Lucknow

est. 1722 — the long account

Lucknow was a provincial town until the Mughal empire began to fray and its governor Saadat Khan founded, in effect, his own dynasty in 1722 — the nawabs of Awadh. When Asaf-ud-Daula moved the court from Faizabad to Lucknow in 1775 the city became a capital of pleasure and patronage: Shia imambaras on a monumental scale, Kathak dance, Urdu and Persian poetry, and a court etiquette — tehzeeb — that Indians still invoke as shorthand for refinement.

The nawabs built with an eye to posterity and payroll: the Bara Imambara of 1784, one of the largest vaulted halls in the world, was raised as famine relief to keep the poor employed. Lucknow's cuisine — dum cooking, kebabs of impossible softness, breads like works of lace — was a court art that moved into the bazaar. But Awadh's wealth made it prey: in 1856 the East India Company annexed it on the pretext of misgovernance, an act that pushed the region's soldiers and landlords toward revolt.

In 1857 the British population was besieged in the Residency compound for nearly five months, and the relief and recapture of Lucknow flattened whole quarters of the city; the shattered Residency was left unrepaired as a monument to the Raj's darkest summer. Afterward Lucknow became a quieter provincial capital — its taluqdars co-opted, its courtly culture domesticated — but it kept its voice: the 1916 Lucknow Pact briefly united Congress and the Muslim League here, and the city's Urdu press and poetry circles still set the tone for a certain idea of India.

Lucknow · Gomti