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@ +฀ChaptEr 5฀∂ 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 182 ∂ gardEns of EmpirE 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 + 183 gardEns of mEmory 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...

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