There was a time when I would meet Ira Mukhoty frequently. We had published books on the Mughals at the same time and would often be part of the same festivals or on the same panels. Then came COVID, the festivals stopped, the panels shifted online. We continued working on the Mughals — by an odd twist of fate, on the same Mughal, Akbar — but it was after half a decade that I met Mukhoty again, on a muggy July afternoon to talk about her newest book: The Lion and the Lily, a sprawling account of the rise and fall of Awadh, featuring an enthralling cast of characters — the proud Nawab Shuja ud Daula, his formidable wife and mother, Bahu Begum and Nawab Begum, and his eclectic son, Asaf; assorted and increasingly aggressive Governors General of the East India Company alongside an array of adventuring Frenchmen in Hindustan; and, of course, the Mughals in tragic decline.
Ira Mukhoty
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Miguel Oliveira
What was it like to go from the Mughal empire at its great rise under Akbar to the time of its greatest pathos? “It did feel very personal to me,” says Mukhoty, “the record of how very decrepit the empire and the emperor had become. But we must remember that these records are made by European men, often to show the empire in a decrepit state to justify their own incursion into the country. The fact is that while the Mughal centre was crumbling, states like Awadh, Murshidabad, Hyderabad, Banaras, were all coming up. So yes, while it was dismaying to see how the once mightiest empire in the world had come to this sorry end, that culture by no means ended — it migrated, with poets, dancers, writers, warriors, statesmen, to the so-called sub-imperial centres, places like Awadh, where the old culture gained a new vitality from different influences — for example, the Shia influence. But sadly we are not told this story. We are told the story of the gradual decline of Hindustan from Nadir Shah onwards till the Brits had the great idea to save us and bring us railways and all kinds of civilising things.”
Masters of spin
While reading the book and during our conversation, it is impossible to miss Mukhoty’s anger with British colonisers, what she often refers to as the venality, greed and corruption of the men who built the British Raj. In fact, her book begins with the British destroying evidence of their history in India as they prepare to leave in 1947. Did they, in the end, have a guilty awareness of what they had done?
Emperor Shah Alam was forced to remain in Allahabad for more than 12 years, being undermined and bullied by the East India Company.
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“I think so. They had just gone through the Bengal famine of 1942, apart from many other atrocities. It is impossible that they would not have known that there would be a reckoning. After all, they cared a lot about their reputation, and I see the Brits as the best masters of spin that ever existed. We are all sitting in post-colonial countries with this nostalgia about our colonisers. How does that come about? They knew what to keep away, what to destroy and what to tell people in its lieu.”
The busy world of the Awadhi zenana, where elite women play chess, and paan is passed around.
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The British didn’t just erase their own guilty past, they also re-wrote Indian history. Mukhoty’s book traces some of this re-writing, like the demonisation of Tipu Sultan and of Muslims generally. Reading those passages, you are struck by the irony of how our current ‘decolonising’, ‘nationalist’ discourse parrots the animosities that British colonisers left behind. “We really need to look at the myths that we have been left with,” says Mukhoty. “To understand our past, but also to see the repercussions that they have today. The British were threatened by the elite Muslims whom they displaced. The Muslims were going to be the enemy, they were othered very clearly.”
Culinary etiquette reached extraordinary heights under the nawabs of Awadh, with food being sent from six separate kitchens.
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Rich cultural legacy
I’m eating a late lunch of omelette while we talk — poor substitute for the flaky breads and melting kebabs that the great chefs of Awadh produced for their patrons. Cuisine, art, music and tradition are part of the fabric of Mukhoty’s book. Her description of the ceremonies around Muharram stand out, particularly its resonance among Hindus: how Imam Hussain was seen as Rama, Caliph Yazid as Ravana. Her affection for Lucknow, the city where at least some of this culture survives, is palpable. “People often ask, ‘What is left of Lucknow?’ So much has been destroyed because it was a centre of resistance in 1857. What is left of this culture is in the people. I was lucky to be welcomed to many homes, some who were noble families, some who have fallen to penury, others who are ordinary Lucknawis, even pan sellers on the road, they all have this extremely delicate way of life, so hospitable and generous, capacious and welcoming. And there is a sense of nostalgia in them, a sense of something having been lost. But the spaces have really gone to ruin. If it goes on this way, with our political leadership, I don’t know what will remain of Lucknow.”
A dance performance in the Awadhi court.
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In a book teeming with characters, readers will find their favourites. I particularly enjoyed Asaf’s mother and grandmother — Nawab Begum and Bahu Begum. Immensely powerful, they supported the Raja of Banaras, Chait Singh’s war against the East India Company, and suffered the vicious revenge of Warren Hastings. Then there is Noor Begum, concubine to a French mercenary, Benoit de Boigne, and abandoned by him in an English village where she raised de Boigne’s children. During her travels researching The Lion and the Lily, Mukhoty tracked down the Begum’s grave to the grounds of an old church, where rows upon rows of graves in a line are interrupted by one grave at an angle, facing Mecca.
An oil painting of Asaf ud Daula in a white muslin dress, with necklaces and armlets of pearls, rubies and uncut emeralds. He wears the typical Lucknow headdress of a red turban ornamented with a tinsel and velvet appliqué band attached by a jewelled frontlet.
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Heroes and villains
I assume Mukhoty has a favourite character, and certainly a favourite villain.
“I thought that Asaf ud Daula would be more debauched than he turned out to be. We are always told that rulers were too effeminate or they were womanisers or gay — make up your mind. Which was it? I spoke with the late Salim Kidwai in Lucknow and he said that Asaf ud Daula was homosexual, everyone in Lucknow knows. The accounts are so garbled because the Brits could not bring themselves to say what was happening and were confused themselves.”
She found the nawab “absolutely charming”. For how he dealt with all his enemies. For his generosity. You can still hear it said in Lucknow: Jis ko na de maula, usko de Asaf ud Daula, Asaf helps those whom even God has abandoned. “And how much he did for the arts — he created a Shia renaissance. The message of Shia-ism is how a small community under assault managed to vanquish all odds. I think he did this to tell the Brits, ‘We will always survive’.”
The simple grave of Asaf al-Daula under a canopy inside the Imambara, with imams reading the Koran. The hall is brilliantly lit with coloured girandoles attached to the parapet beneath the ceiling, and by three rows of chandeliers suspended from the latter.
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Her biggest villain was Claude Martin, and readers will agree. The man whose name survives through a chain of elite schools has a history that includes not only racism but paedophilia. “I was shocked by his indecency,” says Mukhoty. “It’s very hard for me to say anything positive about him except that, okay, he had his great collection of botanical paintings.”
In her descriptions of Martin and other contemporary Europeans, Mukhoty reverses the colonial gaze, shifting it from the so-called degenerate nawabs to the truly degenerate colonisers. “The nawabs were intelligent men, using their enormous resources in all kinds of canny ways”: forging diplomatic contacts, building a vibrant culture. “It was not degenerate at all. I don’t understand how we’ve allowed ourselves to buy into this narrative.”
Rumi Darwaza, built by Nawab Asaf ud Daula in 1784 in Lucknow.
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The Lion and the Lily; Ira Mukhoty, Aleph, ₹999.
The reviewer is the author of ‘Akbar of Hindustan’ and ‘Jahangir: An Intimate Portrait of a Great Mughal’.
