BOOKS
Looking Back at Lucknow

The rustle of documents and the absence of human voices mar a painstakingly researched book.

This book is part of a French series called "Memories of Cities". The publisher's idea was to look at cities with an "especially meaningful past".

A sufficiently ingenious and imaginative scholar can elicit significance from the most unlikely and unpromising of places, reconstruct whole civilisations from shards of pottery, bleached bones, from the detritus which history leaves behind as it rushes to more important assignations. Still, it must be the case that there are places, and particular times in particular places, when (and where) something of special significance is transacted and concentrated. In such cases, in the desert of time, different caravans of significance converge and gabble furiously into the desert night until day breaks and they must once again resume their lonely trajectories.

Lucknow, Nawabi Lucknow, with its brief, brilliant efflorescence culminating in the tragic (but also heroic) events of 1857; its re-emergence, via rape and worse, as colonial Lucknow is clearly one such oasis. And sensitive writers have long recognised this. Avadh -- no longer Oudh -- has freed itself from the sanguinary hold of colonial reminiscence and become a potent symbol for lost (or merely misplaced?) civilisational possibilities, for a culture of plurality and tolerance. The relation -- and tension -- between Lucknow and Avadh, and between the idea of Lucknow and the idea of Avadh, is only one of the many themes which this erudite collection illuminates.

Thus, anyone who would like to get beyond sentimental clichés in thinking about this vaunted (and real) culture of plurality and tolerance will have to think about the relations between the Lakhnavi and the non-Lakhnavi Avadh elite, and about the relation between both these elites and the urban and rural masses they sat upon. The fate of that longed-for culture is inseparable from this necessary politics.

Violette Graff has assembled a notable cast of contributors -- and they cover a fascinating variety of subjects. Thus, Muzaffar Alam and Michael Fisher have written on the early history of Lucknow, and Rosie Llewellyn-Jones has contributed a fine essay on "Lucknow, City of Dreams", dealing with the diverse architectural styles which jostle for attention in "this remarkable city, woven from the dreams of its disparate, but imaginative creators".

It would be difficult to find a reader who is not drawn to at least a few of the wares on offer here: the events of 1857, as reconstructed through the records of the white women who were besieged in Lucknow; a painstaking account of the historical backgrounds to the recurrent Shia-Sunni conflict. There is an essay on "Urdu in Lucknow/ Lucknow in Urdu" and another on "The Musical Evolution of Lucknow" -- but nothing, alas, on kathak. And there is an absence of warmth here.

Despite the promise of the subtitle, Memories of Cities, one hardly hears the sound of human voices, only the rustle of documents.

Finally, therefore, although the underlying story is a fascinating one -- and the cast of tellers is quite a galaxy -- the resultant volume is rather grey and academic. Worthy, no doubt, but a lay reader, who might be tempted by the title and the attractive book design, should be warned. Even Imtiaz Ahmed's piece on Hazratganj is curiously cold. His essay -- the last in the book -- ends: "The important thing is to remember that Lucknow was after all no ordinary city." Well, we'll just have to take his word for it.

Second Coming

A compelling new translation of an enduring Tagore novel.

By Malashiri Lal

From the bare essentials of Oh! Calcutta! to the olfactory arousals of The Calcutta Cookbook, there is something about this City of Joy that evokes lost sensations. Sujit Mukherjee's compelling translation of a Tagore classic once again urges us to wander through the streets of "Kolikata". This time, the politics of translation links the Hindu-Brahmo debates in renaissance Bengal to present-day concerns with revivalist Hinduism.

In the novel Gora, the opposition between "pristine" Brahminism and the reformist doctrine hinges on idol worship and the practice of rituals. The hero Gora wears caste marks on his forehead and is so strict about the observance of piety that he refuses to share meals with his liberal-minded mother. His orthodoxy is questioned by Poresh Babu, a spokesperson of the Brahmo Samaj which rejected Hindu "superstition" and sought the "rationalism" of the "western scientific temper". Gora's excessive rhetoric is countered by Sucharita's gentle but firm advocacy of women's education and social egalitarianism. Reading Gora anew, I am struck by the pompousness of a hero who makes a convenience of everyone. A spoilt child, an overbearing friend, an argumentative zealot, he revels in demolishing opinions expressed by the other characters in the novel, even as the novel ultimately exposes the duplicity inherent in a traditional Hindu hierarchy.

Why has Sahitya Akademi published a new translation when the old, familiar Macmillan edition has 18 reprints from 1924 to 1995? Sujit Mukherjee -- author of the well-received Autobiography of an Unknown Cricketer -- deserves credit for showing up serious flaws of incompleteness and inaccuracy in the early translation. Furthermore, it has a lot more to offer in terms of being a scholar's edition framed by Meenakshi Mukherjee's perceptive introduction.

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