Northern India: Lucknow of the Nawabs

Lucknow today is a city of two million people and the capital of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, but neither this size nor this status have eased the very rough ride foreign visitors have given the city. Murray's Indian handbook in the 1920s stated with customary certainty that "the buildings at Lucknow are nearly all of a degraded and barbarous type of architecture, and apart from the two tombs in the Kaisarbagh and the Jami Masjid, not one of them possesses any real architectural merits, though the large hall of the great Imambara is a very grand one." Lucknow played a major role in the Mutiny or Rebellion of 1857, which may explain some of this hostility. So may the character of the nawabs of Awadh, or Oudh, as the British called it. From 1775 to 1856 the nawabs made Lucknow their capital, and of them Murray writes: "No reigning dynasty of India ever showed such a series of vicious and incompetent Chiefs...." Then again, Lucknow's sorry reputation may be purely esthetic. James Fergusson, who surveyed India's architecture in the 1830s, slammed Lucknow. He writes, for example, (II, 324) "If mass and richness of ornamentation were in themselves sufficient to constitute architecture, few capitals in India could show so much of it as Lucknow. It is, in fact, amazing to observe to what an extent this dynasty filled its capitals with gorgeous buildings during the one short century of its existence, but all--or with the fewest possible exceptions--in the worst possible taste. Whatever may be said of the Renaissance, or revival of classical architecture in Europe in the 16th century, in India it was an unmitigated misfortune." Fair judgment? See for yourself. By the way, the pictures should ideally be juxtaposed against the historic photographs spectacularly reproduced in Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, ed., Lucknow: City of Illusion (2006), a book showing the city's monuments as they were in the late 19th century--partly in ruin but for the most part in much better shape than they are today.