बादशाह का विलाप: लखनऊ 1856 से कलकत्ता 1938

In February 1856, the British East India Company moved against the last independent Nawab of Awadh. Wajid Ali Shah — poet, musician, choreographer of the Kathak tradition, and ruler of Lucknow — was charged with misgovernance and ordered to surrender his throne.

In February 1856, the British East India Company moved against the last independent Nawab of Awadh. Wajid Ali Shah — poet, musician, choreographer of the Kathak tradition, and ruler of Lucknow — was charged with misgovernance and ordered to surrender his throne. He was given one choice: sign the papers and leave, or fight and lose both kingdom and dignity. He signed.

Before he boarded the British steamer at Kanpur that would take him to Calcutta (and later to a gilded exile at Garden Reach, from which he never returned to the city he had built), Wajid Ali Shah performed a thumri he had composed for the occasion. He sang it in Bhairavi — the raga of morning and farewell — in the voice of a bride leaving her father's house:

'Babul mora naihar chhuto hi jaaye.'
— O my father, my childhood home is slipping away.

The conceit was not subtle and he did not intend it to be. The 'naihar' (father's house) was Lucknow. The palanquin-bearers were the Company's soldiers. The bridegroom's house was British India. He was not a bride; he was a king. But kings in the thumri tradition speak as women — it is the convention that allows grief without surrender.

Wajid Ali Shah lived in Calcutta for thirty years after this, composing prolifically, holding a diminished court at Garden Reach, and maintaining the arts patronage that had made Lucknow India's most refined cultural capital. He died in 1887, having never seen Lucknow again.

Eighty-two years after that farewell, in a Calcutta film studio, K.L. Saigal sang the same thumri before a camera.

The film was Street Singer (1938), directed by Phani Majumdar for New Theatres — the Calcutta studio that had been making the finest Hindi films of the decade. Saigal played Bhulwa, a gifted street musician fighting poverty and longing. The character, like the king, is a man who sings because there is no other way to hold loss.

Crucially, Saigal sang live. By 1938 playback singing had been established (Dhoop Chhaon, 1935) but for this particular song, in this scene, the old method was preserved: Saigal performed before the camera without a pre-recorded track. The result carries a quality of unguarded presence that studio-d믭 recordings of the period rarely achieve.

R.C. Boral's arrangement was spare — harmonium, sarangi, tabla — the classical instruments that Wajid Ali Shah himself would have heard at his court. There is no orchestral elaboration. The room is the same room that has always held this song.

From that film, 'Babul Mora' entered a new phase of its life. It became one of the most frequently performed thumris of the 20th century. Pandit Bhimsen Joshi popularised it as a Bhairavi thumri. Jagjit Singh and Chitra Singh recorded a version for the film Avishkaar (1973). For decades the thumri was carried forward, on stage and on record alike, reaching generations who had never heard the original.

The song crossed the Partition of 1947 without diminishment. If anything, the partition gave it new audiences who understood the metaphor without needing the history: the people being displaced from what had been their father's house did not require explanation of what 'naihar chhuto hi jaaye' meant.

The chain runs: Wajid Ali Shah composed the thumri in Lucknow in 1856. Saigal sang it in Calcutta in 1938. The recording carried it to every home with a gramophone. The radiogram carried it to the 1950s. The cassette to the 1970s. The MP3 to the present.

The king's farewell to his city is now every person's farewell to wherever they cannot return.