MUSTAFABAD is a small qasbah on the eastern fringes of Rae Bareli that once served as Indira Gandhi’s parliamentary constituency in the rural heartland of northern India. Neither Rahul Gandhi nor Sonia Gandhi who succeeded her has needed to visit it, the qasbah being too low-yield electorally for them to bother.

A large thermal plant set up by Indira Gandhi a stone’s throw away from the qasbah is said to generate electricity for big cities including faraway Delhi.

Residents of Mustafabad (now also known as Unchahar) and the surrounding small subsistence farm holdings continue to make do for the most part with a trickle of this electricity if at all it deigns to pass their way.

Once an integral component of the splendorous taluqdari system, Mustafabad has struggled to survive a barrage of adversities that began with the anti-British revolt of 1857. The taluqdars of Avadh led that revolt under the supervision of Begum Hazrat Mahal, their chosen queen. Defeat and humiliation was followed in independent India by the abolition of zamindari in Uttar Pradesh, which further stripped the surviving members of Avadh’s nobility of their once ornate but later rarely lavish lifestyle.

Last week we met Mohammed Qasim, scion of Mustafabad’s last taluqdar family as he walked barefoot with the Muharram procession through the meandering dusty lanes of the village. When most people would retrieve their footwear from the lofts after the customary 10 days of mourning in Muharram, Qasim would be struggling to find a decent pair for himself unless a loyal friend of the former first family helps out. The Muharram procession is an annual cultural and religious feature of the village sustained through generations of Qasim’s Shia forebears.

To eke out a living Qasim did a stint as a railway gang man, a job he got through a resourceful friend of his father the late Laddan Mian. His job was to help out with the laying of new train tracks. Soon Qasim found it humiliating to work as a menial and opted to live as an unemployed middle-aged lay-about. His former mansion was torn asunder years ago, the spaces occupied by the former staff and heirs of the retinue. He is now virtually homeless. Qasim’s stoic smile masks the transition from the days the taluqdars revolted and were then defeated and humiliated literally beyond recognition.

Two or perhaps three concrete relics from the Mughal period have survived Mustafabad’s chequered history. The Diwankhana, with its beautiful floral patterns in stone, is said to have been built by Princess Mahaparwar who though a niece of the Sunni ruler Aurangzeb had married a Shia nobleman from Avadh. They settled down in Mustafabad in the early 18th century, safely away from the ire of the Mughal court. The Diwankhana was their main audience hall. Qasim’s father and Mustafabad’s last taluqdar, Laddan Mian, who inherited the monument, handed it over, in his last great move towards penury, to the local charity that organises the annual Muharram processions.

The stone mansion in the residential part of the structure is decaying due to disuse triggered partly by disputes among its many claimants. Abid Mian, a former communist trade union leader from the village, has retired in Mustafabad and looks after a smaller mansion adjoining the Diwankhana and its surrounding small farmland. His ageing cousin Atia Fatima voiced fears last week that the communist overseer was more inclined to hand over the remaining piece of land to share-croppers who tilled the land than to serve the family’s needs when they gather there from far and near for Muharram.

It is not too difficult to calculate the loss of a culture that many a city slicker would give their right arm to inherit for its fine etiquettes which in today’s value system has become something of a novelty. The Sunni drum players who lead the Muharram processions, the throng of Hindu worshippers at the imambaarrhas (now known in Pakistan as imambargahs, a Persian coinage that replaces the more native baarrha, Bengali for home, a variant of vaarrah in Marathi), have been matched by the Shia taluqdar’s absorption with an inclusive culture.

A traditionally Avadhi sohar, a composition sung during childbirth, for example, reflects the cultural blend. “Allah Mian mori bhauji ka deo nandlaal” is a sohar in which a Muslim sister asks Allah to bless her brother’s wife with a son as loveable as Lord Krishna in his avatar as a little boy. Most of the classical music in north India, particularly the older dhrupad and dhamaar genre, surrounds the legend of Krishna both as a mischievous boy and about his dalliances with his consort Radha.

The taluqdars of Avadh were not unique in their patronage of this syncretic musical culture. They were mostly following the lead of the king Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, the patron saint of a dance form that celebrates Krishna with appropriate music and poetry that came with it.

A similar syncretism in South India produced the naagaswaram (also naadaswaram) genius Sheikh Chinna Moulana in the 1960s. On his way to master the traditional and difficult wind instrument, Moulana became a devotee of Lord Ranganatha and took up permanent residence in the pilgrim city of Srirangam.

Muharram in Avadh is not complete without the best vocalists who are trained in classical music performing at the countless gatherings where the martyrdom of Karbala is recalled with intense emotion.

In Mustafabad the sozkhani of Chhakki Mian is legendary. Sozkhani is a poetic tribute to the heroes of Karbala woven in classical music. Chhakki Mian learnt his singing from the great maestro of Agra Gharana Ustaad Faiyyaz Khan himself. Many youngsters have learnt the art of divining the ragas by simply listening to people like Chhakki Mian in Muharram.

Mustafabad is of course not just about Muharram or the poetry of Mir Anees and the dying art of Chhakki Mian. It is bang in the middle of the agricultural districts of Rae Bareli, Pratapgarh and Sultanpur that link the current state capital of Lucknow to the colonial administrative headquarters of Allahabad.

The region has a history of volatile peasant politics that may have in a crucial way defined the difference between the ascent of Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Jawaharlal Nehru on India’s political firmament.

Gandhi dispatched Nehru here in the 1920s to work among the kisans and this is where in a sense the future prime minister of India was to cut his political teeth. Though both became mass leaders with messianic appeal Jinnah remained apparently bereft of comparative rural experience.

But his ideology didn’t leave Mustafabad untouched and several of its leading residents were to make their way to Pakistan. A faint Jinnah-Nehru debate still occasionally rings through its decrepit havelis. But the passage of time appears to have swept both the heroes off the political radar in Mustafabad and beyond.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in New Delhi.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com