When young Thomas Twining walked through Delhi in 1794, no one looked at him twice. The bazar he passed through was busy with men in white robes and turbans, coloured shawls tied at the waist, all carrying arms of some sort – a wicked blade or a scimitar, or sometimes a black shield. “All the inhabitants I met in this crowded bazar,” he wrote in his memoirs, “were perfectly-behaved and civil, not displaying more than that certain degree of curiosity which is not, perhaps, unpleasing to a stranger.” The men simply acknowledged the presence of the pale firangi with a discreet salaam, stepping aside to make room for him as he passed by. No longer were there horrified villagers running away at the sight of these “white devils”, nor curious mobs as there had been a few decades before. Hindustan had changed considerably in the last decades of the eighteenth century.
The sense of dislocation must have been pronounced by the time Twining arrived in Lucknow in 1796. He was immediately swept up into the giddy social scene enjoyed by the British residents there and was moved to remark that “the style in which this remote colony lived was surprising, it far exceeding even the expense and luxuriousness of Calcutta”.
This intimate little band of Europeans spent these winter evenings sitting by a crackling fire, alternately dining at each other’s homes. They had organised a large band of musicians for their entertainment at these numerous soirees. “I had singular pleasure,” sighed Twining, “on hearing some old English and scotch airs played extremely well. The traveller cannot have much music in his soul who is not moved with the concord of sweet sounds which remind him of his native country.” No longer were inquisitive Europeans moved by the concord of Hindustani music itself, nor the courtesans’ husky thumris, as they had in the past. Indeed there was no mention of local women or bibis at all in Twining’s account. Instead, young Twining was thoroughly charmed to find himself in the company of a certain Mrs Arnot, who “enjoyed the distinction of being the handsomest lady in India”.
All the Europeans who had once led those brocaded lives were now long gone. Madec, Polier, Gentil, Zoffany, and de Boigne had all left Lucknow, leaving only the increasingly solitary figure of Claude Martin. Martin no longer spoke of returning to Europe himself, perhaps realizing that it was a mirage, best left to the world of dreams. For the fate of many of these men had proved uncertain, and even violent, as in the case of Polier, and had been enormously sobering for Martin. “I really lament and very much, the fate of Colonel Polier, how unfortunate he has been,” Martin wrote to Elizabeth Plowden in 1796. “He was an excellent good man, and the life of society where he was.” Writing to de Boigne, he admitted to “a kind of taciturnity, without being melancholy”, which required the frequent society of all available Europeans so as to remain “always in gay spirits and happy”. He was delighted, and perhaps envious when he received a portrait of de Boigne with his ethereally beautiful teenage aristocratic bride Adèle. “As pretty as an angel,” Martin exclaimed, “being eighteen years old, possessing music and songs in particular to perfection, with unequalled zest and a remarkable gaiety, born of good family…beautiful with all kinds of talents, ho! My good friend! The painting is so beautiful that I envy your sort and should even be jealous…” As for himself, “I am forced to content myself with the ‘Beauties of the Indies’, who are well below that of the painting that you have sent me.” After a lifetime spent with the charming and beautiful Boulone Lise, it was deeply ungallant of Martin to claim that he was “forced to content” himself with such company. Clearly, this reflected his own anxiety, untethered despite decades in India, in the face of the Company’s growing racism and sense of superiority.
Nonetheless, Lucknow was at its most enchanting in the late winter, which Twining would have experienced. In the nawab’s Mughal-style gardens, the orange and apple trees would have bloomed and the flower beds would have been thickly planted with luscious marigold, blue larkspur, white and yellow jasmine, and deeply fragrant red and white rose bushes. The nawab went to great lengths to make his European residents feel comfortable and to accommodate their exigencies. An English employee of Asaf described his easy-going bonhomie:
He is very fond of the English, and English manners; he eats at table with them without the silly superstitious repugnance of other Mahomedans and he relishes a good dish of tea and hot rolls. Once he was at table and a roasted pig by mistake was placed before him, he smiled and said – though I am forbid to eat that animal I am not forbid to look at it.
Twining himself had been awe-struck by the magnificence of the nawabi cortège when he had witnessed it a few years earlier, and now wrote that “in polished and agreeable manners, in public magnificence, in private generosity, and also, it must be allowed, in wasteful profusion, Asaf, king of Oude, might probably be compared with the most splendid sovereigns of Europe.”
Most of the houses of the British and European residents of Lucknow were clustered within a site to the east of the Macchi Bhawan and along the Gomti, an area that would later be called simply the Residency. Sometime in the 1770s, Claude Martin had bought up a large swathe of land here, while the rest had been bought by the nawab. Houses were sporadically built here which Martin then rented out to the British residents. In 1778 the first Company building was specifically built as a Treasury, and the remaining structures were added haphazardly. The residency thus displayed a mixed character, with mosques, shrines, and zenana structures amongst the gardens and the brick bungalows and larger buildings. Llewellyn-Jones believes these buildings were constructed by order of the nawab and leased to the Resident and his staff for a trifling amount. The nawab was also forced to pay for the upkeep of the Residency staff ’s houses, as well as the salaries of the employees such as the guards, gardeners, messengers etc.
And yet there was increasing condescension in the way in which the nawab was viewed, even a sniggering disdain. A British man who confessed that “Asaf allows me 1800 pounds a year and nothing to do but enjoy his frequent entertainments of shooting, hunting, dancing, cock fighting and dinners” wrote about the nawab to his friend in England, to say that:
Asaf-ud-Daula is absurdly extravagant and ridiculously curious; he has no taste and less judgement… He is…extremely solicitous to possess all that is elegant and rare; he is…a curious compound of extravagance, avarice, candour, cunning, levity, cruelty, childishness, affability, brutish sensuality, good humour, vanity and imbecility; in his public appearance and conduct he is admirably agreeable. In short, he has some qualities to praise, some to detest and many to laugh at.
After this litany of indictments, the writer sheepishly added that “he is very affable, polite and friendly to me”.
The charge of being “extravagant and ridiculously curious” was one that many Europeans were beginning to hiss angrily about the nawab. What had once inspired amazement and awe – the nawab’s collection of astonishing objects – now increasingly attracted censure and derision. Twining had also visited Asaf ’s Aina Khana, or “Mirror Hall” which contained “English objects of all kinds – watches, pistols, guns, glassware, furniture, philosophical machines, all crowded together with the confusion of a lumber room. The number of clocks and watches was quite extraordinary. Many of them were very beautiful and were said to have cost the Nabob immense sums.” A repeated criticism of the nawab’s collection was that “all were placed without regard to order or reference to their qualities or value. A valuable chronometer…would be suspended next to a common watch of the most ordinary description.”
But as Jasanoff has recorded, collecting “was part and parcel of the culture of Indian kingship. Kings make collections, and collections make kings. To own rare, precious, sacred or just plain numerous things is a virtually universal emblem of royal power. In many parts of the Muslim world, collecting meaningful and valuable objects enhanced a sovereign’s personal charisma, or barakat, and with it, his ability to command the loyalty and admiration of his subjects.”
Excerpted with permission from The Lion and The Lily: The Rise and Fall of Awadh, Ira Mukhoty, Aleph Book Company.
