The French Connection

IN IRA MUKHOTY’S The Lion and the Lily: The Rise and Fall of Awadh (Aleph; 504 pages; ₹999), one travels back to 18th-century India, where British and French colonial forces wrestle for control of lucrative regions. The politics, culture, and architecture of the time come alive in a narrative whose vast and diverse cast includes the Nawabs and Begums of Awadh, key British and French military strate­gists, courtiers, travellers, opportunists, concubines, and art­ists. Mukhoty’s work shines a light on the unique autonomy Awadh maintained through careful political manoeuvring and successful warfare up until its annexation in 1856. After seizing the territory, the British went to extraordinary lengths to destroy buildings, manuscripts, and documents—signal­ling a profound anxiety around the pride and loyalty the people of the region had for their home.

Following on from her previous works, Daughters of the Sun: Empresses, Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire (2018), and Akbar: The Great Mughal (2020), in The Lion and the Lily, she turns her attention to a period of waning power and fragmentation for the Mughal empire and the emergence and success of Nawabi rule. Awadh (now constituting the north­eastern portion of Uttar Pradesh which includes important cultural and religious centres such as Lucknow and Ayodhya) continues to play a critical role in the battle for a secular India, and the book revisits a time whose politically inconvenient influence and significance on the present are among those being rapidly erased from public sight.

A striking and haunting juxtaposition is offered in The Lion and the Lily by placing a photograph of ruins in present-day Dilkusha next to a painting of a feast depicting the wealth and splendour of the third Nawab, Shuja-ud-Daula. Though the contrast cannot possibly reveal how different the life of the average citizen may have been, it insists on the acknowledg­ment of a culturally significant era that yielded incredible architecture and art. That much of the former is in ruins, and the latter in collections outside the country, speaks to the distance, chosen and imposed, that India has from its past.

When asked about these images, Mukhoty confesses, “As a writer of narrative history, I must walk a tightrope between historical authenticity, and the ability to induce emotion in my readers. I must reserve judgment as far as possible, but I can create context,…[and] hope to give the reader pause.” In Faizabad, she visited Nawabi monuments including the ruins of Shuja-ud-Daula’s palace on the banks of the Ganga, and Bahu Begum’s towering maqbara. “If I had not seen these buildings in person, and appreciated the scale of their majesty, and born witness to the beauty that remains even today, I would not have understood the immensity of their ambition. These buildings speak of a confidence, wealth and vision that can almost not be translated into words.”

A turning point in her own understanding of the Nawabs occurred when she spent time in Lucknow speaking to families who had lived there for generations. “No doubt…influenced… by largely colonial recordings of history, I viewed the nawabs with a degree of suspicion. These were men with immoderate appetites, or so I thought, profligate and debauched, decadent and effeminate,” she says. But the Lucknawi residents she spoke to remembered Asaf-ud-Daula in particular with deep affection. “This idea [of Asaf] as the most generous of the Nawabs is so pervasive that to this day there is a dictum, ‘jis ko na de maula, us ko de Asaf ud Daula.’ (He to whom God does not give, to him Asaf-ud-Daula will give.)”

These conversations also allowed her to “experience first-hand what is meant by Lucknawi ‘tehzeeb’, that ineffable sense of refined hospitality and charm, a very capacious and old-world sense of what it means to be a citizen of a city.” The residents articulated a sense that this way of life was under assault. She says, “There was also, undoubtedly, a sense of fraying splendour, of a world under siege, and it is a feel­ing that I have tried to recreate in The Lion and the Lily, as the relentless rapacity of the British East India Company slowly undermined everything the Nawabs and Begums were trying to achieve.”

The Lion and The Lily is the result of granular attention to detail. “I often feel that the work of a writer of narrative history is that of a detective.” She tries to educate herself as widely around a subject as possible—reading the work of musicologists, art historians, anthropologists, sometimes even archaeologists, and more. “Sometimes a stray line somewhere will startle me, and allow me to make connec­tions. For example, Nawab Saadat Ali Khan once scolded his stepmother Bahu Begum for speaking to ‘firanghee’ men. No male outsider, he thundered, had ever heard the sound of her voice. Then I remembered that a zenana insider, the writer Faiz Baksh, had written about how Bahu Begum had once chastised her brother so loudly that everyone outside could hear her voice.” That single sentence revealed to Mukhoty the temperament and power of Bahu Begum, simply from the fact that the timbre of her voice had once been recorded.

Mukhoty arrived at writing histories by way of writing mythological fiction, and she now realises that she wrote Song of Draupadi (2021) in a similarly forensic manner. She gathered all the information she could to make the world of ancient India feel as immediate and visceral as possible, from the food that was cooked to the omnipresent force of supersti­tions, the cadence of rituals, and the fabrics used. “Everything was anchored in meticulous research,” she says. At the time, she was deeply interested in the ways in which myths were used to control the lives of modern Indian women, and the many ways in which our society was shaped by a fictitious historical past. “The impulse to write in this [investigative] way comes from a certain level of immersion in a subject,” she explains, “of wanting to join as many dots as possible for the reader, to make connections in multiple directions so that the richness and complexity of a human life is recreated.”

ADDITIONALLY, AS THE daughter of a French woman who spoke exclusively to her in French, Mukhoty was uniquely placed and motivated to tell the story of French influence in 18th century India. She made extensive use of little-mined French archives from the time. She studied sources ranging from the surviving correspondence of military adventurer Benoit de Boigne in his family archives in Chambery, France, to the notes the ambitious bureaucrat Jean-Baptiste Chevalier left in the margins of his albums. The impassioned memoirs of an influential aristocrat and traveller, Count Louis Faidherbe de Modave, provided critical insight into the political and cultural context of the Mughal court as well as the country at large. Mukhoty’s French heritage allowed her to glean cultural prejudices and nuances in these writings. For example, Modave’s likening of Kashmiri courtiers to a community in France with an unfortunate reputation of being deceitful revealed that he had been duped by one.

These writings had been previously underutilised in established narratives about Awadh partly because “the victors of the war of empires, Britain,” had “glorified their own recordings.” Another unconventional source she turned to was Faiz Baksh’s account of the zenana of the Bahu Begum of Awadh. She says, “I also really enjoy looking at evidence from art history to supplement my understanding of an era. We have an absolute treasure in our miniature paintings, which are like tiny vaults of information about the society of their times.”

Mukhoty’s consumption of alternative histories has laid bare for her the deliberate whitewashing and obfuscation in the histo­ries she has always assumed to be “true” and complete. One that proved particularly revelatory was Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder which she describes as a “subversively brilliant work that exposes the absolute tyrannical patriarchy that Orwell implemented to dissimulate his wife Eileen’s phe­nomenal talent and contribution to his work.” Similarly, Marc David Baer’s The Ottomans startled her by challenging her west-centric view of history by “present[ing] the history of the Ottomans as inextricably intertwined with that of the West, not as a separate monolith defined simply in religious terms.”

She believes that the framing of history is on the cusp of an “explosion of what used to be called alternative histories, but which now have become simply histories. It is in­stead the old Western point of view that has become dated—the one that traced a linear line from Greece and Rome to the Enlightenment and to the modern Western Europe as the centre of the world.”

AwadhbookshistoryIra MukhotyThe Lion and the Lily: The Rise and Fall of Awadh