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.
This story is from the November 14, 2022 edition of India Today.
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This story is from the November 14, 2022 edition of India Today.
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