Nawabs of Awadh

The kingdom

Saadat Khan, a Persian noble in Mughal service, was appointed governor of Awadh in 1722 and made the office hereditary. The province was fertile and populous, and after Buxar in 1764 the nawabs governed as subsidiary allies of the East India Company — paying for British troops stationed in their territory, a system that transferred the revenue of the state to the Company by degrees while leaving the ruler in place.

Asaf-ud-Daula moved the capital to Lucknow in 1775 and built the Bara Imambara, whose central hall is among the largest vaulted spaces in the world without pillars, constructed as famine relief — an employment scheme in which, by the standard account, the poor built by day and the gentry demolished by night so that the work might continue and no one need be seen to take charity.

Lucknow

The Awadh court became the centre of Indo-Persian culture in northern India as Delhi declined. Urdu poetry — Mir Taqi Mir, Insha, later Anis and Dabir with their marsiya elegies on Karbala — flourished under its patronage; so did khayal and thumri, the Kathak dance tradition, and the Awadhi kitchen with its dum cooking.

It was also a Shia court in a largely Hindu and Sunni country, and the Muharram observances of Lucknow, with their imambaras and processions, took the elaborate form they still have.

Wajid Ali Shah, who succeeded in 1847, was a dancer, a composer and a playwright — his Rahas dance-dramas are part of the history of Kathak — and this was used against him.

Annexation and after

In 1856 Dalhousie annexed Awadh on the grounds of misgovernment, having systematically drained its revenue for decades through the subsidiary alliance. Wajid Ali Shah was deposed and exiled to Calcutta, where he lived at Metiabruz and recreated a version of his court.

The annexation was among the immediate causes of the rebellion of 1857. A large proportion of the Bengal Army's sepoys were recruited from Awadh, and the dispossession of their homeland was felt directly. Lucknow saw the longest siege of the rebellion, and Begum Hazrat Mahal, Wajid Ali Shah's consort, led the resistance in the city and refused amnesty afterwards, dying in exile in Kathmandu.

Satyajit Ray's Shatranj ke Khilari, from Premchand's story, is set in the last days of the kingdom.