Allahabad has been a more significant city in the annals than one would imagine.

Under the shadow of Varanasi, just a hundred kilometres away, Allahabad has not been much of a tourist destination – but for every 12 years when it hosts the world’s largest congregation of humanity, the Kumbha Mela, on the banks of one of the longest rivers of northern India, the Ganges and Yamuna, where the latter merges into the former.

That’s why the city acquired the name of Prayag, which literally means confluence of rivers.

An ancient town, Prayag or Allahabad was a political hub of the country for many decades during the struggle for Independence in the early 20^th century. It’s the hometown of the Nehru-Gandhi family. And their two palatial houses, Swaraj Bhawan and later Anand Bhawan, were the de facto headquarters of the Indian National Congress.

Allahabad has also contributed to the making of at least six prime ministers, namely Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, Lal Bahadur Shastri, VP Singh and Chandrashekhar. Many of the student leaders in the 1940s and 1950s went on to become the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, like HN Bahuguna, VP Singh and ND Tiwari.

But behind the active political life of the city, there was also a literary movement taking place during this time. One of the contributing factors was the Allahabad University, which was for a long while referred to by the proud alumni as the “Oxford of the East”.

The city is also associated with some of the literary giants of the Hindi-Urdu world in the last century. Munshi Premchand was one of them. He wrote more than a dozen novels, and around 250 short stories, many of which have been translated into a number of languages. He was referred to by his contemporaries as Upanyas Samrat or the emperor among novelists.

Equally prolific were Sumitranandan Pant, Mahadevi Varma, Raghupati Sahay, better known by his pen name Firaq Gorakhpuri, and Harivansh Rai Bachchan – who’s more famous as the father of megastar Amitabh Bachchan.

Some of these doyens of Hindi and Urdu literature were actually professors of English at the University of Allahabad, and notable among them are Gorakhpuri and Bachchan.

Pant, though born in Kausani, spent most of his life in Allahabad, and was one of the most celebrated and progressive left-wing writers of his times. He was famous for romanticism inspired by nature and inherent beauty.

Varma was a feminist par-excellence even before the term became trendy in public discourse. She was turned down by her husband only a few years after marriage. Her looks were not the kind that the fashion industry portrays as desirable, but the physicality of being has little to do with the beauty of her soul and intellect.

And if fashion is a way of self-expression, Varma epitomised simplicity, distilled candidness and was at ease with her own reality. Her husband summarily dismissed her from his life, but it was a blessing in disguise. She began her literary journey and career as an educationist, and excelled in both. Her house in Ashok Nagar was converted into a memorial after her demise, and is now collecting the dust of time.

Premchand’s grandchildren live in two big bungalows near Ashok Nagar, not far from where Varma and Bachchan used to live – the same neighbourhood. The bungalow that housed Bachchan has since been demolished and there now stands a multi-storey residential complex.

The spirit of the city is reflected in Varma’s famous poetry Aatripta, where she says contentment is an impediment to the progress of life, and wishes that her quest for life may never be quenched. She wrote: “I lose when I attain; in losing I have the delusion of attainment; may my life remain discontent. For those who cease their quest unto life are dead before dying.”

Allahabad is on the move. The laid-back city life of intellectuals is a thing of the past. The bungalow city is now turning into tightly-packed multi-storey residential colonies. The Civil Lines market is crowded and laden with cars. The streets have been widened and the underground sewage system created recently.

Allahabad is also part of the Smart Cities initiative of the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs that aims to “drive economic growth and improve the quality of life” by “local area development and harnessing technology” and to transform (retrofit and redevelop) existing areas, including slums, thereby improving the “liveability of the whole city”.

Allahabad has changed, and can better deal with the burgeoning population. But, as they say, old habits die hard. The love for the river, the composite culture – Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb – is still the guiding force, though caste and religion play an important part in the polity of the city.

The vibrant literary culture has been bequeathed to some prominent literary figures like Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, a world-renowned scholar of Persian and Urdu, and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, the city’s prodigal poet in English.  

Today’s Allahabad doesn’t have the easy pace that provided the necessary calm to galvanise into a political and literary revolution in the last century. However, the city remains quintessentially the intellectual and spiritual capital of the region, along with Varanasi.

This story was published in the Patriot.