassabpura, but spends his waking hours in Connaught Place, wondering whether he will ever live in the style of his friends Harbans and Nilima, in their Hanuman Road bungalow “with paintings on the walls”. For Thakurain, his landlady, Connaught Place is a distant “outing” – she excitedly remembers having gone there once, “on Independence Day with Thakur Saheb.”

In one of the book’s most devastating scenes, Madhusudan writes a newspaper feature on “the streets of Delhi” whose mention of Qassabpura’s dilapidated houses results in the Municipal Committee threatening to pull down Thakurain’s home. Old Delhi was no longer about poetry and music, or even delusions of grandeur – it was a dirty, congested, “breeding ground for epidemics”, full of houses of “the sort that should be condemned!” Rakesh’s novel coincided with the 1962 Delhi Master Plan’s schemes for “decongesting” Shahjahanbad and its declaration as a notified slum.

Even nostalgia, if it existed, now served as an excuse for demolition. Jagmohan followed up his Rebuilding Shahjahanbad (1975) with his infamous attempt to “clear” sections of the old city during the Emergency. It was not until the 1990s, with William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns (1993) and Krishna Sobti’s magisterial Dil-o-Danish (1993) that Old Delhi began its slow return journey to being a site of history and romance, leading to an increasing interest in it as “heritage”.

It remains to be seen what writers in the 21st century will make of a city that must now negotiate a path between preserving havelis and thriving trade, a path that will hopefully allow for both cycle-rickshaws and the Metro.

Published in Time Out Delhi Vol 2 Issue 4 (Jan 25 - Feb 7, 2008)

The Romance of the Single Screen

The demolition of Chanakya Cinema, December, 2008. Designed by PN Mathur (Photo courtesy Ram Rahman's blog)

My first memories of watching films in Delhi are rather hazy. I remember watching Masoom and crying, and being taken to see a film in which Rishi Kapoor sang a qawwali. If I really dredge the depths of my memory, the image that floats up is from when I was about five – an expedition with my father, to watch a ‘children’s film’. What I remember is not something from the film (it must have been in English, which I barely understood at the time), but the morning sun, a crowd of people and a poster with a picture of a girl and a dog, propped up at the entrance to a hall that I am convinced was Chanakya. The year was probably 1982.

Chanakya remained centrestage in my movie-going life through the 1990s, though Priya provided stiff competition. School expeditions to Priya were where a whole generation of girls were weaned into expressions of undying love by Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard. (The Terminator probably didn’t do as much damage to the boys.)

Last winter, I happened to be in Delhi when the NDMC managed to wrest control of Chanakya from its long-term leaseholders and decided that it would be demolished to make way for a mall-cum-multiplex. “Last day, last show at Chanakya!” said the city supplements. A friend and I showed up to say our farewells. We weren’t the only ones. Tickets were sold out. A huge crowd surrounded the hall – strangers smiling at each other, middle-aged men swapping memories with twenty-somethings. We finally bought tickets in black. Going out with a bang, I remember saying, with a tinge of something like pride.

But going, all the same. Most of the halls that people remember from the seventies and eighties have either gone, or shrunk: from the great, hulking, comfortable beasts they once were into unrecognizable glossy creatures with tinsel wings that shimmer in the night. I was young enough to celebrate the transformation, once: in my first year at college, I woke up at seven on a Sunday and braved a full-scale Delhi stampede to get a free ticket to the first-ever show at the city’s first-ever multiplex – PVR Saket, where once had been Anupam. But I didn’t quite realize then the shape of things to come. Within a few years, the multiplexes increased in number as well as clout. They managed, for example, to get rid of the clause that had required them to sell a small percentage of tickets at low prices (in PVR Saket in 1997, any seat in the first two rows was a joyful Rs 7).

I left Delhi soon after. When I came back, Alankar, my mother’s old favourite from long-ago Defence Colony days, had become 3Cs and Eros, where I had watched many an evening (while casting sidelong glances at the “morning show” posters) had disappeared. Where the hall had been was nothing but a crater – and the name. Like thousands of others, I mention Eros every time I give directions to Jangpura, where I now live. It strikes me that Eros is but one name in the vast geography of a city marked by absent cinema halls. Think of the hundreds of times you’ve jumped into an auto and pronounced tersely, “Savitri”, or perhaps, “Kamal ke paas”, or “Archana-wale road par”, with no need to say another word. Sometimes I wonder if the ease of that communication, that common language of the city, evokes an earlier time when cinemas were spaces that the middle class shared – if sometimes grudgingly – with the working masses. Everyone knew the difference between Regal and Rivoli and Odeon and Plaza, even if they were all in Connaught Place. In contrast, there is something untranslatable, incommunicable, about the difference between Citywalk and Square One – both are merely “Saket wale naye mall”. One reason why the autowala thinks they’re indistinguishable might be that he will never see the inside of either. But perhaps the real reason is that they are no different.

My nostalgia for the old halls isn’t blind – they were (and the survivors still are) cavernous, often dirty and predominantly male. Seediness came with the territory. You didn’t need to be bunking school or watching an A-rated movie to feel transgressive: if you were female, just being in a cinema alone was enough. The first time I went to watch a film alone was during IFFI 1996. I caught a bus from college to Sheila to see Sai Paranjpe’s Papiha, and bought a front stall ticket. It was an innocuous, feel-good tale about a forest officer amid tribals – but I will never forget the rousing reception I got from the men around me when the lights came on. Another memorable time I took a cousin and an unsuspecting French friend to watch a Govinda film at Stadium Cinema. The hall had clearly seen better days, but we were intrepid, and the tickets were Rs 20. It was only when a worried-looking ticket checker set about finding us seats with his flashlight that we realized a) that only a third of the seats were unbroken, and b) that there no other women in the audience, let alone foreign ones.

Multiplexes, for all their cookie-cutter aesthetics and ridiculously overpriced snacks, probably do make life easier for women who can afford them. But most single-screen cinemas in Delhi seem to be going the Stadium way: interesting variations include Imperial in Paharganj, which now fills up every night by showing 80s multistarrers for twenty bucks a ticket, and Moti in Daryaganj, which has tied its fortunes to the rising Bhojpuri tide. Some few have managed to survive the transformative years without losing their identities completely – one model is that of Priya, which keeps afloat because it’s part of the PVR family. But another model is Delite, now divided into Delite and Delite Diamond, its wooden panelling and illuminated, jewel-like ceiling clearly a labour of love for its owners. The neebu pani and samosas and photos of Dilip Kumar visiting the hall in its older avatar make people describe it as retro. Yet the place is as far from being a museum as possible, with the crowds rolling in every night. Clearly there is a space for something that’s beyond the multiplex – why aren’t there more people seeking to fill it?

Published in Time Out Delhi Vol 2 Issue 8 (July 11-24, 2008)

Sham-e-Awadh: Book Review

Author : Ed by Veena Talwar Oldenburg
Publisher : Penguin
Cost : Indian Rupees 395

Most readers probably expect exactly what this anthology of writings about Lucknow delivers. There are tales of nawabi delicacy and decadence, accounts of British depradations and melancholy twentieth century laments on the decline of everything – architecture, music, dance, language, manners – that had once made the city famous as the repository of cultural refinement. Yet, Sham-e-Awadh leaves you with a feeling of dissatisfaction.

Perhaps the problem with the book is precisely this failure to depart from expectations. Piece after piece goes down the same well-trodden paths, as if what can be said or thought about Lucknow is circumscribed by some pre-existing narrative outline. This is particularly true of the attempts to sum up what has happened to Lucknow in the twentieth century. Veena Talwar Oldenburg herself never seems to look at the present city except to look for survivors from its gentler past. Neither Mrinal Pande’s take on the new political culture forged by Mayawati and Mulayam Singh Yadav, nor Nasima Aziz’s description of the grand double wedding of the sons of magnate Subroto Roy manage to go beyond evoking the predictable shock-and-awe to actually tell us something we don’t already know.

Oldenburg’s elegiac proclivities make the historical sections much more substantial – the eminently readable extract from Flora Annie Steel’s 1897 novel (On The Face of the Waters, set in 1850s Lucknow) is a revelation, as is Carla Petievich’s all-too-brief glimpse into the sexier, more colloquial side of Urdu poetry, rekhti. There are several individual portraits that provide revealing insights into the city – especially Michael Edwardes’ affecting little account of Hazrat Mahal (“the Rebel Begum”), and Saleem Kidwai on Begum Akhtar’s complex relationship with Lucknow.

But even here, the book seems incomplete, since Oldenburg uses her editorial privilege to give us not one but two of her own accounts of Nawabi Lucknow and chooses to include nothing at all from Abdul Halim Sharar, who spent his childhood in the Lucknow of Wajid Ali Shah and produced an account of the city’s life and culture that is unrivalled in its detail. Trisha Gupta

Published in Time Out Delhi and Time Out Mumbai, 2007