4 - The Case of Lucknow

Summary

This chapter presents a case study of Lucknow, an interior capital city in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Lucknow is smaller than Bombay, Calcutta, and New Delhi, yet by the mid-1930s new entertainment enterprises facilitated a market for jazz in Hazratganj, a commercial area known for the exchange of European and British goods and services. By World War II, cafe and cinema hall proprietors were building dance floors and local entrepreneurs had established new performance venues on a thoroughfare in Hazratganj now called Mahatma Gandhi Marg. These venues included the Ambassador Club (previously a skating rink), the Mayfair Ballroom, the Soldier's Club (built for Allied troops), the Silver Slipper, the Blue Haven, and many others. This chapter explores how a small city in interior India enjoyed a lively jazz scene by the time of World War II. It emphasizes personal history narratives that I collected from now elderly individuals in Lucknow, and focuses on Mahatma Gandhi Marg and its smaller adjacent streets in the 1930s and 1940s. I cite oral histories collected from Anglo-Indian and Goan dance organizers, venue proprietors, community leaders, and musicians. Sometimes I include narratives from avid enthusiasts. The Anglo-Indian and Goan communities represented a large slice of the market for jazz in Lucknow beginning in the mid-1930s, and they regularly patronized the Mayfair Ballroom, Ambassador Club, and other venues.

Indian Civil Service (ICS) week in Lucknow in the early and mid-1930s supported the early proliferation of jazz. This weeklong festival featured a wide variety of entertainment and sports, and the British were probably the largest community in attendance. The first ongoing performances of jazz were organized during this week in a small number of venues catering to ICS week participants, including Valero's, the Mahomed Bagh Club, and the Racecourse bandstand. Tourism associated with ICS week stimulated commerce in Hazratganj, and the flow of cash into the pockets of music venue proprietors and musicians during the festival was crucial to the spread of jazz in Lucknow throughout the course of the year. I finish the chapter by outlining the role of American troops in broadening the scope of jazz performances in Hazratganj during the last two years of the war.