Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850. Maya Jasanoff
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very first months. For the next two decades, his province would be split by bitter feuds between his mother’s faction in Faizabad and the Lucknow court. It would be paralyzed by Company pressure on its borders, treasuries, and policies. And it would be ruled by a nawab who didn’t much want to govern.
But Asaf ud-Daula’s move to Lucknow signaled change for the better in one substantial way. He may not have cared about administration, but he adored the arts, and had plenty of money to indulge in them. And though as a ruler he was weighed down by Company demands, responsibilities to the emperor, and his father’s legacies, Asaf ud-Daula enjoyed complete control, for once, over cultural matters. By establishing a new capital for himself, he could look to the great Mughal emperor Akbar as a model. As a young ruler, Akbar had abandoned Delhi, the capital of his ancestors, in favor of Agra and the new city of Fatehpur Sikri, where he assembled the very finest talents in the arts, sciences, philosophy, and letters. What Akbar had done for Fatehpur Sikri, Asaf now set out to do for Lucknow. With a stupendous program of monumental building, patronage, and court entertainments on a scale so lavish they put Orientalist fantasies to shame, Asaf ud-Daula transformed Lucknow into the new cultural capital of North India.
And it was a melting pot. Asaf ud-Daula was a Persian Shiite, ruling largely Hindu and Sunni Muslim subjects, and welcoming a fat payroll of Europeans into his service. Drawing on his Persian inheritance, he sponsored Shiite religious scholarship and festivals, and erected Lucknow’s most important shrine, the Bara Imambara. He also actively patronized the arts and letters of Mughal India. Finally, and perhaps most visibly, he cultivated ties with Europeans that influenced everything from the food on his table to the design of his many palaces. The result was a city so vibrant and various that descriptions of it erupt with adjectives. Overripe, sophisticated, seedy, magnificent, voluptuous, glittering, wicked, melancholic, battered, cosmopolitan, faded, dynamic, bittersweet: Lucknow was all these things and more; a “curious and splendid city,” in the later words of the British administrator Sir Henry Lawrence, where the sublime and the ridiculous folded into one.14 Lucknow, in a word, was an experience. And you either loved it or hated it.
To the many Europeans and Indians who hated Lucknow, the city was debauched, corrupt, and extravagant. One needed only to look at Asaf ud-Daula for proof. The obese nawab, coiled and quivering with fat, positively oozed debauchery. As one French officer put it, disgusted by the “monstrously fat” young man, “one would never imagine in Europe that depravity could be taken so far…[I]n no country of the world and in no history would one find examples of turpitude equal to those which this man daily presents to his court and capital.”15 Asaf’s marriage, it was said, had never been consummated. He moved from wine to hashish to opium; from women to boys and back again (said some; others insisted he was impotent); from chickens fed on musk and saffron to gleaming pilaus where each grain of rice was dyed a different jewel tone.16 He may merely have been conventionally self-indulgent, rather than criminally voluptuous. (And a fitting contemporary for Britain’s famously gluttonous Prince of Wales, the future George IV, another disempowered royal and patron of the arts.) But to those on the lookout for signs of Awadh’s decline and fall, encountering the debauched nawab was omen enough.
“There must be much that is ‘rotten in the state,’ whose chief city, the residence of the sovereign, presents such an appearance,” declared one British visitor.17 You could see signs of corruption just by walking down the street: poor people shoved into swilling gutters while persons of privilege lumbered past on caparisoned elephants. The court was rife with nepotism; royal favorites fed on state offices like vampire bats. “There was no low or lowminded class, barbers, green-grocers, butchers, mule-vendors, elephantdrivers, sweepers, and tanners,” hissed another critic, the embittered Awadh nobleman Muhammad Faiz Bakhsh, “but some of them rose to opulence and rode proudly through the market-places in fringed palankeens, on elephants with silver litters, or on state horses.”18 Still worse, as far as the British were concerned, was the worry that this corruption could be catching. It infected them, too. Even Warren Hastings—who was impeached in part for his extortions in Awadh—was appalled: “Lucknow was the sink of Iniquity…It was the school of Rapacity…What will you think of Men receiving the Wages of Service from the Nabob, and disclaiming his Right to Command it; and what of a City filled with as many independent and absolute Sovereignties as there are Englishmen in it?”19 Thus European and Asian voices joined in deploring the corrupt capital, where British civil servants were “orientalized” and the Indian ruling classes shamelessly aped the West.
In short, Lucknow seemed to be awash in extravagance and excess. The fact that half of Asaf ud-Daula’s revenue was sucked up in payments to the East India Company only made his profligacy look worse. He spent money everywhere: on his eight hundred elephants (in days when a decent elephant cost £500) and his thousand horses (”kept merely to look at,” as he was too fat to ride them); on his hunts, gargantuan processions a thousand animals long, weighed down with everything from his mistresses to ice blocks for his drinking water. He spent money on his wardrobe, banquets, dances, and cockfights. He spent money on his army—of servants, that is, to trim his mustache, snuff out his candles, and feed his pigeons.20 He spent money on his art collection—so much, some estimated, as to rival all his other expenses combined. And he spent money on his city. The nawab’s “building mania,” ranted another Awadh notable, Abu Talib Khan, cost the state coffers some £100,000 per year. To make matters worse, hundreds of poor townspeople would be evicted every time a palace went up; and yet the nawab generally abandoned his new palaces after spending just a few days in them. Even noblemen suffered in a display-obsessed court culture that forced them, “on the principle of ‘like master, like man,’” into a bankrupting contest of conspicuous consumption.21
Debauched, corrupt, extravagant, to contemporary critics Lucknow seemed to be “the true image of despotism,” a city of sin of almost biblical proportions.22 And yet alongside this image, there gleamed a picture of the city equally vivid, if strikingly different. As ardently as some abhorred Lucknow, others adored it. Their beloved city was a place of perfumed orange groves and cool marble palaces, eloquent conversation, and exquisite banquets accompanied by the thrum of sitars. Their Lucknow was refined, dynamic, and generous.
To achieve perfect refinement in all things seemed to be the city’s collective ambition. Even ordinary pastimes were raised to the level of high art. Sporting pigeons, trained and flown in flocks of up to nine hundred, were carefully plucked and then painstakingly “re-feathered” with multicolored plumes. Kites were fashioned into human form and lit up inside with lanterns, to ghostly effect.23 Animal fighting, another favorite hobby, reached such a “pitch of perfection”—according to Lucknow’s greatest rhapsodist, the late nineteenth-century writer Abdul Halim Sharar—that meek, spindle-legged stags were set against one another, just so spectators could admire how elegantly they fought. It was claimed that in Lucknow even everyday Urdu speech had been raised to its highest degree of perfection. “The masses and uneducated people” were said to “speak better Urdu than many poets…of other places,” and outsiders were too intimidated to open their mouths. In the celebrated salons of Lucknow’s noblewomen and courtesans, conversation flowed with such grace “it seemed as though ‘flowers were dropping from their lips.’”24
Lucknow was buzzingly dynamic. In a self-conscious effort to echo the lost glory of Akbar’s India,