Lucknow

The Martiniere, Lucknow
From a cigarette card published ca. 1919-1929
Courtesy: New York Public Library

Named after a Hindu icon, Lucknow is home to India's magnificent Muslim tradition. One in five Lucknowis are Muslims. Muslim women in burqas are all over town. Shia College and Hazratganj, the two Imambaras and Chattar Manzil, Ameenabad and self-flagellation on Moharram; all are integral parts of the Muslim Lucknow this blogger knows so well.

This once-youthful city -- a maximum city in its own right -- now is bent with age.

The Muslim Rifah-e-Aam club, once gracious host to Hindu wedding parties, yawns in disrepair. Chattar Manzil, where Muslim Nawabs of Awadh once frolicked, has become a sterile laboratory. Old men with white beards shuffle around defeated. Lucknowi tehzeeb has become a tacky punchline.

This is the eventual fate of even maximum cities with soul, but lacking spirit.

What Daniel Henniger writes about New Orleans is just as true for Lucknow:

Several years ago, Sir Peter Hall, the British historian of urban centers, delivered a lecture in Glasgow called "Creative Cities and Economic Development."

What, Peter Hall asked, enabled the rise of six famously potent centers of urban creativity--Athens, Florence, London, Vienna, Paris, Berlin? They "were all capitalist cities," he answered, and "they were all great trading cities."

Those cities, Mr. Hall said, became "magnets for the immigration of talent" but were also "generators of the wealth that could help employ that talent." Indeed, "most creative cities were bourgeois cities.

But most intriguingly for New Orleans' edgy reputation, Sir Peter also argues that "creative cities . . . are places of great social and intellectual turbulence; not comfortable places at all," a place "where outsiders can enter and feel a certain state of ambiguity." Then comes this proviso: Greatness can never be achieved "in societies in which all sense of order has disappeared."

The great creative cities Peter Hall described were exposed to the forces of the market in ways unthinkable today, giving them what he calls "unstable tension."

It is precisely such an unstable tension that Lucknow needs for renewal -- but, in our intellectually stagnant Hindi heartland, it shall likely never receive.