The Age of Kali (7 page)

Confronted with such verses, Mir expressed his view that most Lucknavi poets could not write verse, and would be better advised to ‘stick to kissing and slavering’.

He may well have thought the same of late-Nawabi architecture, with its similarly unrestrained piling on of effects. For by the end Lucknow’s builders had developed a uniquely blowsy Avadhi rococo whose forms and decorative strategies seem to have borrowed more from the ballrooms and fairgrounds of Europe than from the austere shrines and fortresses of Babur and Timur the Lame. There was no question of sobriety or restraint: even in monuments
built to house the dead, every inch of the interior was covered with a jungle of brightly coloured plasterwork intertwining promiscuously with gaudy curlicues of feathery stucco.

Nevertheless, the best of the buildings in Lucknow – those that date from the late eighteenth century – are evidence of a remarkable silver age which in sheer exuberance has no equal in India. The Great Imambara complex was constructed by Asaf ud-Daula for Shi’ite religious discourses in 1784. One of the largest vaulted halls in the world, it was built in order to create employment during a famine. Here there is none of the camp doodling that would be seen on later Nawabi buildings. Instead the Imambara is a vast and thoroughly monumental building: long, echoing arcades of cusped arches rise to great gilded onion-domes and rippling lines of pepperpot semi-domes; at the corners soaring minarets culminate in solid, well-designed
chattris
. The whole composition surrounded by the Great Mosque and the Rumi Darwaza exudes a bold, reckless and extravagant self-confidence. Lucknow was consciously aiming to surpass the glories of late-Moghul Delhi, and the Great Imambara shows it could do so with dashing panache.

Driving today through the melancholic streets of modern Lucknow, the massive buildings dating from the days of the Nawabs rear out of the surrounding anarchy like monuments from some lost civilisation, seemingly as disconnected from the present as the pyramids are from modern Egypt. At times it seems almost impossible to believe that they date from less than two hundred years ago, and that at that period Lucknow was famed as one of the richest kingdoms in Asia. For today the city is as shabby and impoverished as anywhere in India. Waves of squabbling cycle-rickshaw drivers pass down the potholed roads, bumping in and out of the puddles. Rubbish lies uncollected by the roadside, with dogs competing with rats to snuffle in the piles of garbage. Beside them, lines of desperate street-vendors squat on dirty rush-mats, displaying their tawdry collections of cheap plastic keyrings and fake Rolex watches. There is no grass in the parks and no flowers in the beds; barbed wire hangs limply around what were once beautiful
Moghul gardens alive with the sound of parakeets and peacocks. Above the crumbling ruins of the old city of the Nawabs rise the monsoon-stained tower-blocks erected since Independence, and now, like the ruins, showing signs of imminent collapse, with deep fissures running up their sides.

The contrast between the magnificent follies of the Nawabs and the decayed, impoverished post-colonial intrusions which stand among them is almost unbearably painful: everywhere, it seems, there has been a universal drop in standards and expectations.

Yet even as the greatest buildings of Nawabi Lucknow were being erected, the Kingdom of Avadh was acutely conscious that it was living on borrowed time. In 1764, before the Nawabs had even established their capital at Lucknow, their armies had already been defeated in battle by the East India Company, and over the course of the early nineteenth century the Company ate like a cancer in to the territories of Avadh: in less than fifty years the British annexed more than half the kingdom. But the Nawabs remained surprisingly well disposed towards Europeans, and delighted in the trinkets and amusements Westerners could provide for their court: European jugglers, portrait painters, watch-menders, piano tuners and even fashionable London barbers were all welcomed to Lucknow, and were well paid for their services.

If the Nawab sometimes amazed foreign visitors by appearing dressed as a British admiral, or even as a clergyman of the Church of England, the Europeans of Lucknow often returned the compliment. Miniature after miniature from late-eighteenth-century Lucknow shows Europeans of the period dressed in long white Avadhi gowns, lying back on carpets, hubble-bubbles in their
mouths, as they watch their
nautch
girls dance before them. Even those who never gave up European dress seem to have taken on the mores of Nawabi society: Major General Claude Martin, for example, kept a harem which included his favourite wife Boulone as well as her three sisters. Nor was this sexual curiosity one-way: at least two British
memsahibs
were recruited to join the royal Avadhi harem, and a mosque survives which was built by the Nawab for one of them, a Miss Walters.

Much of the surviving architecture of the city reflects this unique moment of Indo-European intermingling. Constantia, Claude Martin’s great palace-mausoleum, now the La Martiniere school, is perhaps the most gloriously hybrid building in India, part Nawabi fantasy and part Gothic colonial barracks. Just as Martin himself combined the lifestyle of a Muslim prince with the interests of a renaissance man – writing Persian couplets and maintaining an observatory, experimenting with map-making and botany, hot-air balloons and even bladder surgery – so his mausoleum mixes Georgian colonnades with the loopholes and turrets of a medieval castle; Palladian arcades rise to Moghul cupolas; inside, brightly-coloured Nawabi plasterwork encloses Wedgwood plaques of classical European gods and goddesses.

For while Martin designed Constantia to be the most magnificent European funerary monument in India, the East India Company’s answer to the Taj Mahal, it was also intended to be defensible. The eighteenth century was an anarchic and violent time in India, and during an uprising in the 1770s Martin had to defend his residence with a pair of cannon filled with grapeshot. It was a lesson he never forgot, and he built Constantia to be his last redoubt in case of danger. Lines of cannon crowned the façade, and thick iron doors sealed off the narrow spiral staircases which connected the various ‘bomb-proof’ floors. On the façade Martin erected two colossal East India Company lions which were designed to hold flaming torches in their mouths. The sight of these illuminated beasts belching out fire and smoke on a dark night was intended to terrify would-be intruders.

In its wilful extravagance and sheer strangeness, Constantia embodies like no other building the opulence, restlessness and open-mindedness of this city on the faultline between East and West, the old world of the Nawabs and the new world of the Raj. To this day the whole extraordinary creation stands quite intact, still enclosed in acres of its own parkland. As you approach on your rickshaw you proceed along a superb avenue of poplar and tamarind, eucalyptus and casuarina, at the end of which you pass the perfect domed Moghul tomb which Martin built for his beloved Boulone. As he rather touchingly wrote in his will: ‘She choosed never to quit me. She persisted that she would live with me, and since we lived together we never had a word of bad humour one against another.’

Not far from Constantia, a short rickshaw ride over the railway crossing, I stumbled across a smaller but equally remarkable building from the same period. It turned out to be the ruins of one of the Nawabs’ most lovely pleasure palaces, named Dilkusha, or Heart’s Delight. Yet despite this very Persian name, Dilkusha was in fact closely modelled on one of the great English country houses, Seaton Delaval in Northumberland – but with four gloriously ornate octagonal minarets added to the otherwise austere Palladian design.

The whole period was an extraordinary moment of Indo-European fusion – a moment pregnant with unfulfilled possibilities, and one which is often forgotten in the light of Lucknow’s subsequent history. For this process of mutual enrichment did not last. As the nineteenth century progressed, the British became more and more demanding in their exactions on the Nawabs, and more and more assured of their own superiority. They learned to scoff at the buildings and traditions of Lucknow, and became increasingly convinced that they had nothing to learn from ‘native’ culture. Relations between the Nawabs and the British gradually became chilly: it was as if the high-spirited tolerance of courtly Lucknow was a direct challenge to the increasingly self-righteous spirit of evangelical Calcutta. In 1857, a year after the British forcibly deposed the last Nawab, Lucknow
struck back, besieging the British in their fortified residency.

In the event, after nearly two years of siege and desperate hand-to-hand fighting in the streets of Lucknow, the British defeated the Mutineers and wreaked their revenge on the conquered city. Vast areas of the capital of the Nawabs were bulldozed, and for half a century the administration of the region moved to Allahabad. Every site connected to the Mutiny was lovingly preserved by the British – the pockmarked ruins of the besieged residency, the tombs of the fallen British leaders, every point in the town where the relieving forces were ambushed or driven back – turning much of Lucknow in to a vast, open-air Imperial war memorial, thickly littered with a carapace of cemeteries and spiked cannons, obelisks and rolls of honour. But shorn of its court and administrative status, preserved only for the curiosity of British visitors, Lucknow gradually turned in to the melancholic backwater it is today.

‘Yet even in my childhood something of Lucknow’s old graces survived,’ said Mushtaq. ‘I’ll show you what I mean.’

We walked together through the
chowk
, the narrow, latticed bazaar-labyrinth which was once the centre of Lucknow’s cultural life. Above us, elaborately carved wooden balconies backed on to latticed windows. Figures flitted behind the wooden grilles. Every so often we would pass the arched and pedimented gateway of a grand
haveli
: the gateway still stood magnificently, but as often as not the old mansion to which it led had been turned in to a
godown
or warehouse. A bird’s nest of electricity wires was strung down the side of the
chowk
, often brutally punched through the walls and arcades of the old mansions.

Below the latticed living quarters was a wonderful collection of tiny, boxlike shops, all arranged in groups by trade: a row of stores
selling home-made fireworks would be followed by another row piled high with mountains of guavas or marigold garlands; a group of ear-cleaners – whose lives revolved around the patient removal of wax from their customers’ inner ears – would be followed by a confraternity of silver-beaters who made their living from hammering silver in to sheets so fine they could be applied to sticky Lucknavi sweets.

‘When I was a boy, before Partition, I came here with my brother,’ said Mushtaq. ‘In those days the
chowk
was still full of perfume from the scent shops. They had different scents for different seasons:
khas
for the hot season,
bhela
for the monsoon and
henna
for the cold. Everywhere there were stalls full of flowers: people brought them in from gardens and the countryside roundabout. The bazaar was famous for having the best food, the best kebabs and the best women in north India.’

‘The best women?’ Looking around now, all I could see was the occasional black beehive flitting past in full
chador
.

‘Ah,’ said Mushtaq. ‘You see, in those days the last courtesans were still here.’

‘Prostitutes?’

‘Not prostitutes in the Western sense, although they could fulfil that function.’

‘So what was it that distinguished them from prostitutes?’ I asked.

‘In many ways the courtesans were the guardians of the culture,’ replied Mushtaq. ‘Apart from anything else they preserved the traditions of Indian classical music for centuries. They were known as
tawwaif
, and they were the incarnation of good manners. The young men would be sent to them to learn how to behave and deport themselves: how to roll or accept a
paan
, how to say thank you, how to
salaam
, how to stand up, how to leave a room – as well as the facts of life.