Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850. Maya Jasanoff

such as Mir Taqi Mir fled the crumbling Mughal capital and came to Lucknow instead, where they developed a distinctive style and school of poetry.²⁵ Modern Urdu prose literature originated in Lucknow, and Persian, the language of status and learning, flourished. As a seat of Shiite scholarship, Lucknow rivaled the religious centers of Iran and eastern Iraq.²⁶ It also attracted European artists: the well-known London painters Johan Zoffany and Ozias Humphry each spent several years there, drawn by the promise of lucrative commissions from the nawab. Across the arts, a “Lucknow style” emerged—a style defined by hybridity. Urdu writers blended different traditions so seamlessly that it was often impossible to tell whether they were native Persian or Hindustani speakers, Muslim or Hindu.²⁷ European artists influenced local painters. Lucknow’s architecture—much of it designed by the nawab’s European employees—fused European and Indian elements.²⁸

Refined and dynamic, Lucknow was also marked by the nawab’s tremendous generosity. Maybe generosity is just profligacy by another name. Still, even Asaf ud-Daula’s harshest critics conceded that there was some virtue in his most extravagant building project, the Bara Imambara. This shrine to the imams Hassan and Hussein was Asaf’s most important architectural legacy (and, incidentally, his only building not influenced by European models). It was a massive undertaking: one Englishman (albeit one given to rash estimates) put the cost at a million pounds.²⁹ But it was also a massive piece of public welfare. Started during the crippling famine of 1783-1784, the project employed perhaps as many as forty thousand people, and paid them with food.³⁰ It was even said that the nawab had pieces of the structure torn down every night, in order to prolong the undertaking. Apocryphal though this story may be, it was just one of the many tales of Asaf ud-Daula’s generosity to work its way into poetry and folklore. According to the poet Mir Taqi Mir, “the great Asaf “ was “renowned…for his generosity and benevolence.”³¹ “All his natural faults were effaced under the cover of his generosity,” wrote Abdul Halim Sharar. “In the opinion of the public he appeared not as a dissolute ruler, but as a selfless and saintly guardian.”³² More than a hundred years after Asaf’s death, Lucknow shopkeepers were still remembering his generosity every morning, opening their stores with the couplet: “If one does not get from God, he receives from Asaf ud-Daula.”³³

Debauched, corrupt, and extravagant? Or refined, dynamic, and generous? Which was the real Lucknow? Indeed, the leading historian of the city asks, “Given the weight of all these foreign elements, can the ’real’ Lucknow be said to have existed at all?”³⁴ Yes. It lay in the combination of all of them at once. Whether one loved it or hated it, the defining fact was inescapable: Lucknow was the most cosmopolitan city in India. Not only was its population diverse; diversity was a way of life. Hindus and Muslims shared state positions, celebrated each other’s holidays, borrowed from each other’s literary and artistic traditions. Europeans caroused and hunted with the nawab, and talked, traded, and intermarried with his subjects. For people of all backgrounds—and from social margins everywhere—Lucknow held out the promise of reinvention in its cosmopolitan embrace.

      This mixed society is captured in glorious Technicolor by Johan Zoffany’s Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match, painted between 1784 and 1786 for Warren Hastings, and later copied for Asaf ud-Daula. Bustling, populous, energetic, the composition was an unusual one for Zoffany, who had made his name in Britain as a painter of elegant conversation pieces and staged theatrical scenes. Indeed if anything, its microscopic detail and flat perspective lend it the feel of a Mughal miniature—a style Zoffany certainly knew and just might have been echoing.

At first glance, the painting plainly seems to illustrate a world of luxury, lassitude, pleasure, and indulgence.³⁵ This is an image, above all, of the exotic: of Europeans “going native” and of decadent Asians, of lush temptations and shameless self-indulgence. But it is easy to forget, looking at the picture today, just how familiar it all would have been to the people who appear in it (most of whom are identifiable historical figures). They were not merely playing at being exotic. Around the time this was painted, in fact, Colonel Mordaunt’s cockfights—to say nothing of banquets, festivals, weddings, and many other occasions where Europeans and Asians came together—were practically weekly events. Of course artistic license is at work here, and the scene is not without violence, or divisions, or barriers. Nevertheless, the painting exposes the genuinely multicultural possibilities of Lucknow. Who you were, with whom you associated, and how you wanted to live were not either-or choices. You could bridge the boundaries.³⁶

      And many of the people shown in the painting did. Antoine Polier is not in attendance, but his best friend, Claude Martin, is, sitting on the sofa in his East India Company uniform. A Frenchman and, like Polier, an outsider to the Company hierarchy, Martin was Lucknow’s premier self-made man, transforming himself there into a British country gentleman and connoisseur. Or consider the two central figures. Mordaunt, standing tall in virginal white underclothes, was the bastard son of the Earl of Peterborough, and traveled to India to get away from social stigma at home. Asaf ud-Daula, for his part, was impotent and heirless, as well as politically disempowered, and thus especially concerned with finding posterity by alternate means, such as cultural patronage. It is a crude joke—this cock match between the illegitimate and the impotent—but also an astute comment on two men who both came to Lucknow to escape the social margins. As, in his own way, had Zoffany. Austrian by birth and British by adoption, he arrived in Lucknow to find fortune after losing the support of his patroness, Queen Charlotte. Snubbed by British royals, he showed himself, at the top of the painting, sheltered by a green umbrella: a traditional Indian emblem of royalty.

Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match is a splendid snapshot of a working world at play. But perhaps the fullest picture of Asaf’s Lucknow in its heyday emerges, instead, from the scrawled sepia entries in a young Englishwoman’s diary. Beginning on January 1, 1787, and continuing into October 1789, the diary of Elizabeth Plowden is a rare and wonderful document: a young mother’s unpublished account of living, traveling, and rearing children in Calcutta and Lucknow. Elizabeth Plowden had first stayed in Lucknow as a new bride in the late 1770s, when her husband, Richard Chicheley Plowden, was serving alongside Mordaunt in Asaf ud-Daula’s bodyguard. In 1781, the Plowdens moved to Calcutta, leaving Lucknow, like many Europeans, with an outstanding debt from the nawab. Richard waited in vain to be paid. And money was tight. With seven children born in almost as many years, the Plowdens barely had enough money to send the eldest back to Britain for school, let alone to return themselves (in the style they would want to, that is). Elizabeth even had to ask her mother “to be an Economist,” “to buy nothing for the House,” and to stay with friends until their fortunes revived.³⁷ In late 1787, the Plowdens went back to Lucknow with their two youngest children—baby William, just a few months old, and toddler Trevor Chicheley—in a last-ditch effort to get their £3,000 from the nawab. They stayed on for a year.

“Miss Brown and myself with the Gentlemen went to Col Mordaunts Cockfight,” Elizabeth scribbled in her diary on June 15, 1788. “The Nabob [was] there, we dined with him at a little after 9. He did not keep the fast of Remyan [Ramadan] but eat [sic] very heartily,” she noted, and “ask’d me a great many questions about my little ones and said William could not be flesh and blood,