In 30 Seconds
Story
Some cities are remembered for what they conquered. Lucknow is remembered for how it behaved. In the eight decades between Asaf ud Daula’s arrival in 1775 and the annexation of 1856, the capital of Awadh built the most elaborate culture of refinement the subcontinent has known, a civilisation of manner, language, cuisine, and art so distinctive that its name became an adjective. Lakhnavi, applied to a greeting, a kebab, a couplet, or a courtesy, still certifies a particular finish, and the word for the whole achievement, tehzeeb, is ordinarily translated as culture and means something closer to the art of being civilised at close quarters.
The tehzeeb’s most famous emblem is a traffic rule for doorways, pehle aap, after you, first, the phrase Lucknow deploys where other cities push, and the legend of two gentlemen missing their train in an exchange of precedence is told with pride rather than irony, because the code it exaggerates was real. Speech in the Nawabi capital was cultivated like an orchard, the Urdu of its streets held by its speakers to be the language’s finest register, its honorifics graded to the exact rank of the addressee, its refusals engineered to leave no bruise. The culture crossed every line the census draws. This was the seat of what the plain calls Ganga Jamuni tehzeeb, the confluence culture, Hindu khatris and kayasths serving as ministers of a Shia court, Muslim patrons endowing Ramlilas, the festivals of each community attended by the other, and the whole city, whatever its faith, keeping Muharram with the Nawabs, the imambaras this series has visited functioning as the capital’s shared theatre of grief.
The court’s patronage rebuilt whole art forms. Kathak, the storytelling dance of the plain’s temples, was refined in Wajid Ali Shah’s Lucknow into a courtly classicism of intricate footwork and abhinaya, the expressive art of suggestion, and the gharana founded there by the brothers of the Kalka Bindadin house descends, through Birju Maharaj in our own time, as the dance’s most celebrated lineage. Music acquired the thumri, the light classical song of love’s negotiations, a form the last king himself composed in under his pen name, and poetry divided the Urdu universe into its two schools, Delhi’s austere metaphysics against Lucknow’s polish and play, while the city’s marsiya poets, Anis and Dabir above all, raised the Muharram elegy into epic, verse recitation becoming a spectator art the city still practises.
The famous kitchens belong to the culture batch of this series, but their principle belongs here, for dum pukht, the sealed pot’s slow steam, born by tradition in the famine kitchens of the Bara Imambara works, is tehzeeb applied to heat, patience as a cooking method, and the kebab softened, the story goes, for a toothless Nawab is refinement applied to appetite. The same finish ran through the crafts, the chikankari whitework this series meets again, the attars, the kite and pigeon cultures of the rooftops, pastimes elaborated into sciences, and the courtesan salons of the Chowk, whose tawaifs were the city’s conservatoire, mistresses of poetry, music, dance, and address, to whose establishments, the saying went, gentlefolk sent their sons to learn manners, women whose centrality to the culture, and whose dispossession by colonial morality afterward, historians have lately restored to the record.
Architecture gave the tehzeeb its skyline, the Bara and Chhota Imambaras, the Rumi Darwaza’s great arch, the labyrinth of the bhulbhulaiya, a style the colonial critics called decadent stucco and a later eye reads as a court building fast, in brick and invention, the theatre of its own identity. Across it all falls the shadow the next articles bring, for the culture of refinement was flowering inside the fiscal trap the previous article described, and the British resident’s house already stood over the city like a raised eyebrow. The colonial telling made the connection a moral, effeminate refinement inviting virile conquest, and the revision replies that Lucknow’s culture was not the cause of its fall but the achievement the fall interrupted.
What survived 1856 and 1857, and the demolitions and remodellings that punished the city afterward, was the manner itself. The tehzeeb migrated into the city’s ordinary speech, into Hindustani cinema, which recruited Lucknow’s writers and its idiom wholesale, into the nostalgia industry of every Awadhi restaurant on earth, and into the daily courtesies of a capital that still, at its best, holds the door. This series will report, in later batches, the coarser Lucknow of politics and power. It records here, first, the city’s founding claim, that how one treats the person in the doorway is also a civilisation, and that the heartland once built its finest monument out of manners.
