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Empires rarely die at a stroke. They subside, and in the subsiding, their provinces quietly become countries. The most consequential such becoming on the Gangetic plain began in 1722, when the Mughal court appointed a Persian noble from Nishapur, Saadat Khan, titled Burhan ul Mulk, as governor of the rich but turbulent province of Awadh. Within a generation his house had converted a governorship into a hereditary kingdom in all but name, and for the next century and a quarter the Nawabs of Awadh ruled the heart of the plain, patrons of a culture whose glow has outlasted their state, and partners, increasingly captive ones, of the foreign company that would finally swallow them.
Saadat Khan’s founding was a soldier’s work, breaking the province’s defiant rajas and settling its revenue, and his dynasty’s Shia faith, carried from Persia, would stamp Awadh’s court culture permanently, the Muharram observances and imambara architecture this series has already met. His successor Safdar Jang rose higher still, becoming wazir of the empire itself, the family thereafter styling themselves Nawab Wazir, viceroys of a Mughal throne that increasingly reigned at their sufferance, and his tomb in Delhi is the last great garden mausoleum of the Mughal line, the dynasty of Awadh closing the architectural sentence the Taj had crowned.
The third Nawab collided with the future. Shuja ud Daula, ambitious and formidable, sheltered the fugitive Bengal Nawab and the wandering Mughal emperor, and marched with them against the East India Company, the new power that had seized Bengal’s revenues. At Buxar in 1764 the combined armies were broken by the Company’s smaller force, a battle historians rank with Plassey and above it, for Plassey won the Company a province and Buxar won it India’s centre. Yet the peace that followed shaped Awadh’s strange fate. By the Treaty of Allahabad in 1765, Clive restored Shuja’s kingdom, minus districts and plus a large indemnity, preferring a buffer to a conquest, and Awadh entered its long condition, sovereign in ceremony, allied in form, and paying, endlessly paying, for Company troops stationed on its soil, the subsidy system that would bleed the treasury and hollow the state.
What the Nawabs did with their remaining century is the paradox this series lingers on. Asaf ud Daula, moving the capital from Faizabad to Lucknow in 1775, inaugurated the golden age of the culture batch’s Lucknow article, and his most famous work answered a catastrophe, for during the terrible famine of 1784 he built the colossal Bara Imambara substantially as relief employment, tradition adding that gentlefolk ashamed of labour were set to work by night, the monument thus a welfare scheme wearing a crown, and its unsupported vaulted hall remains among the largest of its kind on earth. Around such patronage the court drew poets, musicians, cooks, and craftsmen from a declining Delhi, and Lucknow became the subcontinent’s capital of refinement precisely as its state’s sinews were being cut.
The cutting was methodical. Warren Hastings’s dealings with the Begums of Oudh, the dowager queens whose treasure was extracted under duress to meet the Company’s demands, supplied Burke with articles for the great impeachment, and in 1801 Wellesley forced the cession of half the kingdom outright, the Ceded Provinces that became the Company’s doab, the state of this series’ fifth article assembling itself from Awadh’s amputations. What remained was a kingdom surrounded, its army capped, its succession supervised, its treasury a reserve the Company drew on at need, and in 1819 the Nawab Ghazi ud Din Haidar, with British encouragement, took the title of King, a crown that formalised independence from the Mughal fiction at the price of deeper dependence on the Company fact.
Historians have argued the balance of the Nawabi ever since, the older colonial telling of decadence and misrule, written largely by the annexers, against the revision that finds in Awadh a functioning, prosperous, culturally brilliant state whose fiscal strangulation was the Company’s work, its famous extravagance the display economy of a court denied a foreign policy. The truth this series carries forward is structural. Awadh was the laboratory of indirect rule, the model of the subsidised, supervised, slowly consumed Indian state, and its final consumption, the annexation of 1856 that the batch’s later article details, would detonate the greatest rebellion the British empire ever faced, on this same ground. The kingdom inside the empire, in the end, brought the empire down around its own grave.
