From the Meḥ fil to the printed word: Public debate and discourse in late colonial India

Urban Mythologies and Urbane Islam: Refining the Past and Present in Colonial-Era Lucknow

“…(Premchand 2007(Premchand [1924: 53) 5 While Sharar, Ruswa and Premchand's works remain perhaps the most iconic, they were hardly the only such portraits of old Lucknow to be published within this same quartercentury. Many other tracts emerged thanks to the city's status as home to major publishing houses like Nawal Kishore Press (Stark 2007), as well as an emerging public sphere that voraciously consumed ephemeral and serialised publications (Perkins 2013). Among these, Najmul-Ghani Rampuri's encyclopaedic chronicle Tārīkh-i-Awadh was an empirically rich account of the intrigues and dynastical conspiracies within the Awadhi court, reflecting new tastes for authoritative historiography in Urdu literature (Rampuri 1919).…”

“…Their appropriation of an Anglicised vocabulary of aspirations such as 'improvement', 'progress' and 'public good' comprised, as memorably put by Douglas Haynes, a 'conceptual straitjacket' by which these organisations further embedded colonial hegemony in India's associational life (Haynes 1991: 145-6, Chatterjee 1986. While this framework has been heavily applied in studies of colonial India's urban public sphere, it has been both implicitly and explicitly critiqued by a number of excellent recent studies of colonial Lucknow (Joshi 2001, Stark 2011, Perkins 2013). Many of these have shown that the array of public associations that emerged in Lucknow did not, like some larger 'All India' organisations, simply appear to emulate colonial deliberative models, but instead often seemed to ground themselves in motifs and symbols drawn from the city's mythologised history.…”