Mutton rezala isn’t just another curry. It is Lucknow on a plate, with all the old splendour baked right in. Manzilat Fatima, Nawab Wajid Ali Shah’s great-great-granddaughter and the city’s most passionate rezala cook, keeps this legacy alive. You’ll spot her at the Sanatkada Lucknow Festival, which now sprawls across all seasons, serving up a rezala that’s the opposite of ordinary. Lucknow doesn’t treat its past like a relic the way most cities do. Here, history isn’t behind glass but is in the present, woven into everything. In two centuries, Lucknow has changed from a Nawab’s city to the state capital, with roads smoother than airport runways and futuristic towers, but scratch the surface and you’ll hit Awadh. Walk into Chowk bazaar and it’s a full sensory hit: perfumers scattering jasmine and oud into the air, chikankari artisans lost in their embroidery, poets huddled in corners spinning verses while the clang of tanga carriages drifts past centuries-old portals. The air is thick with the smell of kebabs, and the clatter of pushcarts follows no traffic rules—just a rhythm as old as the city. Stop for a minute and you’ll meet people who’ve seen it all—like an old teacher who tells you, “Everyone passes through this city.” And he’s right. If Delhi is the mind of India, Lucknow is its soul. The real heartbreak here, as an Urdu professor once sighed between bites of paan, is that Lucknow remembers everything but can keep so little. To know Lucknow, you need to catch it at dusk, when the day blurs into history. Most places hide “the good old days”, but Lucknow brags about them—they’re all over its food, its music, its manners, and the kind of Urdu that glides off every tongue. Here, the past and present are fused—you can’t slice them apart.
To understand the Lucknow of today, you must first understand the Lucknow of twilight—because unlike most cities, which bury their golden ages in footnotes, Lucknow carries its history on its sleeve, in its food, in its greetings, in the cadence of its Urdu. The Nawabs of Awadh inherited the wreckage of the Mughal Empire and built something extraordinary in its place. Through the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as Delhi crumbled and the British consolidated power, Lucknow became the subcontinent’s most brilliant cultural hothouse—a court where poetry, music, cuisine, dance, and manners were elevated to the level of serious civic enterprise. Poet and literary historian Anis Ashfaq describes Lucknow as a living civilisation where history, culture, and tehzeeb continue to thrive. “Lucknow is not merely a city but a living civilisation shaped by memory, language, and grace, where history is not confined to books but is experienced through everyday life and shared cultural practices. The processions here, especially those of Muharram, are not just rituals but deeply layered narratives of history and sacrifice, where the story of Karbala finds a unique and powerful expression within the cultural fabric of the city. Through marsiya, majlis, and poetry, Lucknow has preserved its past in a way that is both artistic and emotionally resonant, allowing generations to connect with history in a living form.”
Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, the last and most luminous of the line, composed thumri melodies in the morning and choreographed kathak performances in the afternoon. He is credited with the refinement of dum biryani—a slow-sealed, layered masterpiece that is, in its patience and its complexity, a precise metaphor for the civilisation that produced it. When the British East India Company annexed Awadh in 1856, citing misrule, they found a king who ruled primarily over art. He was exiled to Calcutta, where he composed verses. Today, performances at Sanatkada Lucknow Festival is lyrically syncretic with the music of Urdu and Bengali. Manjari Chaturvedi, Kathak dancer, director and choreographer, says, “I have travelled to around 35 countries, and wherever I go, a part of Lucknow goes with me. My entire artistic expression is deeply influenced by Lucknow. Lucknow is known for its refinement, and that refinement lies in detail. Everything in Lucknow—its language, food, craft, and art—reflects a deep sense of intricacy. Even in my dance, I focus on detailing, whether it is the movement, expression, costume, or presentation. These are the values I have absorbed from Lucknow.”
You can taste the city’s heartbreak and hope in every steaming plate, every greeting and coffee order. They all belong here. That mix, where ancient etiquette sits right next to the speed and neon of modern life? That’s tehzeeb. The background melody never really fades. Lucknow is shaped by a kind of longing—almost nostalgia for a world slipping away. When the Mughal Empire fell apart, the Nawabs of Awadh turned Lucknow into a city that cared less about power and more about being dazzling—music, poetry, food, manners; they poured themselves into these. The galawati kebab, invented for a toothless Nawab who still demanded his pleasures, is minced with over a hundred spices and dissolves on the tongue before you’ve quite decided how to describe it. The nihari, slow-cooked through the night and served at dawn, has fed labourers and lovers and poets for two centuries and now travels to the menus of restaurants in Delhi, Mumbai, and Brooklyn—a diaspora of taste that the city exports almost unconsciously.
Tundey Kababi on Akbari Gate road, founded by a one-armed cook in 1905, still draws queues of autorickshaw drivers alongside food bloggers with ring lights. The recipe—reportedly 160 spices—is a family secret maintained with an intensity more common to matters of national security. To eat there at noon, surrounded by everyone the city contains, is to understand that some things in Lucknow exist outside the reach of nostalgia. They are simply, continuously present. Like the Bara Imambara, that vast vaulted hall built without a single iron or wooden beam which still draws thousands. Built in 1784 as a famine relief project so the poor could eat without suffering the indignity of charity, it remains an emblem of architectural genius and profound political imagination simultaneously. Within it, the Bhool Bhulaiya maze of 489 near-identical corridors still confounds visitors, as it has for 240 years.
Stand at the Rumi Darwaza at rush hour and you will see it all at once. Above it towers a 60-foot gateway of impossible Nawabi elegance with Persian arches, built in 1784 for no practical purpose whatsoever, purely as tribute to beauty, which the Nawabs of Awadh believed, required no justification. Around it all flows a river of honking cars, zigzagging motorbikes and autorickshaws, delivery boys with phones bungee-corded to their handlebars, schoolgirls in uniforms, and hawkers selling everything from sugarcane juice to phone cases bearing the face of the Chief Minister. And somewhere just overhead, almost ghostly in its modernity, is the elevated track of the Lucknow Metro, inaugurated in 2017, air-conditioned, efficient, quietly indifferent to the six centuries of civilisation it floats above. Playback singer and music producer Ashutosh Kumar Singh says, “The tehzeeb of Lucknow is something that reflects deeply in my music. It is not just about etiquette, but about a certain grace and respect that translates into how we present ourselves as artists. At the same time, I have witnessed a clear shift in what we call ‘new Lucknow.’ Younger audiences today are more inclined towards modern genres like pop, hip-hop, indie music, and live performances in clubs and festivals. The culture of traditional mehfils is slowly changing.”
Gomti Nagar, the city’s new spine, is a different world from old Lucknow entirely. Glass-and-steel office buildings. There is a functioning mall. Coffee chains. Young IT professionals debating product roadmaps at tables where the menu is in English and the sweets case still displays imarti and kalakand, because Lucknow insists on that, at least. The city has grown from 1.6 million at the turn of the millennium to an estimated 3.5 million today, and it shows in the traffic, in the pollution, in the Gomti river, which once drew poets to its banks at dusk and now flows as a sluggish, darkened thread through the city’s centre. This is not a city caught between past and present. It is a city in which past and present are simultaneous, layered like the rice and meat of its famous biryani—each distinct, each essential, and the whole greater than the sum.
The old tea seller will not merely hand over your glass. He presents it—a small inclination of the wrist, a murmured “Janab, meherbani” as though the transaction were a privilege extended to you. Ten steps away, a teenager in AirPods places his order by holding up two fingers without looking up from his screen. Neither finds the other remarkable. This, too, is Lucknow: tehzeeb, that untranslatable refinement of manner that is the city’s deepest inheritance persisting not in spite of the chaos around it, but somehow within it, the way a raga persists through traffic noise if you know how to listen. “Tradition and modern life sit at the same table, sharing space, sharing time, still unmistakably Lucknow,” explains Dr Rizwan Mir, Former President, West UP BJP Minority Morcha Uttar Pradesh. Lucknow sits at the centre of UP’s complicated political geography. It has sent some of India’s most consequential political stalwarts to Parliament, including former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who held the Lucknow seat for decades. Today the air is electric with debates about identity and community.
Muslims, once at the centre of everything, now make up a quarter of the city’s residents and feel the changes more than most. Old etiquette—tehzeeb—softened sharp edges before, but now, change charges through on metro lines that fly over streets where bullock carts once creaked along. In sleek new neighbourhoods, English and Hindi are the rules; Urdu is being pushed out but refuses to vanish. Scholars and poets whisper the old language in drawing rooms and at poetry nights, and a new generation listens, eyes wide, wanting to pick up where their grandparents left off. “Urbanisation and migration have undoubtedly altered the city’s social and physical landscape, bringing new influences and reshaping its environment, yet they have not erased its cultural memory. In many households, traditions are still passed down quietly and organically through language, poetry, rituals, and everyday etiquette, often without formal instruction but through lived experience. Even younger generations, despite being influenced by modern lifestyles and global cultures, find themselves returning to these roots in moments of reflection, identity, and belonging,” says Ashfaq.
There’s nothing dying about this city, but it’s morphing. People like Syed Zakaria Hussain roam the city with a camera, collecting the stories you’ll miss in a history book. His “Zakaria Roams” social media page insists: This is not just monuments and recipes, but the warp and weft of real life. Gen Z in Lucknow wants back in—they’re curious, adapting old traditions, mixing nostalgia with WiFi. That’s how you know the city’s core is still beating.
The Yogi Adityanath government has attracted and poured millions in investment into the city infrastructure. Young engineers in Gomti Nagar argue over Python frameworks at cafes. Yet there is some unwelcome change, too. “The state of Urdu is such that even government signage often misspells the name of Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula. Today, it is Hinglish that dominates, replacing the purity of Urdu,” says Adil Faraz, an Urdu scholar, lamenting, “Observe Hazratganj. The palaces of Wajid Ali Shah and Wahaj-ud-Din Haider once stood here. Now, government offices occupy these sites, but not a single plaque acknowledges their history.” Hussain focuses on what the camera does not see. “This page is about memory so that we don’t forget that Lucknow is not just a city of monuments or viral reels, but a city of tehzeeb, adab, and human values.” As his audience grows, a revelation unfolds: “Lucknow’s youth are curious about where they come from. They want to revive forgotten traditions and adapt them to their modern lifestyles. That tells me the essence of Lucknow is not fading.”
More than Delhi, Lucknow is a graveyard of monuments—the Chota Imambara, the Husainabad Clocktower, the crumbling Dilkusha Kothi—each softened by decades of monsoon and sun, draped in scaffolding and aspiration. Some are maintained by the Archaeological Survey of India; others have been absorbed into the city’s living tissue, their courtyards now housing small businesses, schools, and the general productive chaos of Indian urban life. Perhaps the most poignant of them all is Constantia fantastical palace built by French adventurer Claude Martin, who served both the Nawabs and the British and left a will funding schools across Asia. The building, a wild Gothic-Baroque hybrid designed by a man who had read every architectural style and committed to none, now houses La Martiniere College, one of India’s most prestigious schools.
Meanwhile in Hazratganj bazaar old people pass older bakeries that have been in the neighbourhood for generations. “Lucknow’s food is not just about taste; it is about emotion, respect, and tradition,” Hussain says. He points out that cafés used to belong to their customers, not the other way around. Now, people come and go, chasing the next click or upload. Vishal Thakur, owner of Owl Café, treats Lucknow’s food like it’s art. The recipes are old, but the vibe is new—music, rare dishes, a bit of pride in every plate. He wants a living legacy, not just another restaurant chain. Recipes follow original techniques, while presentation offers gentle familiarity for younger diners. Live music fills the room. It stays open through the night, welcoming those who arrive after hours. “Building a brand is easy, but building a legacy is hard; we want to connect tradition with the new generation,” he says.
You see change everywhere—fast café next to slow chai shop, tech lingo rubbing elbows with poetry. Bollywood returns to this style repeatedly, placing Lakhnavi grace on the silver screen. Big names like Mir and Anis wrote the city’s soul into couplets that still get a sigh instead of applause at the mushaira. But here’s the catch: the young now grow up in Hindi and English. “Lucknow remembers everything. It just can’t keep much of it,” says an Urdu professor
One prized art of Lucknow which has stayed intact is chikankari. Walk into a workshop in Old Lucknow and you’ll find patience stitched into every panel. Dawood Ahmad, who runs one of these workshops, says it’s more than work—it’s culture, identity, and a craft his city won’t lose without a fight. The city remains a centre of textile art and bridal embellishment as it has for centuries, with Kinari Bazaar in Chowk at its heart. The market supplies laces, zari, beads, sequins, and decorative borders essential to wedding wear, stage costumes, and ceremonial clothing, blending heritage with contemporary demand. Among its many small shops is that of Hasib Ali, 58, who sells laces and borders in a narrow Chowk lane. To keep with times, his shop stands out for digitally printed laces that merge modern design with traditional aesthetics, drawing younger buyers looking for something distinctive. An attar shop established in 1928, leaves a trail of rose, jasmine, sandalwood, and kewda. Shops are small, shelves dense, glass bottles catching light. The city’s legacy of scent unfolds at every turn.
Still, change keeps coming, not always culturally welcome—double the people, jammed roads, rivers that need rescue. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath launched the ‘Gomti Rejuvenation Mission’—95 per cent of the city’s sewage is supposed to stop pouring into the water, and on festival nights, the river glows with the fire of floating diyas, prayers hopeful as ever. Harmony isn’t easy. Some say Lucknow’s “tolerance” was a bit of an act, others swear those bonds were genuine and only now feel frayed by speed and pressure. Maybe both are true.
In the end, Lucknow’s real treasure isn’t its crumbling buildings, its endangered language, or even its food. It’s the way people treat each other. The belief that the how matters just as much as the what. That grace isn’t weakness; that kindness, even in quick exchanges, counts for everything. When you find yourself alone, lost on a winding street, a stranger not only gives directions but insists on walking you there personally, apologising for any trouble their hospitality might have caused. For one bright second, you know exactly where you are: in one of the most quietly civilised cities anywhere. “Pehle aap,” —After you, please. In a world of jostling elbows, it’s more than good manners. It’s poetry. And in Lucknow, that’s no small thing—a small, daily act of resistance against the culture of speed. It rings out on the city’s streets like a single note held perfectly steady while everything around it changes key.
Which, in Lucknow, is exactly what it has always been.