Background:

The principal city during the Muslim era was the embodiment of the court and political exigencies often made the king to relocate the court, deserting the city that had grown up around it and inspiring a new city to bloom.¹

Lucknow was already a flourishing town by the sixteenth century when the fleeing Mughal emperor Humayun had taken refuge and had received from the sympathetic townsfolk ten thousand rupees and fifty horses. When Nawab Asaf ud Dowlah moved the court of Awadh from Faizabad to Lucknow in 1775 in order to escape his domineering and politically influential mother, it was as if the kernel of the court shed its old husk and acquired a new one and the city largely grew in and around the existing town to accommodate the influx of the court.

 Lucknow used to be the most prosperous pre-colonial city in the 19th century as the capital of Oudh it commanded the richest hinterland. Only the three colonial port cities exceeded it in size or affluence. After 1857, Lucknow, however, had a different fate; it was truncated, pruned while the new masters, whose needs inspired a differently built environment, grafted onto it a new urban species to create a ‘hybrid’ city that was both peculiar to and typical of the colonial era.