Transition periods in art history rarely present straightforward theses, and eighteenth-century South Asia is no exception. In the recent past this period was characterized more eloquently in terms of its failure rather than its success, as a cultural gulf stretching between waning Mughal power and an encroaching British one. Art historians have viewed this political crisis of the Mughal state as a corollary of an artistic crisis of style and composition—a primary concern being the dissolution of a unifying stylistic and cultural vision, the hallmark of the early modern Mughal atelier. Yet, as this book argues, when viewed from the margins of Mughal stylistic authority, the art of its provinces or subas emerges stronger and less refracted through the lens of Mughal ideas.

India’s Fabled City: The Art of Courtly Lucknow examines the dynamics of power and art, the relationship between artists and patrons, and the cross-cultural nature of artistic production in cosmopolitan societies over the course of a fateful century that was marked by the semi-autonomous rise of Mughal dominions and the ascendancy of the British East India Company to political power. This lavishly illustrated volume, with engaging essays by specialists, brings together topics ranging from poetry and music, architecture, photography, painting, decorative arts, textiles, and dress, capturing the myriad artistic achievements of the province of Awadh. Its emphasis is complementary to the accompanying exhibition, providing a context for the study of the vivid range of works drawn from collections across the globe.

Awadh’s coming of age, as Stephen Markel recognizes, was culturally indentured to the Mughal court at Delhi; its religious leanings were shaped by the dynasty’s Shia ancestry that originated in Iran; and it was sustained politically by the nawabs’ financial alliance with the British East India Company. Ruled by an enterprising dynasty of Shia nawabs, Awadh’s governor, Saadat Khan Burhan al-Mulk (r. 1722–1739), was the first subedar to appoint his own successor, an important step in establishing its regional autonomy, as historian Richard Barnett has argued (North India between Empires: Awadh, the Mughals, and the British, 1720–1801, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). Under Safdar Jang (r. 1739–1754), his nephew and son-in-law, the office of the nawab-wazir (prime minister) became imbued with a quasi-imperial status and, later, the suffix wazir was dropped altogether. Saadat Khan also conspired with the Persian Afsharid ruler Nadir Shah (r. 1736–1747) in 1739 to invade the Mughal capital at Delhi forcing the capitulation of the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah (r. 1719–1748), a move that resulted in an exodus of nobles, literati, and artists to the more politically stable provinces. The image of the Great Mughal with all its connotations of riches and opulence was adequately shattered when, after a tragic sack of Delhi, the ancestral wealth, along with Emperor Shah Jahan’s (r. 1628–1658) famous Peacock throne, the takht-i taus, was carted off on donkey back to Nadir Shah’s camp before the eyes of a grieving public.

The book charts the age of artistic boom at the two principal courts, Faizabad and Lucknow, though the latter city occupies the majority of the discussion. Faizabad, Awadh’s first capital under Nawab Shuja al-Daula (r. 1754–1775), is laid out as the site of initial experiments with the Mughal idiom, as a number of imperially trained artists settled there. For the emigrating literati, Mughal Delhi remained the standard of comparison. As Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam observe, exiled Mughal princes and Delhi poets made Awadh their new home even as they lamented their separation from the Mughal city. The Mughal mind-set, Malini Roy discusses, was predominant in the works of Mughal émigré artists such as Mir Kalan Khan (fl. 1734–1770) (see chronology of the artist’s works, especially “Lovers in a Landscape,” ca. 1760–70, The David Collection, Copenhagen, plate 16, 252) and Nidha Mal (fl. cs. 1735–1775) (for the last recorded discussion about Nidha Mal, see Patricia Bahree Baryiski, “Painting in Avadh in the 18th Century,” A. L. Dallapiccola and S. Zingel-Ave Lallemant, eds., Islam and Indian Regions, Stuttgart: Steiner, 1993, vol. 1, 351–66; also see, Itihasa Sangraha Aitihasik Tipane, pt. 1, no. 11 [September 1908]) at Faizabad, even as they diversified their practice to suit the needs of a nouveau riche clientele, primarily the nawab’s circle of Indian noblemen and European officers. The social barriers between Indian and European society were largely fluid. As Rosie Llewellyn-Jones discusses, Europeans married locally, adopted Indian manners and customs, employed Indian artists, and held important positions in the nawab’s court. The nawabs, too, embraced European goods and style and actively employed European artists such as Tilly Kettle, Johann Zoffany, and Ozias Humphry to paint for them. Robert Home, a prominent British artist, was the Nawab Ghazi al-Din Haidar’s (r. 1814–1827) primary court painter and designer. Europeans such as the French officer Jean Baptiste Gentil, the Swiss officer Antoine-Louis Polier, and the British civil servant Richard Johnson were among the group of avid patrons and collectors who amassed substantial collections of illuminated manuscripts, books, and paintings, and embellished these with examples of Mughal, Rajput, and Deccani works.

Roy’s essay offers a trajectory of paintings from Awadh—copies of Mughal works, portraits, court scenes, and landscapes—to trace the prevalence of a recognizable Awadh sub-style. Roy suggests that by the mid-1760s, painterly style developed its trademark qualities such as the “widespread use of aerial perspective to create distant landscape vistas in the backgrounds, complete with mountain ranges and small rounded bushes” noticeable in the work of key painters such as Polier’s chef de atelier, Mihr Chand (fl. 1759–1786) and others (Malini Roy, “Origins of the Late Mughal Painting Tradition in Awadh,” 165). The approach of Awadh painters working with myriad drawing conventions deserves greater reflection in this context given the idea of a prevailing artistic raison d’être at stake in the discussion. Tushara Bindu Gude’s analysis of Awadh’s geo-cultural identity as a result of the interaction of ideas from Delhi, Iran, and Europe offers a plausible approach. Gude frames the development of Awadh painting in terms of an expanded view of a “hybrid” cultural vision made up of “histories, relationships and processes,” drawing the focus to Awadh as a “place of artistic invention” (Tushara Bindu Gude, “Hybrid Visions: The Cultural Landscape of Awadh," 69; emphasis in original). It would be useful to further consider how the dynamic, and sometimes complex, working style of Awadhi painters resists classification into a particular idiom—take for example, the paratactic approach of painters such as Mir Kalan Khan (see Molly Emma Aitken, “Parataxis and the Practice of Re-use: From Mughal Margins to Mir Kalan Khan,” Archives of Asian Art, 59 (2009): 81–103; see also Irving L. Zupnick, “The ‘Paratactic’ Image in Egyptian Art,” Art Journal 22, no. 2 [Winter 1962–63]: 96–98) and other works where artists exerted greater creative control over their use of linear and multiple-point perspective for representing space in three dimensions—as observed in Mughal painting throughout, but more frequently in the seventeenth-century paintings of the Padshahnama (Ebba Koch, “The Hierarchical Principles of Shah-Jahani Painting,” in Milo Beach and Ebba Koch, with new translations by Wheeler Thackston, King of the World: The Padshahnama: An Imperial Mughal Manuscript from the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, London: Azimuth, 1997, 130–43 and, especially, 137–42; see also Milo Beach, “Introduction,” 15–19). The marked transitions within painting practices of manuscript painters in the eighteenth-century also offers an opportunity for an art-historical reassessment of the umbrella term “Company Painting” where such paintings have, until now, solely been understood as products of European taste (Mildred Archer and Graham Parlett, Company Paintings: Indian Paintings of the British Period, London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1992, 11; for the work of manuscript painters as mapmakers in Awadh and Delhi, see Yuthika Sharma, “From Miniatures to Monuments: Picturing Shah Alam’s Delhi 1771–1806,” in Alka Patel and Karen Leonard, eds., Indo-Muslim Cultures in Transition, Leiden: Brill, 2012, 111–38; Chanchal Dadlani, “The ‘Palais Indiens’ collection of 1774: Representing Mughal Architecture in Late-Eighteenth Century India,” in Nebahat Avcıoğlu and Finbarr Barry Flood, eds., “Globalizing Cultures: Art and Mobility in the Eighteenth Century,” Ars Orientalis 39 (2010): 175–97). A more streamlined vision of the arts, the book argues, appeared after Lucknow became the new capital after 1775, under Shuja’s son Asaf al-Daula (r. 1775–1797) and his successors. The authors see this later phase as perpetuating a ”gilded age”—the forging of a conspicuous aesthetic vision centering on lavish patronage, courtly splendor, and literary flourish—one that received its wish fulfillment with the assumption of an independent throne by Ghazi al-Din Haidar as King of Awadh in 1819.

Lucknow’s Urdu poetry and its expressive culture from this period, discussed by Carla Petievich, acquired a measure of self-consciousness too. This was conveyed through the idea of Lakhnawiyat or Lucknow-ness, the self-expression in Lucknow society that centered on nazakat or delicacy. Peter Manuel’s discussion of North Indian classical music and semi-classical genres used in dance performances or nautches, the mainstay of elite entertainment, provides a sense of the developments within music culture at the court of King Wajid Ali Shah (r. 1847–1856) at Lucknow. The popularity of parodic variations of normative ghazal poetry of Urdu known as rekhti, court drama and satire, music, and tawaifs (courtesans) altogether informed contemporary biases, as well as later characterizations, of Lakhnawiyat and its politesse as effeminate.

The luxury arts and textiles of Awadh are examined for their strong formal relationship with later Mughal and Deccani designs but with key points of inventiveness that lent them a unique sensibility. Markel discusses the prevalence of decorative floral imagery, especially the adaptation of the Mughal single flowering motif and the paired fish emblem, the mahi-ye maratib (Fish of Dignity). Markel observes how Awadh nawabs vociferously adopted the mahi-ye maratib, a Mughal honorary insignia first awarded to Saadat Khan by Muhammad Shah, as their dynastic leitmotif. Rosemary Crill examines Awadh’s textile tradition exemplified by the light jamdani weaves, chikan-work embroidery, and heavy, gold embroidered furnishings. The dress culture at court, Crill suggests, was a variation on the prevailing Mughal style worn at Delhi, which by the nineteenth century acquired its distinctive flamboyance with lavish use of gold embroidery and decorations featuring gilt metal, sequins, fringes, pearl, and glass beads. Awadh nawabs and elites could be easily recognized in their characteristic headwear—a variety of form-fitting caps accessorized, at times, with jeweled turban bands (goshpech).

The architectural heritage of Awadh, Catherine Asher argues, also became increasingly refined and distinct from Mughal Delhi in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Analyzing built expressions of piety and authority in the region, Asher discusses the distinctive architectural type of the imambara (European-styled mansions and gardens) that flourished in Lucknow. Innovated in South Asia and consisting mainly of a large domed or vaulted hall, imambaras also featured a freestanding mosque and residential chambers. As a Shia dynasty, the Awadh nawabs actively patronized the building of imambaras for the recitation of poetry and to facilitate mourning rituals during the month of Muharram that was associated with the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Husain (killed in 680). The coexistence of palaces and imambaras along with Hindu and Jain temples pointed to the rich diversity of forms patronized by Lucknow’s elite. Lucknow’s Shia architectural heritage and its elite were popular themes of photography in the city. Sophie Gordon sheds light on the career of the hitherto un-celebrated local photographer Ahmad Ali Khan, the keeper of the Husainabad Imambara at Lucknow. Ahmad Ali’s role as the court photographer under Wajid Ali Shah reveals a body of compelling portrait studies of the royal family and harem, as well as architectural views of the city. The photographer’s perceived “defection” to the ranks of “mutineers” during the Indian Uprising of 1857 is a telling segue into the precedence of a British vision of Lucknow’s association with the Mutiny, which was championed by European photographers such as Felice Beato in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Where Lucknow delighted in an aesthetic zenith of its expressive culture, architecture, and the luxury arts, its “manneristic, rococo sophistication of exquisite refinement” (Peter Manuel, “Music in Lucknow’s Gilded Age,” 244) eventually elicited criticism from its own. As Alam and Subrahmanyam point out, Lucknow’s embroilment in a cultural bias of decline, excess, and self-indulgence was a powerful hermeneutic guiding the hand of later historiographies of the city. While historians have re-addressed such biases, a parallel reassessment with respect to the region’s arts is in its formative stage. India’s Fabled City makes an important contribution to the cultural epistemology of eighteenth-century studies in South Asia, bridging the transition from Mughal to British rule in the subcontinent. It is by no means a simplistic self-fulfilling tautology of the empowerment of rising British interests in India. Instead, it highlights the resilience of the region’s cultural forces to withstand powerful externalities and its creative capacity to assimilate them into its unique fold.

Following a century of visual and cultural ebullience, Awadh’s fall after 1857 paralleled the upheaval in Mughal Delhi as Company administration transitioned into Crown rule. The last nawab of Lucknow, Wajid Ali Shah, although exiled to Calcutta, did not suffer the miserable fate of the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah II, who died in Burma with much of his family. At Delhi, the Mughal dynasty’s demise was a bookend to a century of a remarkable synthesis of Indo-Persian and European painting. But that is another story waiting to be told.