KEEPERS OF THE LOST CITY

Nazia Akhtar’s book acquaints us with women Urdu writers who brought alive 20th-century Hyderabad

- Saeed Naqvi

BIBI’S ROOM

Hyderabadi Women and Twentieth-Century Urdu Prose by Nazia Akhtar

ORIENT BLACKSWAN ₹995; 432 pages

Sometimes, things are so close to one’s skin that one fails to see them. I soaked in the ambience of Lucknow but I took it for granted that it was also the city of, say, Rasheed Jahan, her second-floor clinic in Lal Bagh, the centre of leftist banter, not far from Nishat Talkies. But I only had to be pointedly asked, and Josh Malihabadi, Majaz Lucknowi, the Coffee House, Danish Mahal, Aminabad would float out of me like a procession of vivid images.

Since Lucknow was a centre of Urdu, other Urdu cities— Delhi, Lahore, Hyderabad—were not in our ken. The depth and durability of Lucknow, as a centre of culture, is clear from recent history: the metropolis began to get destroyed in 1856-57, but it retained some of its élan until, say, the 1880s. Delhi’s predicament was similar.