IN SEARCH OF ‘ILLAHABAD’
have been a synthesis of its colonial, Hindu and Islamic traditions. What are the aftereffects of its name change to Prayagraj?
The spirit and image of Allahabad have been a synthesis of its colonial, Hindu and Islamic traditions. What are the after-effects of its name change to Prayagraj?
At the Allahabad Government Public Library, Gopal Mohan Shukla is scanning every line of the official documents passing through his office. As the librarian, he has to make sure they bear the city’s new name, Prayagraj, in the dateline. The traffic signal can’t show red when the order is for green. He says he has nothing to say about Allahabad turning into Prayagraj. In a library, he says, the books should do the talking.
Avinash Kumar, a student, is browsing through some chapters of a colonial-era gazette in preparation for an exam. It shows that the Mughal emperor Akbar had made Allahabad into a province around 1575 and named it Ilahabas. (Ilhabas is the place where Divinity lives; Ilah is a general word for God, any god.) In Ilahabas, Akbar maintained the social, political and religious status quo. Of the 11 forts he built in and around the province to control the economic largesse from the heartland, seven were controlled by the Brahmins; Rajputs, Kayasths and Muslim landholders controlled the rest of them.
“So whom did the Mughals disempower?” wonders Kumar in the context of statements by politicians of renaming Allahabad to reclaim a ‘Hindu city’ lost to the Mughals. “The British, in fact, razed villages and built a British town.” As for Prayag, the name was and is in currency for the confluence of three rivers, Ganga, Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati. “Prayagraj,” says Saurabh Basu, an advocate practising at the Allahabad High Court, “is actually the name of the train that goes to Delhi.” Skand Shukla, a state government officer, says Prayagraj evokes “only one aspect of the city’s spirit that is religious”.
Like many Allahabad residents stunned by the name change, Basu looks as if he has been hit by the classic lawyer’s dilemma; having to defend a case when he has been told half the story. “Didn’t get what the name change will achieve,” he says. Growing up, he always knew Prayag as the city limit and never the entire city. “People came from all over the Presidency towns in the late 19th century. Ours is a migrants’ city but not for anyone with a big bank balance.” And that’s the way, he suggests, Allahabadis have so far wanted it: a small town with the cosmopolitanism of a big city but never fully convinced that it had to be one.
The real deal, as its people have always known, was in being the underground. The Kumbh melas get Allahabad into the headlines once every six [Ardh-Kumbh] and 12 years; after the melas are over, the residents move on. Allahabad is the quintessential city of Nehruvian liberal modernity but it also yielded space to Lohiaiite socialism and its offshoots, the Janata Dal and Samajwadi Party (SP). It has also been a centre of RSS politics; Rajendra Singh or Rajju Bhaiyya, the first north Indian sarsanghchalak (1994-2000) of the RSS, taught physics at Allahabad University.
IN MANY DIRECTIONS
“Political success and political dissent, this is a city that has not let congeal any orthodoxy,” says Pranay Krishna, professor, Allahabad University. This is perhaps why the city has until now not shifted entirely to the Hindutva highway. Or for that matter, any one highway. Allahabad has two Lok Sabha constituencies, currently split between the BJP and the SP. Of the 12 assembly seats, the BJP has the majority, eight. “Even those who voted for the BJP in the last assembly elections, would they have voted for it had they known about the name change?” asks Anugraha Singh, a Congressman and a former MLA. Locals use both names – Prayag and Allahabad – interchangeably. For the first time, it seems one has been privileged over the other. “Allahabadis take their liberalism very seriously,” adds Singh.
In Allahabad, liberalism is almost a religion. Even the person on the Right will say he or she is one. “What you call Nehruvian liberalism, we call social harmony,” says Narendra Gaur of the BJP.
The city’s literary world has also been a ground for battles. These debates have had a bearing not only on the realm of literature but also national politics. A new Hindi-Hindu reality was sought to be constructed in a way that eventually generated the tide of Hindu nationalism, says noted Urdu critic and novelist Shamsur Rahman Faruqi. This involved artificially dividing a language into Hindi and Urdu on the basis of two scripts – Nagari and Perso-Arabic – and two vocabularies , suggesting that one was exclusive to the Hindus and the other to the Muslims.
“In 1895, in Varanasi, was started the Nagari Pracharini Sabha. It had a strong role in promoting Hindi/Hindu nationalism. It was also among the sponsors of the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan formed 15 years later in Allahabad. The latter became the site for the forging of the slogan Hindi-Hindu-Hindustani,” he adds.
This strand and sentiment still find a cachet in today’s times, says Allahabad’s most well-known public intellectual Alok Rai. Rai is the grandson of Premchand, who fathered realism and progressivism in Hindi literature.
“The Prayag of rivers, Sangam, funeral rites, I understand. But Prayagraj is a Brahminising move. The whole sound and spectacle of a ‘teertharaj’ somewhere pleases the Brahminical Hindu who has been in a state of assertion for a long time. This is a panditji who thinks well of himself but he finds people wealthier than him, so in Allahabad becoming Prayagraj, there is a kind of symbolic gratification. He has also felt excluded in the Anglophonic environment of Allahabad and so the only vengeance he can have now is symbolic because real change in the social balance of power will require more than a change of signage.”
Rai, however, also feels that this breeding ground of resentment eventually fed into the politics of the RSS-BJP. “But it has been prepared precisely by the self-centred and myopic Nehruvian elite – the Kashmiri Pandits, Kayasths, the Muslim aristocracy and the upper-caste Bengalis – which didn’t understand that there would be costs of its dominance,” he says. The Prayagraj project seems to be the assertion of a second-rung elite, mainly Brahmins, Khatris, Baniyas and Rajputs, against this first-rung liberal elite, he says.
Due to this tussle at the top, the popular history of Allahabad has been pushed to the margins. The Pasi people (a Scheduled Caste) of the city have, for example, been rendered invisible by the dominant discourses generated by this competition among its various elite groups. Ram Bahadur, a retired IAS officer from Allahabad, a Pasi , points out how even the numerical strength of his community [10% of the city’s population] has been denied in most official histories so as to underplay and undermine their potential for power. “The British paid the Pasis for their unrelenting resistance during the 1857 rebellion by the Criminal Tribe Act, 1871, and classified them as habitual criminals. It took 12 years after Independence for this Act to be repealed,” says Bahadur.
Allahabad remained a colonial city even after the British left, right until the heyday of Nehruvian liberalism, adds retired academic Manas Mukul Das, who also traces the alienation and displacement of the traditional elite by the particular nature of Allahabad’s modernity, something that was determined by how English you could be. It also helped to be plugged into the usual networks.
THE LAST BUNGALOW
Chintamoni Ghosh’s The Indian Press was the publisher of all mainstream litterateurs in the late 19th century. “Besides 87 titles of Tagore, we printed the first Hindi literary magazine, Saraswati; Premchand’s first Hindi novel and Nirala’s translation of Tagore,” says Kalyan Ghosh, Chinatamoni’s grandson, who lives in a palatial bungalow in Georgetown, a posh colony. A dumpster now sits outside his house. The road outside is full of potholes. Sangam is a half hour drive from his home. “I’ve seen at least 60 Kumbhs, it wasn’t a problem before but this time, all roads have been dug up to widen roads for this Kumbh. As for the new name, what’s in a name? A lot of Bengalis still call Calcutta, Calcutta, don’t they? But things change, my entire neighbourhood has. I don’t know half my neighbours, where they are from….”
Dhiraj Kumar, his security guard, is , however,Team Prayagraj. Originally from a village outside the city, he stays in a rented home nearby. His is a mixed neighbourhood, of “old-time Allahabadis and people like us from the village. We do not visit each other’s homes but there is no quarrel either.” He says he dreams of moving into one of the big bungalows that a decrepit Allahabad is still known for one day. And that day, he feels he may understand why it’s such a big deal for some people that Allahabad should stay Allahabad.
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I have seen at least 60 Kumbhs, it was never a problem before but for this Kumbh all roads have been dug up. As for the new name, I prefer the name Allahabad but don’t mind Prayagraj as such. What’s in a name?
KALYAN GHOSH, grandson of Chinatamoni Ghosh, founder,
The Indian Press
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The Prayag of rivers, Sangam, funeral rites, I understand. But Prayagraj is a Brahminising move. The whole sound and spectacle of a ‘teertharaj’ somewhere pleases the Brahminical Hindu...
ALOK RAI, writer and academic. He is one of Allahabad’s well-known public intellectuals and Munshi Premchand’s grandson