Citizens, Spatial Practices and Resurrection of the Idea of Place in Contemporary Lucknow

Abstract

Cities worldwide respond differently to the homogenizing tendencies of globalization. Urban spatial and cultural transformation is deeply unsettling for old cities with rich historical and cultural legacies. Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh , and historical, cultural and political epicentre of North India after New Delhi, is one such city . Second-tier cities of India like Lucknow are aspiring to become global through borrowed images from bigger cities in an attempt to replicate them or through direct imagery supplied from the internet and media. The presence of an overwhelming global culture has subjected old cities like Lucknow to an unsettling experience in its cultural realm and a subsequent search for uniqueness, identity or place-specific culture . This search has motivated cities like Lucknow to celebrate ‘difference’ because it is this difference that sets them apart from other cities. The growing interest in heritage, tourism and branding around place-specific cultures and citizen-driven spatial practices is the varied responses witnessed in cities across India . With examples of citizen-driven spatial practices as witnessed in the profusion of celebrations and secular festivals in Lucknow, this chapter argues that distinct cultural forms like cuisine, heritage sites, dance, musical forms and literature are being reinvented and packaged to create brand Lucknow and create its place amid the rapidly transforming and homogenizing cityscape and subsequent dilution of its local culture . Lucknow retains its place with its urban spatial practices like hosting street plays, food, art, textile and jewellery exhibitions, heritage walks and literary and food festivals.

Aspects of this chapter draw on my earlier work in Binti Singh, Lucknow: Culture , Place, Branding and Activism (Copal Publishing Group, Ghaziabad, 2018). I thank Copal Publishing Group for permission to republish this material here.