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London, Lucknow and the Global Indian City c. 1857–1920*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 September 2017
Abstract
When Abdul Halim Sharar (1860-1926) set sail for England to ensure the Eton College-bound son of Viqar-ul Omrah (Prime Minister of the Nizam of Hyderabad, 1894–1901) received an Indo-Islamic education, it was Sharar's first foray outside of India. Like many previous Indian travelers he found his experiences to be eye opening. Inspired by his sojourns in England, Italy, France, and Spain, he serially published his travelogues upon his return to India in 1896. Providing examples of the failures and successes of industrialization, such accounts were evocative in their detail. They provided middle class Indians with global and historical perspectives of the changes brought by colonialism, industrialization, and urbanization in European and Indian cities. Drawing from Sharar's and other travelers’ accounts of the period, this essay examines the use of literature to humanize Lucknow's urban landscape, not only to transform the city, but also the relationship between the city and its inhabitants into one of sympathy and affection.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 27 , Special Issue 4: Feeling Modern: The History of Emotions in Urban South Asia , October 2017 , pp. 611 - 626
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2017
Footnotes
*
I want to thank Megan Robb, Liz Chatterjee, and Sneha Krishnan for organizing the workshop ‘Urban Emotions: Responses to the City, c. 1850–1960’ at the University of Oxford in February 2016 where an early draft of this article was presented. I am grateful for their comments as well as the anonymous reviewers’ comments on earlier iterations of this article. Thanks to St John's College, the New College Ludwig Humanities Research Fund, and the Oriental Institute at Oxford for funding this workshop. I also want to thank The Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and the Center for South Asia at Stanford University for the opportunity to present this work as part of their Lecture Series, ‘Urdu Literature and the Public Sphere in Colonial and Post-Colonial South Asia’ in the winter quarter of 2016. All remaining shortcomings are entirely my own.
References
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3 The first instances of the English word ‘public’ in Indian languages were in the 1880s. As Sanjay Joshi has underscored, resorting to the English word underscores its novelty as a concept, expressing an idea otherwise not expressed in Indian languages. Joshi, Sanjay, Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India (New Delhi, 2001)Google Scholar, p. 43.
4 I use the idea of an ‘emotional community’ in a slightly different manner than that used by the proponent of the term, Barbara Rosenwein. In her formulation an emotional community is a group of people who have “the same norms of emotional expression and value—or devalue—the same or related emotions”. See Rosenwein, B., Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 2006)Google Scholar, p. 2. I instead use the term to refer to a group of people who are bound together by shared emotions in response to particular historical circumstances facing them as a community.
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8 Within his series of articles on Lucknow, Sharar goes to great lengths to point out the participation of Hindus in this cultural world and even mentions Wajid Ali Shah dressing up as Krishna as a demonstration of the unique cultural world, but he also goes to great lengths to deny non-Muslims an equal place in the creation of that world. In particular see his long-running debate with Awadh Punch and others in Shafī Shīrāzī, Muḥammad and Ḥasan Nūrānī, Amīr (eds.), Ma'rikah-e Chakbast o Sharar, y‘anī, Mubāḥiṡah-e Gulzār-e Nasīm (Lucknow, 1966)Google Scholar. Sharar began writing his series of essays on Lucknow's unique cultural world in 1914 as Hindustān meñ Mashriqī Tamaddun kā Āḳhrī Namuna (The Last Example of an Eastern Culture in Hindustan). Sharar published this series of essays in his monthly journal Dil Gudāz until late 1919 and they were subsequently put into book form as Guzashta Lucknow (Lucknow Past). In 1975 its English translation was published. See, Halim Sharar, Abdul, Lucknow: The Last Phase of an Oriental Culture, translated by Harcourt, E. S. and Hussain, Fakhir (London, 1975)Google Scholar. For a closer look at this debate, see C. Ryan Perkins, “From the Mehfil to the Printed Word: Public Debate and Discourse in Late Colonial India” in the Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 50, No. 1 (2013), pp. 47–76.
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27 It should be noted that both Sharar and Syed Ahmad partook in comrade shaming.
28 Abdul Ḥālīm Sharar, “Maulānā Sharar Marḥum kī Ḳhūd Navisht Sawānih ‘Umrī 'Āp Baitī: T‘alīm aur Shāzādoñ ki Soḥbat”, Dil Gudāz May (1933), p. 97. The biographical accounts of Sharar's life are taken from his autobiography published posthumously and in installments in Dil Gudāz in 1933 and 1944.
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33 Ibid ., p. 6.
34 Ibid . Hali, Azad, and Syed Ahmad argued for a reform of Urdu poetry that would be inspired by Milton and Shakespeare so that “natural poetry” (necharal po‘iṭrī) would prevail and writers would turn their attention to “real events” and “visible objects. See de Tassy, Garcin, La Langue et la literature hindoustanies en 1875: Revue annuelle (Paris, 1876)Google Scholar, pp. 20-22, as cited in Frances Pritchett, W., Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and its Critics (Berkeley, 1994)Google Scholar, p. 38; and pp. 31-45 for a fuller history of this transition.
35 Sharar, “London aur Lucknow ke Mashriqī o Maġhribī Ḥiṣṣe”, p. 2.
36 Mysteries of London was published in 624 weekly installments over 12 years, amounting to 4.5 million words in total. In the late 1840s its popularity was so great that it sold 250,000 copies a week. See https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/penny-dreadful-the-mysteries-of-london (accessed on 31 October 2016).
37 For examples of Indians travelling to England, see Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism.
38 Sharar, “London aur Lucknow ke Mashriqī o Maġhribī Ḥiṣṣe”, Dil Gudāz, February (1910), p. 2.
39 Ibid .
40 Ibid ., p. 4.
41 Ibid .
42 Ibid ., pp. 4-5. For discussions on themes of ruins and empire in eighteenth century English literature, see Goldstein, Laurence, Ruins and Empire: The Evolution of a Theme in Augustan and Romantic Literature (Pittsburgh, 1977)Google Scholar; Kaul, Suvir, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville, 2000)Google Scholar
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49 Sharar, “London aur Lucknow ke Mashriqī o Maġhribī Ḥiṣṣe”, p, 5.
50 Ibid ., p. 6.
51 Ibid .
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54 Awadh Aḳhbār (Lucknow), 5 December 1865, as quoted in the Vernacular Newspaper Reports of the Northwest Provinces and Oudh.
55 For a detailed look at British attempts to clean up the city see Oldenburg, The Making of Colonial Lucknow, 1856-1877, pp. 96-144.
56 Sharar, “London aur Lucknow ke Mashriqī o Maġhribī Ḥiṣṣe”, p. 6.
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60 Ibid. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.
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62 The trope comparing cities to Paris has been very common. For a list, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_of_the_East (accessed online 24 July 2016). For a comparison of Delhi to Rome, see Muhammad Latif, Syad, Lahore: Its History, Architectural Remains, and Antiquities (Lahore, 1892)Google Scholar, p. i. Thanks to Megan Robb for bringing this last reference to my attention.
63 Sharar, “Swiṭzerlainḍ”, Dil Gudāz, July (1897), pp. 14-15.
64 It is important to note the different registers in which London and Lucknow, as global cities, operate. The prevalence of the Paris comparison, suggests that it had become iconic or mythical, a disembodied and abstract yardstick. This contrasts greatly with the lengthy realist descriptions of London.
65 ‘Abdul Halim Sharar, “Rīvīu [Review]”, Dil Gudāz, February (1914), p. 47.
66 While some uses of the word ‘Hindustan’ referred to all of India, it generally referred to the Indo-Gangetic plain in north India, and thus the spoken language was often referred to as Hindustani. In the late colonial context, what was the conceptual relationship between an Indian city like Lucknow and the geographic region referred to as Hindustan, particularly as its cultural world - as outlined by Sharar - continued to live not in Lucknow but on the outskirts of Calcutta where the exiled former Nawab of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah attempted to build a mini-Lucknow?
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