Book Excerpt: How Shuja ud Daula completely altered Faizabad’s topography and culture

But, after Buxar, the nawab would make Awadh, and Faizabad in particular, the focus of his work. Up until this time, Lucknow and Faizabad had both been alternating centres of power for Shuja, while for the earlier nawabs, the lure of imperial Delhi had been irresistible. But after 1765, it was Faizabad that would become the vortex of Shuja’s passion and energy, and he would completely alter its topography and culture.

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And if the warriors were at the nawab’s court at Faizabad, with their retinues, followers, and servants, then so were the rest of the populace. ‘As soon as it was known that Shuja-ud-Daula had decided on Faizabad for his headquarters,’ wrote Lucknow historian Abdul Sharar, ‘crowds flocked in that direction, the entire population of Delhi seemed to be making preparations to move there. In no time persons of every race and creed, literary men, soldiers, merchants, craftsmen, individuals of every rank and file had gathered there.’ Faiz Baksh has described the veritable scrum of merchants, tradespeople, food stalls, artists, poets, and sundry citizens who sprang up almost miraculously once it was known that the wealthy nawab was to reside in Faizabad. Faiz Baksh encountered them himself when he arrived at the city for the very first time. ‘Four miles outside Faizabad,’ he wrote, ‘various kinds of sweet meats, hot viands, kebabs and curries were being cooked and chapatis and parathas baked under the shade of trees. Stalls for distributing cold drinking water. Different sorts of sherbets and faluda with hundreds of people buying.’ When Faiz Baksh had asked if this appetizing gathering represented Faizabad, the scoffing response was: ‘Huzoor! The city gate is four miles from here! What are you thinking of?’ In the city of Faizabad itself, the air was dense with the sound of drums, laughter, and singing: ‘There was not a moment from morning until evening when one could not hear the army or the beat of the regimental drums. From sunrise to sunset the noise of the drums, and kettle drums of the regiments never ceased, and the sounds of the gongs which told the hours and the watches deafened the ears. Well-dressed young men, the sons of nobles of Delhi, physicians of the Greek school, singers and dancers of both sexes and of every land, were in the enjoyment of large salaries. In every street and market, artisans and scholars flocked hither from Dhaka, Bengal, Gujarat, Malwa, Hyderabad, Delhi, Lahore, Peshawar, Kabul, Kashmir and Multan.’

To accommodate all his ambitions, and the soldiers, craftspeople, and sundry populace that came along with them, the nawab commissioned architectural activities at a frenetic pace. No longer distracted and burdened by the need to bolster the Mughal cause, the nawab could instead direct all his resources towards Awadh. He began by razing various sundry ‘Mughal’ houses—these homes presumably tainted by the shameful behaviour of their owners in battle. The nawab then built mud forts and a series of defensive walls on a large scale, to enclose both the nawabi residences and the city itself. To modern notions, a mud construction sounds whimsically impermanent, but eighteenth-century mud forts were no such thing. Popular with the landed aristocracy of Awadh from before the time of the nawabs, these forts were constructed of well-beaten mud, as strong as Lakhori bricks*. They had walls of great thickness, with entrances fortified by large, guarded gateways. In 1771, the nawab would begin work on a fortress described by scholar Banmali Tandon as ‘the greatest fortress erected up to then in the eighteenth century in not only Hindustan but the whole Gangetic basin’, with a design that was ‘at once revolutionary and traditional’.

In addition to the military and defensive structures, the nawab began work on palaces, gardens, and two large hunting parks. The most beautiful of the gardens, the Lal Bagh, had a splendid ornamented gateway, while the menagerie included all sorts of unusual creatures— gazelles, tigers, leopards, nilgai, Kabul sheep famous for their fine, white wool, Tibetan goats and more. The two large hunting parks on the outskirts of the city provided recreation for the nobility and also for the English and French contingents which had settled in Faizabad since 1764. The ponds in the parks ‘were stored with a variety of curious fishes, both exotic and domestic, with their fins and tails adorned with small golden rings’, whom the nawab delighted in feeding by hand, watching them leap above the water to catch the grains of rice. The expansive hunting grounds were also where the Meena bazars were held. The women of the zenana set up stalls, selling a variety of goods and sweets they had sourced, while the begums and noblewomen of Faizabad strolled through, their odhanis light as clouds, delighted as much by the bonhomie and chivvying good humour as by the items on offer. On one occasion, Nawab Begum was so delighted with the charm of a Meena bazar that she distributed 5,000 rupees amongst the nawab’s household. The English cantonment was on the western edge of the city while the French were companionably closer to the nawab’s palace, with Gentil having built a house next to the Anguri Bagh of the Qila itself.* Next to the palace of the nawab was a foundry, set up under the charge of Gentil, exclusively for the manufacture of a wide range of high-quality small arms as well as artillery pieces for Shuja’s army. ‘Employing some 500 persons, no armaments industry had ever been set up on such a scale in the history of the Mughal empire,’ writes Tandon, ‘and never had a native state produced such sophisticated European armaments.’ Outside Faizabad, the fields were neatly hedged by mud walls, laced with canals, while the horizon was dotted with groves of mango and tamarind trees, providing shade as well as a barrier against the blustery winds.

Excerpted with permission from The Lion and The Lily: The Rise and Fall of Awadh by Ira Mukhoty @2024AlephBooks