Awadh

A Mughal province that became a kingdom by ceasing to send its revenue to Delhi, and was annexed for being badly governed by a company that wanted its land. Saadat Khan was appointed governor in 1722 and made the post hereditary; his successors stopped remitting revenue, kept their own army, and by the middle of the century were independent in everything but the coinage and the Friday prayer. Awadh was among the richest agricultural territories in India, and that made it the East India Company's most important client. Defeat at Buxar in 1764 turned the nawab into a subsidiary ally paying for Company troops he did not command. Each subsequent treaty took more: half the territory in 1801 to cover the subsidy, and the rest in 1856. Lucknow under the later nawabs was the centre of a distinct culture - Urdu poetry, kathak dance, the marsiya elegies of Shia mourning, an architecture of enormous imambaras built partly as famine relief. Wajid Ali Shah, a composer and patron who was deposed in 1856 on grounds of misgovernment, rebuilt that court in miniature in exile at Calcutta. The annexation was among the immediate causes of the rebellion of 1857, and Lucknow was held against the British for most of a year by an administration in the name of his eleven-year-old son. The kingdom is dated here to 1858 rather than to the annexation of 1856, because a government in its name held its capital and its revenue for nine months after the annexing power said it had ceased to exist. The kingdom is also the clearest case of a doctrine. Dalhousie annexed Indian states on two grounds - lapse, when a ruler died without a natural heir, and misgovernment - and Awadh was taken on the second, by a Company that had spent ninety years extracting its revenue and blocking its reform. Talukdars lost their estates in the settlement that followed, sepoys from Awadh made up a large share of the Bengal army and lost their privileged legal standing, and both groups fought in 1857. The annexation is the standard example, in British and Indian historiography alike, of a policy that produced the rebellion it was supposed to prevent.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history