THE new sunday express Voices Anand Neelakantan Debashis Chatterjee Ravi Shankar Utkarsh Amitabh Dr Deepali Bhardwaj Swami Sukhabodhananda MAGAZINE Buffet People Wellness Books Food Art & Culture Entertainment march 22 2026 SUNDAY PAGES 12 Two Tales PRESENCE OF THE PAST: Rumi Darwaza; (below) Bara Imambara New and old flow side by side in Lucknow, where modern rendering of tradition keeps the city’s heritage alive of One City M By Farheen Saifi utton rezala isn’t just another curry It is Lucknow on a . plate, with all the old splendour baked right in. Manzilat Fatima, Nawab Wajid Ali Shah’s great-great-granddaughter and the city’s most passionate rezala cook, keeps this legacy alive. You’ll spot her at the Sanatkada Lucknow Festival, which now sprawls across all seasons, serving up a rezala that’s the opposite of ordinary Lucknow doesn’t treat its past like . a relic the way most cities do. Here, history isn’t behind glass but is in the present, woven into everything. In two centuries, Lucknow has changed from a Nawab’s city to the state capital, with roads smoother than airport runways and futuristic towers, but scratch the surface and you’ll hit Awadh. Walk into Chowk bazaar and it’s a full sensory hit: perfumers scattering jasmine and oud into the air, chikankari artisans lost in their embroidery poets huddled in corners spinning verses while , the clang of tanga carriages drifts past centuries-old portals. The air is thick with the smell of kebabs, and the clatter of pushcarts follows no traffic rules—just a rhythm as old as the city Stop for a minute and you’ll . meet people who’ve seen it all—like an old teacher who tells you, “Everyone passes through this city And he’s right. If Delhi is the mind of .” India, Lucknow is its soul. The real heartbreak here, as an Urdu professor once sighed between bites of paan, is that Lucknow remembers everything but can keep so little. To know Lucknow, you need to catch it at dusk, when the day blurs into history Most places hide “the good old . days”, but Lucknow brags about them—they’re all over its food, its music, its manners, and the kind of Urdu that glides off every tongue. Here, the past and present are fused—you can’t slice them apart. To understand the Lucknow of today you , must first understand the Lucknow of twilight—because unlike most cities, which bury their golden ages in footnotes, Lucknow carries its history on its sleeve, in its food, in its greetings, in the cadence of its Urdu. The Nawabs of Awadh inherited the wreckage of the Mughal Empire and built something extraordinary in its place. Through the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as Delhi crumbled and the British consolidated power, Lucknow became the subcontinent’s most brilliant cultural hothouse—a court where poetry music, cuisine, dance, and manners , were elevated to the level of serious civic enterprise. Poet and literary historian Anis Ashfaq describes Lucknow as a living civilisation where history culture, and tehzeeb , continue to thrive. “Lucknow is not merely a city but a living civilisation shaped by memory language, and grace, where history , is not confined to books but is experienced through everyday life and shared cultural practices. The processions here, especially those of Muharram, are not just rituals but deeply layered narratives of history and sacrifice, where the story of Karbala finds a unique and powerful expression within the cultural fabric of the city Through marsiya, . majlis, and poetry Lucknow has preserved its , past in a way that is both artistic and emotionally resonant, allowing generations to connect with history in a living form.” Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, the last and most luminous of the line, composed thumri melodies in the morning and choreographed kathak performances in the afternoon. He is credited with the refinement of dum biryani—a slow-sealed, layered masterpiece that is, in its patience and its complexity a precise , metaphor for the civilisation that produced it. When the British East India Company BETWEEN THE TWO RULERS: Nawab Wajid Ali Shah and Yogi Adityanath annexed Awadh in 1856, citing misrule, they found a king who ruled primarily over art. He was exiled to Calcutta, where he composed verses. Today performances at Sanatkada , Lucknow Festival is lyrically syncretic with the music of Urdu and Bengali. Manjari Chaturvedi, Kathak dancer, director and choreographer, says, “I have travelled to around 35 countries, and wherever I go, a part of Lucknow goes with me. My entire artistic expression is deeply influenced by Lucknow. Lucknow is known for its refinement, and that refinement lies in detail. Everything in Lucknow—its language, food, craft, and art—reflects a deep sense of intricacy Even in . my dance, I focus on detailing, whether it is the movement, expression, costume, or presentation. These are the values I have absorbed from Lucknow.” You can taste the city’s heartbreak and hope in every steaming plate, every greeting and coffee order. They all belong here. That mix, where ancient etiquette sits right next to the speed and neon of modern life? That’s tehzeeb. The background melody never really fades. Lucknow is shaped by a kind of longing—almost nostalgia for a world slipping away When the Mughal Empire fell apart, the . Nawabs of Awadh turned Lucknow into a city that cared less about power and more about being dazzling—music, poetry food, manners; , they poured themselves into these. The galawati kebab, invented for a toothless Nawab who still demanded his pleasures, is minced with over a hundred spices and dissolves on the tongue before you’ve quite decided how to describe it. The nihari, slow-cooked through the night and served at dawn, has fed labourers and lovers and poets for two centuries and now travels to the menus of restaurants in Delhi, Mumbai, and Brooklyn—a diaspora of taste that the city exports almost unconsciously . Turn to page 2