Pride of place — laddoo, jhumka

Sudhirendar Sharma

IT is the stuff of legend that products and places pride their identity from. Think of it, the ash gourd sweet candy called petha has given Agra its distinct geographical indication (GI) label. Far from discounting the Mughal legacy, I am only accentuating it by bringing the petha in as this sweet originated in the kitchens of Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. Synonym to each other, the product extends emotional and cultural bonding to the place. Such intricate is their interrelation that neither can be stripped of the other.  

Come to think of it, not every place may be as popular, but rarely is any place without a distinct cultural output of some kind. We only need to look around. The film Piku revived memories of my train travel beyond Lucknow, wherein I had first tasted laddoos of a different kind. Named after the non-descript town of Sandila, the soft and paler country cousin of the glamorous boondi laddoo has lent an identity to this small town in Hardoi district. But for them, Sandila would have remained a dot on the map. 

Not much is being done to either identify and establish, or revive and restore such distinct cultural identities of small towns and cities. Either crass commercialisation has uprooted geographical indicators from their origin or overt homogenisation of cities has erased their cultural underpinnings. Take the case of Pratapgarh in Rajasthan. This town is the birthplace of the intricate gold-glass fused jewellery called thewa. Ironically, thewa has gone worldwide, but its birthplace does not register in popular imagination.  

I am convinced that a little spark of madness on the part of the city administrators can turn things around. There is little doubt that tossing a cultural identity will only do good to the existence of a city. The myth of the dangling earring, the ubiquitous jhumka, lost in the street of Bareilly has remained in popular imagination for over half a century, thanks to well-known lyricist Raja Mehndi Ali Khan, who rhymed Bareilly into his melodious composition Jhumka gira re, for the immensely popular film Mera Saaya. Since then, one can’t think of Bareilly without talking about jhumka.  

Stories about how Bareilly was rhymed into the song abound on the Internet, but noticeable is the fact that jhumka has finally caught the imagination of the Bareilly Development Authority in drawing plans to give shape to the city’s mythical jhumka identity at its entrance by installing a replica of this piece of jewellery — 12-14 ft in height and 2.43 m in diameter! Only by preserving the uniqueness of a place, real or imaginary, can the distinct character of cities be restored from homogenisation.

More than being just ‘smart’, cities need cultural identity and not just concrete bonding with its residents.