As a part of the Islamic service gentry and given their proximity to Nawabganj, then a lively cultural centre, the Kidwais operated beyond the local boundaries, transmitting ilm-e deen (knowledge of Islam) through madaris, mosques, and kanqahs, and providing a local Muslim as well as secular leadership. Doubtless, nascent revivalist assertions and the temple-mosque dispute in 1855 at Hanumangarhi in Ayodhya had heightened Hindu-Muslim consciousness and led to the intervention of the king’s troops under Captain Barlowe near Rudauli. Nevertheless, pluralism, no matter how amorphous, played a significant part in Awadh, both generally and at the qasba level in particular. It is true that religious attributions were by no means uncommon, but more often than not they were banners under which different economic and social groups organized themselves. The point to stress is that their motives had little to do with religion. The occasions when qasba society actually got polarized along the lines of religion were relatively rare.
The gentry’s patronage and the common man’s veneration of Muslim shrines and holy men enhanced, undoubtedly, the qasba’s solidarity as a unique entity. In some ways, the qasbas shaped Lucknow much more than the other way round. Admittedly, divisions existed; for example, intermarriage across religious communities remained difficult and rare, and marks of distinction manifested in the details of dress and food as expressions of personal, familial, caste, and religious taste and identity. Negative social stereotypes and attitudes regarding the other religious group also continued; but specific strategies evolved by individuals enabled them to avoid conflict whilst interacting in mixed social contexts.
Friendship, cooperation and coexistence characterized daily interaction between the followers of Islam and Hinduism. Peasant and craftsmen created bonding through festivals, melas, and shared religious traditions, wheres gentry families, conscious of having fashioned a civilized world as apposed to the chicanery, huckstering, and manipulative materialism of city life, interacted with one another in the high tradition of a specifically Indo-Persian culture. Sharp social divisions and cultural fragmentation marked the city; consequently, the qasba people invoked their unity of experience. What enabled them to do this was the predominance of a typically Awadhi culture expressed through an Awadhi dialect, spoken in Sandila and in Unao, Lucknow, and Sitapur districts. As the temple bells rang and the muezzin’s cadences floated in the air, one of Rudauli’s prominent service families celebrated Basant and Diwali with much fanfare. Among such families there existed a much longer tradition, provided both by structural and liminal artifacts, of aiding the process of acculturation and extending its reach among the masses.
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Excerpted from “Pluralism to Seperatism Qasbas in Colonial Awadh”
Mushirul Hasan - Oxford University Press
