Gardens of Memory

LUCKNOW WAS A CITY renowned for its oriental extravagance, not to say decadence. To Victorian England it symbolized all that was wrong with India and all, as they came increasingly to believe, that they could set right. Lucknow and the surrounding province of Awadh (Oudh or Oude in contemporary British spelling) had been tributary to the Mughal emperor but gradually asserted its independence as Mughal power declined. The British preferred to maintain Awadh as a convenient buffer between their holdings in Bengal and the tumultuous kingdoms of the hinterland rather than to conquer it outright, counting on their Resident to influence policies appropriately—better to be the ever more intrusive presence behind the throne than to add another, possibly restive, territory to the empire. As long as they received revenues from the rich kingdom and dealt with reasonably compliant rulers, the British were content to humor the vagaries and corruption of the court. For reasons that have been much debated, this attitude changed in the 1850s and the Kingdom of Oudh was summarily annexed in 1856. A little over a year later, when a rebellion broke out among the Indian regiments in the Gangetic plain, Lucknow became an epicenter of the uprising and its besieged Residency a symbol of the struggle to maintain British supremacy in India. By the time the siege was lifted, only a shell of the building was left standing, its once verdant lawns and flowering shrubs covering the ravaged graves of its defenders, their families, and Indian servants. For Lucknow and its gardens, 1857 was a watershed of unforgettable proportions.¹

The Residency

The British men, women, and children hastily buried in Lucknow’s Residency garden did not choose to spend eternity there. They were, rather, the casualties of an event that soon took on a mythological life of its own in Victorian England. The ruined Residency, left defiantly in its shattered state with the Union Jack flying day and night, became an enduring shrine, “perhaps the supreme temple of British imperialism” (Fig. 32). Tennyson’s truly awful poem telling of the siege and the relief that came at last immortalized Lucknow’s heroism for every school child—the “handful of men . . . English in heart and in limb, / Strong with the strength of the race to command, to obey, to endure.”² Twenty years later the Prince of Wales himself would make a pilgrimage to the site, his party touring the battlefield with its terrible memories framed almost unbearably by the “sweet English flowers” of the restored gardens: phlox, sweet peas, antirrhinums.³

Edith Cuthell, a post-uprising resident of Lucknow, tried to imagine an earlier time and the English sitting in their gardens of an evening: “Then fell the thunderbolt out of the blue. Their gardens knew them no more.”⁴ Of course the thunderbolt did not really fall out of the blue. There had been earlier mutinies, such as the ones at Vellore and Barrackpore, and a few voices continued to cry in the wilderness of complacency. Musing about the vulnerability of the handful of Europeans going about their polite amusements in Simla amid the much more numerous mountaineers “wrapped up in their hill blankets,” Emily Eden had wondered, we may recall, that they did not “cut all our heads off, and say nothing more about it.” Even closer to the mark, William Huggins, a Bengal indigo planter, had compared the “Seapoy army” on which the Raj depended to a “powder magazine” that might be touched off at any time by innovations “of themselves insignificant, but offensive on the score of prejudice.”⁵

Fig. 32. Ruins of the Residency, Lucknow, NWP. Samuel Bourne, 1860

[The British Library Board, Photo 394(55)]

And, indeed, tensions long building erupted in May 1857 soon after the introduction of cartridges enclosed in paper greased with what was rumored to be beef fat (offensive to Hindus) or pork fat (offensive to Muslims) that had to be bitten open with the teeth before ramming them down their rifles; many saw this not only as polluting but as part of a more general British plot to forcibly convert native troops to Christianity. Revolt broke out first among the sepoys (native soldiers) in Meerut and quickly spread to other camps, especially in Awadh, where the lion’s share of Indian soldiers in the British army had traditionally been recruited and which had been annexed just the year before. Europeans from outlying stations and from Lucknow itself fled to the Residency for safety, although it had no fortifications and could draw on only a small neighboring garrison for protection.

Like so much of Lucknow, the Residency was itself a hodgepodge of incongruous parts. Three years before the outbreak of violence, an American visitor had described it as “a large and lofty building [it was three stories high] . . . surrounded by beautiful gardens”—not unlike other residencies scattered about India except that instead of being located in a quiet corner outside the city, it was situated in the midst of Lucknavi palaces and mansions and close to a major market or chowk.⁶ Furthermore, the compound included, in addition to the Residency and banqueting hall themselves, a number of substantial bungalows and gardens belonging to officials, a treasury, barracks and mess hall, a small Gothic church, a post office, and tennis courts, plus several houses belonging to Indians, a sheep house, a slaughterhouse, two Sikh squares, two mosques, a Muslim saint’s tomb, and a native hospital. At the height of the siege almost seven thousand people were penned inside the Residency and a few adjoining houses in the garden. They consisted of some three thousand Europeans, including of course the women and children who captured the public imagination, but also an even larger number of Indians: soldiers, servants, and camp followers. To his credit, Tennyson offered thanks to these “kindly dark faces who fought with us, faithful and few.” When the successive sieges were finally lifted five months later, two thousand of those who had taken refuge were dead and the rest reduced almost to starvation.⁷ In the fury of revenge that followed, many wanted to raze all of Lucknow to the ground and annihilate its citizenry. Though cooler heads eventually prevailed, suspected rebels were shot out of cannons, many neighborhoods were dynamited, and the entire center of the city redesigned in the image of Anglo-India. Post-uprising Lucknow became once more a city of gardens, but the gardens bore a very different stamp from those of the earlier city.

Lucknow as Orientalist Fantasy

Nawabi Lucknow was created by a family of Persian Shi‘ite origin who had first deputized as rulers of Awadh for the Mughal emperor in Delhi and then gradually asserted their independence. In 1775 the court moved from Faizabad to Lucknow, ushering in a golden age, however curious a one. As Delhi and other Mughal capitals declined, Lucknow grew until it became the largest and most prosperous precolonial city in India, surpassed in population only by presidency cities of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras. Poets, artists, musicians, scholars, and craftsmen came from all over northern India, lured by lavish promises of patronage and making it a center of Urdu letters and learning.

At the same time, the ruling nawabs and court elite became increasingly fascinated with European culture and most of all with European architecture as mediated by officials, traders, and soldiers of fortune. Preeminent among the last was Claude Martin, a Frenchman in the service of the East India Company, who was “nearly as Indianised as the Nawab was Europeanised.” Martin’s various building projects culminated in the fantastic pile which he called Constantia but which has since been known as La Martinière. A fortress-cum-tomb, it was an over-the-top combination of “Gothic towers, and Grecian pilasters.” Governor-General Hastings thought the plan must have been taken “from those castles of pastry which used to adorn desserts,” while Emma Roberts characterized it as “a grotesquely magnificent house.” The English journalist W. H. Russell went further: the first view inspired him to exclaim, “How beautiful! What a splendid building”; the second, however, caused him to add, “Why it must have been built by a madman.”⁸

Other structures were hardly less sensational as amalgams of indigenous and western. Since none of the nawabi elite had actually been to Europe, their notions were secondhand. They tended to copy plans in books and then to copy each other—what looked good on someone else’s building might be just as impressive on one’s own. Dilkusha, for example, built as a country residence for Saadat Ali Khan about 1800 by a former Acting British Resident, is a fairly authentic replica of Vanbrugh’s Seaton Delaval in Northumberland, with a grand exterior staircase surmounted by Palladian columns, but there are ranks of stone urns atop the balustrades and the flanking octagonal towers are crowned with almost pagoda-like turrets. Oddly enough, the staircases within the towers are the only way to reach the upper floors or the roof. Dilkusha departed from traditional Lucknavi architecture in that it was a solid block of masonry, with no interior courtyards. The masonry consisted of brick plastered over with chunam rather than stone because there was no stone to be had in Awadh. It also differed in being set on a slight prominence “with some extent of lawn about it” and a large surrounding deer park with its “avenue of mighty trees.” Here the nawab hunted with hawks and trained cheetahs. In contrast to Dilkusha, the huge Qaisar Bagh palace complex, completed only a few years before the British annexation of the kingdom in 1856, is ostensibly neoclassical in style, but the plan derives from earlier Central Asian walled enclosures with separate pavilions in the manner of Akbar’s Fatehpur Sikri. Inside, however, it was lavishly furnished with European furniture, draperies, mechanical instruments, and toys.⁹

As ornate palaces, country villas, and imambaras (Shi‘ite religious establishments) proliferated, it became harder and harder to characterize the city. Was it “an ‘oriental’ city, with gilded domes (albeit over a wooden frame) and minarets, or an Indian version of a European spa”? No wonder visitors fell back on the Arabian Nights to convey their reactions. Honoria Lawrence had to admit that for all its “bad taste and inconsistency,” Lucknow “comes nearer to anything I have seen to realize my early ideas of the Arabian Nights and Lalla Rookh.” Emily Eden had the same reaction to the garden in the Chattar Manzil: “Don’t you remember in the ‘Arabian Nights,’ Zobeide bets her ‘garden of delights’ against the Caliph’s ‘palace of pictures?’ I am sure this was the ‘garden of delights.’” Usually so harsh a critic, Eden acknowledged that this was the only Indian residence she ever coveted.¹⁰

The gardens of delight of pre-1857 Lucknow were as eclectic as the architecture. One Resident brought in an English botanist to instruct the king’s malis, but he only lasted a few months. Other Englishmen were employed in the royal gardens from time to time. An avowedly English garden was created for the Anglo-Armenian wife of one nawab, although we know little about it beyond its exotic flowers and European trees; similarly, the Badshah Bagh boasted “a large and beautiful garden, laid out in the English style, and uncommonly delightful,” again without details. Presumably “English” referred to a more informal arrangement, with lawns and shrubs surrounding European-type villas, rather than within enclosed courtyards—the Dilkusha garden, for example, was planted in front of its east facade. More enigmatic were the remains of what was referred to as an “English village” that Major Archer (Fanny Parks’s father) came upon in the deer park around the Dilkusha. It contained the ruins of some mud huts, but otherwise “the spire, the elms and hedgerows, and whitewashed honeysuckled walls, were all left to the imagination”—had it ever existed, “the furious hot winds would have parched it immediately.”¹¹

Mostly, however, the palace gardens took Persian and Mughal prototypes as their starting point: interior courtyards with their symmetrical parterres of flowers and trees divided by watercourses and fountains, all enclosed with high walls so that royal ladies could not be seen by passersby. Royal palaces boasted their lal bagh (“red garden”) and gulistan-i-iram (“rose garden of paradise”). As Lady Nugent described the garden of the Chattar Manzil some twenty years before Emily Eden’s visit, “The place that was yesterday only a barren waste, was converted into a beautiful garden, filled with flowers, pavilions, temples, bowers, and fountains, all composed of coloured lamps, and different sorts of lights.” She does not mention the flowers by name, but they would probably have included sweetly scented bushes such as rat-ki-rani, jasmine, and frangipani, along with roses, poinsettias, and exotics obtained from the Calcutta Botanic Garden.¹²

Nonetheless, her description also alerts us to the fact that nawabi gardens contained more than the usual trees, flowers, and water. They were just as cluttered as their palaces, not only with elaborate pavilions, steam baths, mosques, pagodas, and of course swings for the ladies in the zenana garden, but also with very un-Muslim statuary. Here, too, Claude Martin may have been the inspiration, with “the profusion of plaster lions, Grecian gods and Chinese figures” on the parapets and pinnacles of Constantia and in its French-style garden. Captain von Orlich clearly found the “many painted statues” in the Badshah Bagh rather vulgar. This was not the view of a newspaper reporter when the last king of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah, opened the gardens of the Qaisar Bagh to the public for a brief moment: “The garden is tastefully laid out with marble statues, arranged in outré groupings, Venus and Cupid and in juxtaposition an English cow, not a bad specimen of the statuary’s skill. Then we witness a magnificent marble reservoir where gold and silver fishes disport undisturbed [fish were a symbol of Awadh], also fountains of marble which play unceasingly.” The war correspondent William Howard Russell, on the other hand, while praising the gardens of the Qaisar Bagh as “worthy of Kew,” condemned the statues as “most hideous, ludicrous, and preposterous . . . Hindoo statues in imitation of Italian [classical?] subjects.”¹³

The gardens were intended for more than “eating the air,” as an Urdu phrase had it. Like the gardens of Mughal emperors before them, they were the center of elite social life. And like Ranelagh and Vauxhall in eighteenth-century London, Lucknavi entertainments were famous for their music and dancing, their sumptuous feasts, their elaborately theatrical displays of colored lights, fireworks, illuminated hot-air balloons rising into the air “like so many moons.”¹⁴ But Victorian England had turned its collective back on the frivolities and alleged immorality of Georgian and Regency pleasure gardens. Now, the extravagance and the alleged “decadence” of its rulers provided the public rationale for the annexation of Awadh and the deposition of its king: “The British Government would be guilty in the sight of God and man,” intoned the official declaration of February 13, 1856, “if it were any longer to aid in sustaining by its countenance an administration fraught with evil to millions.” Their claim was buttressed by a succession of reports of misgovernment under increasingly weak and profligate rulers. A Resident who had advocated a British takeover for several years dismissed the king, Wajid Ali Shah, as totally uninterested in public affairs, aiming at nothing but “the reputation of being the best dancer, best versifier, and best drummer in his dominions.” His inner circle allegedly consisted entirely of “poets, fiddlers, eunuchs, and profligate women.” Another writer compared Lucknow in all seriousness to Sodom and Gomorrah. The 1929 edition of Murray’s Handbook of India was only a little less censorious: “With the exception of Sa’adat Ali Khan [whom the British had put on the throne in 1798], no reigning dynasty of India ever showed such a series of vicious and incompetent princes.” And yet the doyen of Lucknavi chroniclers maintains, “It is unlikely that anyone will question the statement that the late court of Awadh was the final example of oriental refinement and culture in India.”¹⁵

When fighting broke out some fifteen months later, the city’s palaces, imambaras, and gardens were in the thick of it. Opposing armies seized control of the palaces with their towers and walled gardens. For Russell, looking out over the city from the balustrade of the Dilkusha in the midst of the battle to regain the city in March 1858, the view was surreal: “How lovely Lucknow looks today! The sun playing on all the gilt domes and spires, the exceeding richness of the vegetation and forests and gardens which remind one somewhat of the view of the Bois-de-Boulogne from the hill over St. Cloud. But for the puffs of villainous saltpeter, and the thunder of the guns, with noise of balls cleaving the air, how peaceful the scene is!” A little later the British captured the Badshah Bagh, the “garden of the great king,” which had been a rebel stronghold. “In the days of its full magnificence it must have been glorious. Such forests of orange-trees, such trickling fountains, shady walks, beds of flowers, grand alleys, dark retreats and summer-houses, all surrounded by a high and massive wall, and forming, as it were, the approaches to a snug little palace of pleasure.” Here as elsewhere the soldiers were given free rein to loot and vandalize to their hearts’ content, leaving most of nawabi Lucknow in the same ruined state as the Residency. “Lucknow used to be the finest city in India and beat Delhi into fits,” commented a British officer, “but it is a most miserable looking city now.”¹⁶

The Aftermath

Over the next two decades, Lucknow rose from the ashes, this time reincarnated in the image of the conqueror. Colonel Robert Napier of the Bengal Engineers drew up a plan for remaking the city that was carried out almost to the letter, a plan that Russell could only characterize as “imperial in conception.” Broad, straight boulevards were rammed through the heart of the old city. “All the bazaar was cleared away,” commented a local woman. “The English like grass better than bazaars.” Buildings that could be of use to the military or civil authorities were taken over, albeit with large empty esplanades leveled around them. Thus the Chattar Manzil, Emily Eden’s Arabian Nights palace, which had been badly damaged by artillery fire, was quickly restored and reincarnated as the very elegant home of the United Services Club. Similarly, the restoration of the Macchi Bhawan involved the razing of one courtyard and its replacement with grass and trees. To add insult to injury, the Jama Masjid was used as a storage depot for ammunition, the Great Imambara turned into a field hospital for wounded British soldiers, and the Asafi Imambara into billets for troops, with no thought of how the vision of soldiers trampling the sacred precincts, eating pork, and downing alcohol would look to the Muslim population—or perhaps there was all too much thought of this. Like Haussmann in Paris, Napier was determined to eliminate the narrow, winding alleys and cul-de-sacs that were so easy to barricade, even if he had to run roughshod over mosques, cemeteries, and neighborhoods to do it. In the end some two-fifths of the city was reduced to rubble in the name of security and hygiene.¹⁷

By the time the Prince of Wales visited the city in 1876, the transformation was complete. “Lucknow has fairly been improved off the face of the earth,” noted Russell ruefully. He had covered the last stages of the uprising, but so great were the changes that he found it almost impossible to recognize many parts of the city. “Hundreds of acres once occupied by houses have been turned into market-gardens. Swarded parks, vistas and drives, far prettier than those of the Bois de Boulogne, spread out where once were streets, bazaars, palaces. They are like oceans beneath which thousands of wrecks lie buried.” Victoria Street cut a swath through the edge of Chowk; other thoroughfares with names such as Canning Street, Havelock Road, Abbott Street—even the very long Napier Street—radiated away from the riverbank, the heart of the old city. Russell felt that the wholesale demolition had been carried too far and that it was sheer foolishness to store guns and ammunition in the imambara and to use mosques for Christian worship, warning, “If we ever lose India, it will be from ‘want of sympathy.’”¹⁸

In addition to the gutting of much of the old city, a whole new civil station was built adjacent to the cantonment, this, too, insulated from the native areas by an expanse of open spaces. As a residential quarter for Europeans, the new Lucknow anticipated to some extent the New Delhi of the twentieth century (see Chapter 8). The basic unit, here as throughout British India, was the ample bungalow, standing in the midst of a generous plot of lawn and garden. A contemporary Indian writer remarked of the civil station, “It has a complete country appearance and though its architecture is not pleasing to the oriental eye, its numerous streets with parks and gardens interspersed everywhere, and an almost dustless atmosphere, have made Lucknow famous as the garden city of India.” This was the Lucknow of garden parties and flower shows, of cricket matches and horse races, the Lucknow of the Carlton Hotel with its bagpipe band in dark red tunics over dark-blue trousers playing at teatime in the garden, the contrast of their dark uniforms striking against the green of the grass. It was no longer the Lucknow of nautches and illuminations and “whimsical piles.”¹⁹

It was also the city that so pleased Lady Dufferin as “one of the nicest stations in India.” She was delighted with the “great open park-like spaces, intersected with broad roads overshadowed by fine trees, and all the grass, shrubs, and leaves . . . so green and luxuriant”—perhaps oblivious to the fact that all these open spaces were dictated by military rather than aesthetic concerns and that they overlay what had once been vibrant native neighborhoods. She even liked the bungalows with their nice gardens. In fact “the whole place looks well-kept and rich, and is as neat as a gentleman’s park at home.” Observing Lucknow through a different lens in the next century, the city planner Patrick Geddes was appalled by the dreary lines of small brick houses assigned to lesser civil servants, finding them ill-adapted to the environment. They were saved only by “zealous garden and tree planting.”²⁰

Edith Cuthell’s husband was posted to Lucknow late in the century. Her book My Garden in the City of Gardens is an invaluable month-by-month account of her own garden and of the city’s garden heritage (until she flees the unbearable heat of June). From her we get a confirmation of the extreme redevelopment of the city: the broad roads blasted through the native city; the long wide Mall, shady with huge gnarled mango trees, running straight as an arrow through the center of the cantonment; the “suburbs well planted”; the Botanical Garden lying in an “immense stretch of ornamental grass, carefully watered and forested, behind the Civil Lines” (“some good ribbon-gardening, with the beds intersected with tiny gravel paths”). But she also loved to visit the ruins of the “lordly pleasure houses” and their gardens. Not far from the Botanical Garden was the Sikanderbagh, built by the last nawab for a favorite and the scene of particularly bloody fighting in 1857. On a November afternoon, however, it was “a glory of beautiful gardening, as are all the Lakhnao ruins,” radiant with plumbago, bougainvillea, alamanda, and convolvulus. She couldn’t resist a visit, also, to the high-walled, fortified gardens of the Chattar Manzil. Three lofty ornamented gateways led into “pleasant grounds, well planted with fruit and forest trees, and divided by gravel walks into parterres gay with shrubs.” As she remarks, shade, water and green were the primary requisites for a garden “in lands where the sun has to be reckoned with.” And “roses, roses everywhere!” Her only disappointment seems to have been with a moonlight garden party in Dilkusha. However romantic this sounded, the reality was that it was “abominably chilly” by mid-evening and everyone huddled around a huge bonfire listening to the “inevitable British infantry band playing in the inevitable chabbutra among the stiff flower beds.”²¹

Cuthell’s accounts suggest that the British were maintaining many of the old palace gardens, perhaps after their own fashion. Photography came in just too late to make before-and-after comparisons, but pictures dating from the 1860s and 1870s show vast stretches of open ground around surviving or restored monuments, albeit with some rather indistinct plantings. Some appear to preserve older patterns, while others show the unmistakable imprint of the conqueror. Cuthell includes a picture of the Lanka and its gardens in the Qaisar Bagh: gone are the rectangular parterres, watercourses, and fruit trees of earlier times, replaced by nonsymmetrical flowerbeds, shrubs, walkways, and lawns (Fig. 33). Other photographs show ranks and ranks of flowerpots, even in the imambara gardens that one might imagine to be more immune to British fashions. Flowerpots notwithstanding, however, Cuthell considered the Husainabad Imambara the ne plus ultra of native ornamental gardening, its roses and flowering shrubs and occasional annuals—marigolds most conspicuously—brilliantly lit up by thousands of tiny lights during the sacred Shia rituals of Muharram. “Of grass or lawn there was not a vestige,” but over all there wafted that marker of the Indian garden, “an amber scent of odorous perfume.”²²

Nonetheless, of all the gardens in this city of gardens, one overshadowed all the others after 1857: the Residency garden (Fig. 34). “The Residency is the spot which all Englishmen will wish to visit first in Lucknow,” asserts Murray’s guidebook. “The gardens are beautifully arranged and perfectly kept, and the place now reflects that peacefulness which properly belongs to sad scenes long since enacted.”²³ One entered through the arched gateway, the Baillie Guard Gate, through which the relief column had literally battered its way with great cannon balls after punching through the walls of the gardens along the south bank of the river. Inside was an “oasis of greenery and flowers,” lawns of doob grass maintained with great care (and difficulty) and stands of bougainvillea, ipomea, and other brilliant flowering shrubs. Left to themselves, luxuriant creepers would soon have completely enveloped the pockmarked shells of buildings, turning them into picturesque ruins rather than the reverent monument to the gallantry of the defenders: the “beautiful but treacherous elephant creeper” half veiling the ruins and the orange venusta hanging “like a golden curtain from the pillars that once formed the verandah.”²⁴ The challenge was to maintain a balance, to use the beauty of the natural world to transform the unsightly into something transcendent.

Lady Dufferin found the place “very pretty—gay flowers, picturesque ruins”—not perhaps the adjective those in charge most wanted to elicit, but she did add, “Seeing ruins made is a very different matter from contemplating them calmly years after the destruction is accomplished.” Edward Lear found the flowers “stupendous; what oleanders, pomegranates, roses and creepers!” And yet the effect was wanting in the Sublime, “especially as there are vulgar cannon-balls everywhere.” Edith Cuthell, too, was constantly reminded of the “sharp contrast between the present and the not-so-far-away past—the gay gardens round deserted palaces; the shot-riddled pleasure-houses, with loop-holed walls.” And yet here were “laughing, chattering Englishmen and women riding and driving about them just as before,” as if there had been no “awful interlude.”²⁵ While the history of the siege in recent guidebooks has been whittled down from the nine pages in Murray’s 1929 edition to a mere box in the most recent Lonely Planet Guide, it is impossible to think of Lucknow without the “awful interlude.”

Fig. 33. Qaisar Bagh, post-1857

[From Edith Cuthell, My Garden in the City of Gardens, 1905]

Fig. 34. The Lucknow Residency restored

[From Edith Cuthell, My Garden in the City of Gardens, 1905]

The “awful interlude” finds a curious parallel in the history of Shi‘ite Lucknow. Here, too, an even more distant past was part of the present. The Great Imambara is the largest religious complex in the world devoted to the rituals and cult of the martyred Imam Husain, the grandson of the Prophet who was killed in an ambush at Karbala by the Caliph Yazid in 680 c.e. (AH 61). The Passion of Husain, like the crucifixion of Christ, became the defining event of Shi‘ism. Every year in the month of Muharram the faithful enact the sufferings and sacrifice of the Imam, sufferings and sacrifice that have “transcended time and space to acquire importance of cosmic magnitude.”

Lucknow exists but to mourn Husain.

Rightly it can be called the home of Husain.

Since Karbala was too far for many to make the pilgrimage, Karbala and the mausoleum of Husain were re-created in India in the imambaras of Lucknow.²⁶

Whether Europeans, caught up in their own history of suffering and sacrifice, would have made such connections is doubtful. In their telling and retelling of the story of the Uprising of 1857, Lucknow shared the tragic stage not with Karbala but with Cawnpore (Kanpur), forty-six miles to the south. If anything the horrors at Cawnpore surpassed those at Lucknow. A contingent of Europeans who had surrendered to the rebels was massacred at the riverside ghat where they had assembled with a promise from Nana Sahib (Nana Rao) of safe passage to Allahabad. Then a further group of surviving women and children confined in the Bibighar were butchered, the bodies of living and dead thrown down a well. These events unleashed a frenzy of vengeance on the part of the British, who cared little whether the innocent were struck down equally with the guilty. Nothing was left of the Bibighar (the zenana garden of a Hindu favorite in calmer times) when the viceroy, Lord Canning, held a durbar at Cawnpore in late 1859, but he commissioned both a memorial church and a monument for the site of the infamous well. His wife, Charlotte, drew up the design for a sculpture, Angel of the Resurrection, surrounded by a stone screen, which Carlo Marochetti followed with only a few changes.²⁷

The garden laid out around the well was, if anything, lovelier than that of the Lucknow Residency; Constance Gordon Cumming wrote that it was “a garden of such richness and beauty as to be exceeded by none in England,” adding “It is little short of a miracle to see such a triumph of art over nature— to pass from the world of dust outside to those smooth green lawns, with masses of such roses as might excite the envy of a Devonshire rose-gardener” (Fig. 35). And not just roses: stands of golden bignonia, lilac creepers “more exquisite still,” bougainvillea, “whose long sprays of delicate lilac leaves festoon each shrub that comes within reach.” Lear described it as “a quiet and beautiful scene, the flowers lovely, and a sort of melancholy grandeur in that sad space.” What made the garden possible was water from the great Ganges Canal that originated four hundred miles away in the Himalayas at the holy city of Hardwar and joined the “mother stream” at Cawnpore, transforming “a sea of dust into a peerless rose-garden with greenest turf.” A decade after the uprising, the well and its gardens were visited more frequently than the Taj Mahal. But entry was forbidden to unaccompanied Indians (servants could drive their masters through the grounds at a stately pace) until after World War II. Even then there were occasional reports of ghosts, such as a sighting of “two blonde boys running this way and that around the mouth of the well” as if “desperately trying to find somewhere to escape.”²⁸

Fig. 35. Garden outside the well, Kanpur. Samuel Bourne, 1860

[The British Library Board, Photo 394(60)]

Lucknow’s history ran the gamut from farce to tragedy, with all the registers in between and with its gardens ringing in the changes. The pleasure gardens of its nawabi elite were places of indulgence and fantasy. When the Victorians condemned the sham and illusion of the city with the epithet “Vauxhallish,” however, they were looking back, perhaps uncomfortably, to a more frivolous time in their own history, and indeed there were parallels between Regency excesses such as the Royal Pavilion at Brighton and the follies of the rulers of Awadh.²⁹ But Victorian values had little time to implant themselves in Lucknow before the savageries of the Uprising of 1857. What followed the recapture of the city was a radical transformation, every broad tree-lined boulevard and greensward intended not only to prevent future uprisings but to proclaim the hegemony of the English urban landscape. And most of all, its sacred ruin and garden of remembrance to create an imperial myth of heroism and sacrifice.