Whenever I hear of Kanpur or think of the city, it brings back memories of a Bob Dylan song, ’North Country Blues’, made famous by Joan Baez's plaintive voice. Its moving lyrics and sorrowful melody speak woefully of a city fallen on bad days: “Come gather 'round friends and I'll tell you a tale / Of when the red iron pits ran a-plenty / But the cardboard-filled windows and old men on the benches / Tell you now that the whole town is empty.”
And so it was last week when I heard of something that smelt of the town's has-been status. Though India beat Bangladesh comfortably to go 2-0 up in the current Test cricket series, the city's Green Park stadium got bad press for its poor drainage that washed out two full days of play despite there being no rain. The washout belied the ground's fashionable name reminds of its rich past before independence and its glory as an industrial town for at least a couple of decades after the end of colonial rule.
Only 10 Tests have been played in Kanpur in the past 40 years against roughly as many in the previous 20, symbolising the decline of the ground that was a regular Test venue in the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s. This is in spite of India playing more Tests per year nowadays. Kanpur was once ahead of even Bengaluru which hosted its first Test only in 1974.
One thing that has certainly changed is that Green Park no longer hosts dull batting pitches. There was a time when a Kanpur Test meant loads of runs on a batsman-friendly wicket. As many as eight of the 10 Tests played at the ground between 1959 and 1979 ended in a draw. It is good to see wickets tumbling in Green Park alongside its reputation as a well-maintained ground.
The UP government this year announced an IT park in Kanpur with an investment of more than Rs 5,800 crore, projected to create 2,50,000 jobs. I will believe it when I see it. For me, Kanpur is the heart of India's northern country and just the bluesy equivalent of Dylan's ballad linked to his childhood days in Minnesota. My visits to the city, though I have not been there in a decade, mostly remind me of its glorious past. The drainage fiasco only confirms its fallen state.
Yet, Kanpur is also the city that has an Indian Institute of Technology whose computer science course was legendary in an era when there was no such thing called a personal computer. Only the highest rankers in the cut-throat joint entrance examination for the IITs could make it to the sprawling campus at IIT-K.
The cricket ground and the IIT stand testimony of days when textile, leather and other manufacturing industries caused the city to be called the ‘leather city of the world’ and the ’Manchester of the east’.
With an estimated population of 63 lakh now, Kanpur is like the ageing, abandoned wife of a decadent prince from Uttar Pradesh's declining royal clans, while Noida, with its broad avenues, is like a pampered new mistress as it awaits its first international flight from a spanking new airport slated to open next year and connect the national capital region.
New technologies, feuding Marwari entrepreneur families and rampant trade unionism caused the decline of Kanpur as an industrial hub, much like ye olde Calcutta. Like the eastern city that was once British India's imperial capital, Kanpur's history is alluring. Its old buildings and smokestack factories invoke poetic thoughts. Like the anglicised Calcutta, the city was once called Cawnpore.
On my last visit to the city, I saw its old city police building still bearing the colonial-era sign that advertised it as the 'Cawnpore Kotwali'. I recall telling a designer friend from the city that she should organise a fashion show in that building that has so much old-world character like Mumbai's Opera House or Kolkata's Victoria Memorial.
Maybe Kanpur's closed textile mills could be redeveloped as commercial or residential hubs, much like their counterparts at Lower Parel in Mumbai. But that would only be a romantic thought as Noida is evidently a better-planned city. Kanpur's leather units earned precious dollars for India in the economically troubled 1990s, but the manufacturing industries also polluted the Ganga, decisively eroding Kanpur's charm even as software stole the national limelight from textiles and leather.
There is much in Kanpur that needs attention and revival. Even the British, who must have bittersweet memories of the city they shaped and made, seem to have forgotten it. The much-awaited but delayed Free Trade Agreement between the UK and India could offer an opportunity for Britain to see if it can breathe some new-age life into rich nostalgia. Kanpur could still do with a Cawnpore touch. Perhaps the new IT park provides a chance to reverse-swing a diminished city.
We may yet see a born-again Kanpur in a state currently torn between the ancient glory of Ayodhya and futuristic fantasies woven around Noida. Perhaps someone will sing "For the times they are a-changing" in celebration of a new Kanpur, to quote the selfsame Dylan. For now, that appears very unlikely and we must stick to singing the Cawnpore blues.
(Views are personal)
(On X @madversity)
Madhavan Narayanan | Senior journalist