Society

This Way To Wajid Ali

Lucknow’s historic boulevard is to get a facelift for its bicentenary celebrations

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This Way To Wajid Ali
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What does a citizens’ body, eager to restore the fabled charm and elegance of a historic boulevard, need to do to ensure the smooth passage of its plan? Well, if they belong to a city called Lucknow, there is really no choice but to seek the blessings of its stern empress, Mayawati—albeit with trepidation, since she has not been known for her passion for monuments other than memorials, statues and parks celebrating herself and her party’s pantheon of ideologues.

But when the members of Connect Lucknow, among them corporate professionals, traders, academics, doctors, poets, social workers and mediapersons, approached the UP chief minister last month through her trusted lieutenant Satish Chandra Misra, they were in for a surprise. Not only did Mayawati back their project to restore the decayed glory of Lucknow’s famous Hazratganj to celebrate its bicentenary this December, she even consented to the removal of her own larger-than-life hoardings, emblazoned with her government’s achievements—one of the many stumbling blocks to the implementation of the project.

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The hoarding listing the Mayawati government’s achievements that was removed from the area (Photographs by Nirala Tripathi)

So, it was a red letter day of sorts for Lucknow when, one month ago, officials of the municipal corporation took down the Mayawati hoarding adorning a UP government-run information centre in the middle of this once-grand hub of Lucknow. That one act earned Mayawati bouquets from quarters where she normally gets only brickbats. “It was incredible. We thought that any beautification and restoration that infringed on Mayawati’s obsession for herself would be doomed, but it was not the case,” marvelled a prominent Hazratganj trader. Since then, thanks to that first step and a subsequent court order, dozens of other hoardings have been shed, including, in recent days, another giant Mayawati one.

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With this auspicious beginning, the 100-plus core team of Connect Lucknow are optimistic about the fate of their plan to restore Hazratganj by December 18, if not to its past grandeur, at least to some of the grace and charm that it exuded a few decades ago. Over time, the historic street—built according to most historians by Saadat Ali Khan, the sixth nawab of Awadh (work commenced in 1810)— has lost a lot of that, thanks to a rash of ugly hoardings, parking congestion, indiscriminate building activity, the street’s deplorable use as a thoroughfare between two parts of the city, its broken pavements and a poor drainage system.

Looking at it today, it’s hard to imagine that it impressed a visitor in 1825 so much “with its handsome European-style houses on each side of a broad road” that it led him to exclaim, “Lucknow has more resemblance to some of the smaller European capitals (Dresden for instance) than anything I have seen in India” (Lucknow’s chronicler Rosie Llewellyn Jones narrates in her book, A Fatal Friendship). Originally an elite residential area, it has seen many twists and turns. It was nearly destroyed during the 1857 mutiny (though one prominent building from that era, Noor Baksh Kothi, still stands), but was reconstructed by the British as a fashionable shopping hub. As another Lucknow historian, Veena Talwar Oldenburg, writes, it faded in prominence when Avadh’s capital was moved to Allahabad, but “a tremendous revival occurred when Lucknow was declared the capital once again in 1920”. Hazratganj, she writes, acquired “some superb buildings” post-1920, like the Art Deco Mayfair cinema building, “and the loyal taluqdars of Lucknow built imposing shops, cafes, bookstores which became the haunt of the new English-educated literati of the city”.

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Ninety-year-old bookseller Ram Advani, whose bookshop has been located in the Mayfair building since 1948, has long been irked by the “utter neglect of this heart of the town” by Lucknow’s successive masters; and is keeping his fingers crossed that he will “see a better Hazratganj than what it is today”. That may yet come to pass. For, divisional commissioner Prashant Mishra avers that there is no room for doubt—“restoration will be carried out, come what may”.

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A view of the area in the mid-’70s

Architect Ashish Srivastava, who has prepared the final blueprint for Hazratganj’s reincarnation, at a relatively modest cost of Rs 22 crore, says the plan includes restoring its colonial facades (hearteningly, 70 per cent of the original architecture is still intact), and giving the area a uniform colour scheme—cream and pink, which was the original scheme—along with signage that ensures “that the beautiful arches and well-adorned columns of Hazratganj are not hidden or subdued”. Alongside, pavements will be redone, dangling wires and cables dealt with, tasteful streetlights, landscaping and wrought-iron benches introduced, and vehicle parking shifted to a multi-level car park. While Hazratganj’s traders are picking up the tab for the restoration of the buildings, the government is financing and executing the other works.

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Says Mumbai-based urban planner and economist Nasser Munjee, who is also associated with the project, “It was sad to see Hazratganj, the focal point of the city, desecrated by its anarchic use, to the extent that the wonderful space was reduced to nothing more than a common street market.” He sent a team of architects from Mumbai to study the boulevard’s buildings and prepare a broad outline for restoration.

As the bicentenary of Hazratganj approaches, the citizens’ group is also planning, in coordination with the state tourism department, a week-long evening carnival on the historic street in December, during which it will remain free of the vehicles that usually clog it; also, a mushaira and other cultural and academic events. And yes, Mayawati has informally communicated that she will be there.

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