An ode to Nagpur
“Not every love happens at the first sight. Some require a second look.”
18 years in the city I was born in and it failed to stir my heart. But then, that’s how Nagpur is. It requires you to put in the hard yards before you earn its love. However, shuttling between home and school and playing with neighborhood friends can’t exactly be called an effort to know the city. So after 18 years, in pursuit of higher studies, I left Nagpur unexplored and unloved.
And then it started to unravel. Every time I visited Nagpur afterwards, it grew on me, bit by bit. Many a times I wondered if I had returned after such a long time that the city had changed. I realized later, it was I who had changed, from being the passive resident of the city, I had turned into an active tourist seeking the beauty of the city. A second look, a third look may be, and there you are, a lover of the city.
It’s been nearly 2 decades since I first left Nagpur and now my visits have also become infrequent, almost rare, but the love for the city continues to grow. Maybe it is the first love that you cannot forget or maybe it’s the sepia-tinted nostalgia, what’s true is Nagpur’s where the heart is.
As a look back, I am advantaged having a local’s knowledge combined with the tourist’s curious eye and the tour guide’s unparalleled enthusiasm when I talk about Nagpur. I have pieced together the picture of my city from the knowledge I picked up along the way and my experience that I hopefully still correctly recall.
The history:
“A city that derives its name from the Nag river, the one with the serpentine flow”, that’s the history that most of us knew of Nagpur. After all, scour any number of books and you would hardly find a mention of Nagpur. It’s a tragedy that a city that sits at the center of the country doesn’t find a place even in the fringes of the nation’s imagination. Nonetheless, Nagpur’s past (at least the recent few centuries) is equally colorful and impactful.
After sleeping through much of the first millennia and a half, around the 18th century Nagpur’s history comes into its own and takes a Shakespearean turn, with drama in fast-forward. This century is a witness to the formation of the city (and as a capital of the kingdom of Bakht Buland Shah), it’s ascendancy shaped by its founder’s vision, then a sudden change in fortune due to multiple claimants to the throne, an external help hired to resolve the conflict ends up back-seat driving the kingdom and we see transition of rule from the Mughals to the Marathas somewhere in the middle of century. The fortunes wax and wane, so does the size of the province with a few territories added and a few others lost. The action-packed 18th century gives way to another breathtakingly busy and equally melodramatic 19th and (early) 20th centuries where our favorites foes, the British, take center-stage. The India playbook of the British gets rolled out in Nagpur as well — using one or all of the following: hook or crook, carrot and stick or wine and women, the British establish their supremacy over the province. Same script different cast, same emotion different lines, whatever — you see all the same aspects of British rule here as well: doctrine of lapse, sati, communalism and riots, nationalism and rebellion, etc, etc till one-day freedom comes around and Nagpur is given a chance to choose its destiny — to choose between the 2 suitors: Madhya Pradesh (created from the Central Provinces and Berar) or Bombay state. We first go with Madhya Pradesh as its capital but then change our mind and hitch our wagon with Maharashtra as its second capital. And we lived happily ever after?
Along the way, Nagpur birthed 2 major events of national significance. RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) and with it, the Hindu nationalist movement was founded in the 1920s in Nagpur; the city continues to be the headquarter of the organization and sees a flurry of political leaders making a visit to the city. It was also in Nagpur, that Dalits found their new identity when Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar embraced Buddhism in 1956, along with lacs of other oppressed Dalits. Since then, every year, the city hosts lacs of pilgrims at the site of conversion, Deekshabhoomi. Coincidently, both these events happened on the day of Dussehra.
The people and language: Eternally the poor cousin to Mumbai and Pune, Nagpur and its people have still been able to hold their own. There’s a certain pungency, certain sharpness that characterizes Nagpur — may be it is the inclement weather or the fiery cuisine or just indifference of the rest of the world that has turned Nagpur into what it is.
And it comes through in the language. The Nagpuri version of Marathi is so distinct from its purist version, it feels almost like a different language, some may say it’s a cross between Hindi and Marathi, well it’s not, Nagpuri vocabulary is an eclectic mix of influences from all over the country (being in the center of the country means all the four regions are equidistant) with a layer of homebred ingenuity. The Nagpuri dialect isn’t solemn or pretentious and it doesn’t try too hard to impress. It’s rooted, very earthy, somewhat rough around the edges and seeks to establish an instant connect between the speaker and the listener as meaning is derived from the emotions accompanying the words as much as from the words themselves. So while the vocabulary hangs on a handful of words and their variants, the additional layers of context and emotion means even the handful words can last a lifetime of conversation. ‘Hau kya bey’ could range from genuine amazement (wow is it so) to sarcasm hiding disbelief / incredulousness (are you out of you mind?) depending on how it was spoken. For the uninitiated, a regular chat between 2 Nagpuri friends with passionate and liberal mentions of ‘bey’, ‘bhok mein jaa’, ‘bhaitad’, would sound like fight’s about to break out.
The dialect is the people. Like the dialect, people here aren’t flashy — their history being witness to a cycle of prosperity and adversity, Nagpuris are down-to-earth folks. From time to time they may become ‘aagau’ (Nagpuri for over-smart), but always good-at-heart. And so even if someone says to you “Bhaitaad aahe kaa bey?” (Nagpuri for “are you stupid?”), it’s always with good intention.
The food:
A gastronomic heaven hidden in plain sight, that’s what Nagpur is. You can visit Nagpur just to sample the fare that it has to offer.
Like the people, the food here isn’t flashy, far from it. Like the language, it’s meant to overpower your senses without any bullshit. But what it lacks in appearance it more than makes up for in taste. Simplicity (and creativity) is at the heart of every food dish in Nagpur.
Take the most famous cuisine of Nagpur: Saoji food whose story’s that of survival. The community of Halba Koshti (traditional weavers) was staring at a bleak future, when their handloom industry was wiped off with the onset of powerlooms. Some of them changed course and set up eateries serving non-veg food which over time gained popularity and has now become a signature dish of Nagpur.
Unsurprisingly, given its history, a Saoji restaurant & food are Spartan. At a Saoji restaurant, you could be sitting in a shanty but what you eat is worth its weight in gold.
Tarri Poha, another of Nagpur speciality is a stroke of genius. You can individually eat Poha or Chana tarri and most people do, but together, they are a match made in heaven. Poha topped with Channa tarri accompanied with chopped onions and dash of lemon makes this breakfast dish a foodie’s delight. And then there’s Param di dal (it is just that, but so much more; and its quirk is that you have to bring your pack of butter to get a butter version of dal, but when you eat it with the Tandoori Roti or Fried Rice, it’s a magic for your taste buds) and Matka/lambya roti (looks like dosa, stretches like roomali roti but made of wheat, the crispy and glutinous lambya roti complements mutton gravy, it’s so soft it melts in your mouth and lets you savour the taste of mutton unhindered ; the preparation for it is nothing less than an art, but with a toil) with their humble origins — it’s probably the earthiness of these dishes, something you could find only in your home-cooked meal, that strikes the chord with so many people. There are many more of Nagpur’s wonders that deserve notable mentions — be it Babbu’s biryani in Mominpura, or the ubiquitous Chinese food stalls (well its more Nagpuri, with spicy rendition, than the Indian-Chinese that you see elsewhere in the country) or the Samosas with elaborate set of accompaniments (chutneys, curd, etc.), some traditional, some creative. And if you a sweet tooth, there’s Santra (orange) Barfi (esp. the one at Heera Sweets) inspired from the Orange city’s horticultural legacy.
The festivals and traditions:
For as long as I can remember, I have always heard Nagpur was a city with cosmopolitan culture. Unsurprisingly for a city that sits at the intersection of north, east, west and south, Nagpur’s culture is shaped by the presence of different religions, sects and beliefs. It’s not uncommon to bump into one or all of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Parsis, Buddhists, Jains at every turn you take — for me, in my childhood, that was a daily phenomenon, as our locality had all those characters and more. What’s remarkable though (and when you think over it, it shouldn’t have been remarkable at all, but unfortunately that’s how faiths are divided these days) is that this diversity isn’t accompanied by animosity. People interact like people should. And so, as a curious eye, you get access to all the religions, to all their festivals and their traditions. And Nagpur comes alive with each one of those.
Some of the earliest memories I have are of the Marbat celebrations, one festival that is the city’s own. Every year Nagpur witnesses the procession of 2 Marbats (tall effigies symbolizing evil forces), one a Kali Marbat and other a Pili Marbat, which culminates in their burning. The sight of the two colorful Marbats surrounded by a sea of people is a sensory experience unlike others. So is watching Raavan Dahan (we used to go to Kasturchand Park) — the city seems to become one when it came to defeating the evil. Then there’s Pola (a festival respecting bulls who toil on the fields throughout the year) — every year, farmers from neighboring places visited our houses with their bulls/oxes and we used to feed them, it was one act of thanking nature. To keep the kids engaged with the theme of the festival, we celebrated ‘Tanha Pola’ (tanha means small) the next day when children would parade their miniature wooden bulls, going from one house to the other and collecting chocolates and other treats and even money. From the pious to the raucous, each festival is uniquely celebrated, but what’s common across all festivals is that the whole city unites in the celebrations. Against the backdrop of a difficult life, festivals offer a moment of joy for the people and Nagpur doesn’t miss out.
The travel trivia: For the seeker, Nagpur doesn’t disappoint. Tucked away in one corner of history or the other corner of geography, there are many jewels that are a traveler’s delight.
For the geography-minded, there’s the Zero Mile Stone, popular as a marker for the geographical center of India and the Double Diamond Crossing, a rarity in railway parlance, where rail lines from opposite directions form a diamond shape.
For the adventurer-at-heart, a rendezvous with tigers at the nearby Tadoba sanctuary, with a high density of big cats, is almost a certainty. For the historian, the city has a proud but forgotten history to narrate — besides birthing the Hindu nationalist and Buddhist movements in the country, Nagpur also led the textile movement, the country’s first textile mill was set up in Nagpur by the Tatas.
The city is surely not for the faint-hearted. The climate is hardly inviting — a scorching summer is followed by generous downpour which gives way to a biting winter. But if you get past this, the city would embrace you like a lover and open up its innumerable beauties — that you can cherish for a lifetime.
