NB: Allahabad was my father’s birthplace and hometown; and that of his two sisters. It was the place where they went to school and college. My father’s closest friendships dated back to his childhood and youth in Allahabad. My grandparent’s home was located on 9, Kamala Nehru Road (once City Road); and I have fond memories of our family visits there as a child. Many family weddings took place there. Nostalgia is never for a place, but a location blended with time. My love and salaam to Allahabad. DS
Driven by a yearning to shed the legacy of past humiliation, defeat, and cultural dispossession, we attempt to obliterate traces of that history. Yet, that very past lingers embodied within us. The changes wrought by time extend far beyond the superficial erasure that a coat of paint can achieve
Akbar Fort, Allahabad | Wikimedia
Allahabad enjoys a disproportionate iconicity, a symbolic resonance well beyond any obvious justification. It is, after all, a nothing sort of place: halfway between Delhi and Calcutta, neither here nor there. It is barely visible in the great human crush of the Gangetic plain. As Allahabad’s reluctant poet laureate put it long ago,
On maps it always takes
The same position: away from the coastline,
Two inches below
The mountain range …
Allahabad is not Banaras, redolent with the odour of sanctity, nor even Lucknow, embalmed forever in the memory of its brief, nawabi efflorescence. Agra has its grand Mughal monuments, the Taj Mahal and Sikandra, the ghostly, haunted and haunting magnificence of Fathepur Sikri. Allahabad has Akbar’s imposing fort all right, but one that has been traduced by the army, bastardised and subjected to mundane purposes.
And its Mughal mausoleum—Khusru Bagh, associated with minor Mughal nobility, is modest, and known, at least locally, only because of its appurtenant orchards of guava and mango. Allahabad’s claim to attention is an odd hybrid of partly mythical antiquity, as well as an aspiration to modernity, even if the only modernity on offer is an addled colonial modernity.
After all, Allahabad was the capital from where the British Raj, in the post-Mutiny age, ruled the vast expanse of north India. Indeed, Allahabad was the place from where the colonial power started the fight back against the rebellious natives in 1857, and inaugurated the great colonial project of ‘civilisation’ by festooning the trees with the bodies of hanged Indians…
https://www.theindiaforum.in/essay/allahabad-prayagraj-politics-erasure
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Lt Col Eric Simeon’s hundredth birthday: October 29, 2018
After the truth-shower 