For a certain generation and class of people Lucknow is a city that exists only in faint memory. Ab kya reh gaya hai? Lucknow to tab tha jab…
The nicest part about Shaam-e-Awadh, an anthology of writings on Lucknow edited by Veena Talwar Oldenburg is that it is completely unembarrassed about wallowing in nostalgia for that city.
There’s Margo True’s description of Awadhi cuisine (‘Fragrant Feasts of Lucknow’) made truly wonderful by an account of the attempt to create a definitive Lucknow cookbook. An attempt almost thwarted by the determination of the various family cooks interviewed to carry their secret to their graves.
Saleem Kidwai’s ‘Zikr Us Parivash Ka: Begum Akhtar in Lucknow’ re-creates not just the journey of Akhtari Bai Faizabadi but also a whole way of life.
There’s the interesting connect with Mishi Saran’s ‘My Nani Remembers…’ where Malti Shukla recalls her father’s motor accident in 1933 as he drove to meet Akhtari Bai, who she describes as his girlfriend.
Where the nostalgia for the past ebbs and the selections tentatively step into the Lucknow of today the sense of loss is palpable.
It’s there in Suleiman Mahmudabad’s despair at the vanishing of the city of his youth in the extract from William Dalrymple’s ‘The Age of Kali’.
And in Nasima Aziz’s tongue-in- cheek look at the new Lucknow nawabi, the money and muscle combination that is the Sahara Parivar in ‘The Double Wedding of the Century: I was There’.
There are things that are missing — the middle of the last century and how Lucknow responded to the freedom movement and was changed by it, for one, and a good piece on Shia Lucknow — but it’s hard to blame an anthology for not packing it all in.
It’s honest in its premise — a look at Lucknow’s glorious past. It’s a wistful collection of writings about a city that now exists only in fragments. A city of refinement and elegance; of poetry and music; of fine food and even finer conversations.