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One day in the hot early weeks of May 1760, Claude Martin gave up. He abandoned his post in the bodyguard of the Comte de Lally, France’s commander in chief in India, climbed onto his horse, and trotted out of the French settlement of Pondicherry. It was the height of the Seven Years War. All around the town the East India Company army under Colonel Eyre Coote lay encamped, besieging the French into submission. As far as Martin was concerned, the time had come. He crossed the hedge of prickly pears that bounded the settlement and surrendered himself into the hands of a nearby British detachment.⁶³

Colonel Coote was used to defections like these. (The East India Company army was hardly immune from defections itself.) Since he had routed Lally at the battle of Wandewash in January, the situation of the French in South India had grown desperate. While Coote and his men ringed Pondicherry to the west, Admiral Pococke brought seven warships into the waters to the east, completing a blockade around the settlement. Inside the city walls circumstances were still worse. No provisions, no money, no defenses, no ships, and no morale: all that the starving, defeatist French population had, and all that united them, was passionate hatred for Lally, who would later be tried and beheaded in France for his troubles. So many French soldiers deserted during those terrible months of 1760 that Coote decided to create a “Free French Company” in the (already multinational) Madras army to contain them. It was to this regiment that Coote attached Martin, who brought his new masters eight years’ experience soldiering and some technical skills as an engineer. In 1763, the young Frenchman was formally commissioned ensign in the East India Company army. There was no going back. From that day on, Martin was a Frenchman by birth but a Briton by choice.

When Martin stumbled out of the cactus hedge and into the Company army, he knew that he was moving still farther from the medieval streets of Lyon’s Presqu’île, where he was born—away from his family’s vinegar business and a good bourgeois life. This, he knew, was a step not just away from France but away from the French. Yet not even Martin could have predicted that his path with the British would take him to Lucknow, to a fortune of almost half a million pounds, and to a future as one of the eighteenth century’s greatest collectors. Where Polier had made himself an Orientalist and an Oriental, Martin took advantage of Lucknow’s opportunities—to make money, among other things—to reinvent himself as a Briton, a gentleman, and a European connoisseur.

After many years in North India, fighting and working as a surveyor under James Rennell, Claude Martin arrived in Lucknow in 1776 to take up a new job as superintendent of the nawab’s arsenal. His appointment was due to the Company’s increased military presence in Awadh; the arsenal would be casting guns for the Company’s own troops. It also hinted at the Company’s rather ambivalent position toward continental Europeans: having forced Asaf to dismiss his father’s “French” advisers, here it was inserting its own Frenchborn agent instead. Martin, at any rate, a keen opportunist, had lobbied hard for the posting and welcomed the chance to get rich off the concessions and soft money that abounded in Awadh.

Martin had no more compunctions than anybody else about milking the nawab for favors. But he owed his tremendous fortune primarily to a natural talent for business, and relentless energy in exercising it. He drew rent on more than a dozen properties in Lucknow, including the Company residency, and various estates around Awadh. He also earned a hefty interest income by lending money to various Europeans, to say nothing of the profligate nawab. Martin invested some of his money in Company stocks and bonds; mostly, though, he pursued an export business, which ranged from small ventures in sugar, shawls, and lapis lazuli, to a sustained private trade in piece goods and indigo. From 1791, Martin manufactured and exported the blue dye himself, at his Najafgarh estate.⁶⁴

In 1800Martin’s net worth was over £400,000 (40 lakhs of rupees), which made him about as rich as the great nabobs of the 1770s, and quite possibly the richest European then in India. Like a latter-day Robert Clive, he plowed his money into land, houses, and political influence. His estates stretched over a vast reach of northeastern India, from Lucknow to Cawnpore, Benares, Chandernagore, and Calcutta. At Najafgarh (which he bought from Polier in 1786), Martin was a gentleman farmer, tending his indigo fields and growing roses for attar. In Lucknow, he based himself in a lavish house of his own design, the Farhat Baksh, which ingeniously channeled water from the River Gomti to cool its rooms. This was only one of many buildings Martin designed in and around Lucknow. During the last years of his life, he built his own equivalent of Claremont: the sprawling mansion of Constantia, on the outskirts of the city. Also like Clive, Martin recognized that he needed to protect his fortune with friends in high places. On the one hand, he made sure to cultivate connections with Warren Hastings and a range of top East India Company officials. On the other, he stayed close to the nawab Asaf ud-Daula, who had the power to grant him lucrative concessions, just as Martin was able to supply the nawab in turn with ready cash. Theirs was a marriage of convenience: they did not especially like each other, but they knew they would be worse off alone.

Unlike Clive, Martin does not seem to have been interested in power simply for its own sake. But he was interested in virtually everything else. Soldier, trader, banker, entrepreneur, farmer, inventor, architect, Claude Martin really was one of those Enlightenment jacks-of-all-trades for whom nothing was too dull or difficult to try. Curiosity sparked in him. And for every interest, there was an object to own. Most of all, Claude Martin was a passionate collector. Acquisition was his addiction. The best surviving testament to Martin’s obsession resides in an inventory of all his belongings, compiled when he died. Five or six pages would be more than enough to list all the possessions that the average European in India owned. For Martin, it took eighty. In column after column of this inventory, what comes through so powerfully is the sense of a man whose life was lived in and through objects. Every one of Martin’s interests is reflected in his things—and none more conspicuously than his quest for European refinement.⁶⁵

Some of what Claude Martin owned would not have been out of place in Robert Clive’s Indian chest: the keepsakes of a soldiering career, acquired in the line of duty. While on campaign in Bhutan in 1773, for instance, he picked up some “Bootan books pictures reliques etc.” by rather proactive means—according to a French officer, who later saw “many rarities that [Captain Martin] appropriated to himself by pillage from several temples of the Bhutanese. He even gave me several manuscripts that he pulled from the hollows of statues.…”⁶⁶ Like his friends Wombwell and Polier, Martin also collected Indian manuscripts in Lucknow, of which he owned some five hundred. Indeed it was even said—by a critic, who accused Martin of doing all this for the sole purpose of finding things to bribe people with—that Martin “ransacked the remotest tracts of Cashmere, Nepaul, Candahar, and other regions, from the frontiers of Oude to the confines of Tartary” for objects, using “Catholic missionaries, Hindoo merchants, Mussulman caravans” as his agents.⁶⁷

But the really unusual items in Martin’s collection came from a more distant, if less exotic, source. For Martin did not acquire only the sorts of weapons, manuscripts, paintings, and decorative objects that many Europeans collected in India. He also managed to collect everything that a European gentleman connoisseur would possess back in Europe. It was a staggering assemblage. There were enough paintings to fill two houses, to say nothing of the thousand-odd fashionable prints and caricatures or the extensive assortment of coins and medals. Martin decorated his rooms with Wedgwood medallions, marble busts (of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, no less), and a gleaming array of mirrors, clocks, and chandeliers. He owned cutting-edge scientific apparatus and a substantial cabinet of natural history specimens. And alongside his collection of Indian manuscripts, Martin could set what was probably the largest European library in India, some 3,500 volumes in English and French. In short, Claude Martin had all the trappings of a European connoisseur and man of fashion. Only he had them in Lucknow.

Four or five times a year, in an office on a Bloomsbury side street,William and Thomas Raikes, agents, would break open Martin’s wax labore et constantia seal, decipher his erratic syntax, and set about fulfilling their client’s latest wishes. Raikes and Company soldMartin’s indigo, bought him East India stock, handled his bills of exchange, and managed his cash account. They also fulfilled his insatiable demand for objects, shipping him everything from “some caricature prints to the amount, as by invoice, about ten pounds sterling. And also some colored prints of the best sort…”; to glass lampshades: “Send me about forty dozens,”Martin ordered. “My servants break one with another about 30 to 40 per month, what makes about that number for the year.”⁶⁸ On Martin’s orders, Raikes often handed twenty or thirty pounds to Johan Zoffany (who had returned to Britain from Lucknow in 1789) to pick up “any curious thing he may think curious to buy for me.” Zoffany also vetted scientific instruments for his old patron, which were invariably the most troublesome items onMartin’s wish lists. A pair of Herschel telescopes arrived in Lucknow missing “the terrestrial apparatus…which without I can’t make any use of them.” A “philosophical instrument for making oxygene air” had “no book of instructions with it; by what mean, I must find out how to make it.” As for the steam enginesMartin ordered, “I can’t manage to make the two you sent me to play at all.” There was one serious drawback to being the only man in Awadh with such equipment: nobody was around to show Martin what to do with it. (ButMartin did manage to launch hot air balloons in Lucknowin 1785, just two years after the first balloon ascent by the Montgolfier brothers in Paris.)

Zoffany, and other Lucknow friends who had returned to Europe, did more than send Martin collectibles. They invited him into an international network of connoisseurs. Through them, through letters, and through the constant traffic of objects across the seas, Martin was able to join an elite brotherhood of collectors, even at thousands of miles’ remove. That the noted antiquarian Charles Townley was one of Martin’s correspondents and suppliers shows how high his contacts reached. (Townley, for his part, owned several pieces of medieval Hindu sculpture, which made him one of only a handful of British connoisseurs collecting Indian objects—though antiquarian interest in ancient India was to be heightened by Jones’s discovery of Indo-European.) If Martin had brought his collection back to Europe, speculates his biographer, he might have been another Sir John Soane, the earlynineteenth-century architect and magpie collector, whose vast and various collection can still be seen, virtually unchanged, in his house in London’s Lincoln’s Inn.⁶⁹

Yet in Lucknow Martin remained. As an archetypal man of the Enlightenment on an imperial frontier, Claude Martin invites comparison with another inveterate collector and polymathic gentleman: Thomas Jefferson, who carved out his own patch of Enlightenment on the edge of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. It was the sheer anomaly of the setting—this island of European connoisseurship in the center of India—that made Claude Martin’s collection so remarkable. He lived at a time when it took an average of six months for letters to pass between Calcutta and London, and longer still from Lucknow, several hundred miles inland, which was neither on the Ganges nor the Grand Trunk Road. If, that is, they got there at all. Ships could sink. (Lloyd’s of London—and with it, the modern insurance industry—was founded for just this reason.) They could be wildly blown off course. Cargo could be jettisoned in storms. And if the rats and weevils didn’t get to it, perhaps the water would. Even if you were lucky enough to receive your chests, you might unpack them only to find a mess of sea-stained splinters and shards. Yet in spite of all the hazards and delays, transcontinental crossing went on regularly, vigorously, and profitably. Claude Martin’s collection offers splendid material proof that “globalization” of a sort was alive and well centuries before the word was coined.

A Frenchman in British and Indian service, and a newcomer to wealth, Claude Martin was another of those men on the margins for whom collecting provided a means of reinvention and made a public statement. Martin did not collect in the way that Antoine Polier so remarkably had, effectively living like a Mughal aristocrat. His own ambitions more closely resembled Robert Clive’s, in that he sought the life and status of a European nobleman instead. Nevertheless, Martin also very consciously intended to make his collection work for him within India as well as among Europeans beyond it. “Here I am at present among the Great Ones,” he boasted to the Bengal councillor Philip Francis in 1780: general Sir Eyre Coote, who in 1760 had held the renegade young Frenchman’s fate in his hands, was now Martin’s houseguest.⁷⁰ And while collecting helped make Martin a king among his peers, it bound him ever more closely to the king next door: Asaf ud-Daula.

Claude Martin’s collection would have been impressive even in Europe; encountering it in Lucknow left some visitors rubbing their eyes in disbelief. But the incongruity of Martin’s collection was nothing compared with the greatest museum in town: Asaf ud-Daula’s own. To enter the Aina Khana, or “Mirror Hall,” of the nawab’s palace was to encounter yet another of those fabulous Lucknow fusions. From floor to ceiling, the place was packed with “English objects of all kinds—watches, pistols, guns, glassware, furniture, philosophical machines, all crowded together with the confusion of a lumber room.”⁷¹ Giant mirrors multiplied every twinkle of the chandeliers overhead. The space was alive with the whir, tick, and chime of dozens of clocks and watches.

Stunning it absolutely was—and to most Western visitors, in stunningly poor taste. Nobody doubted the quality of some individual items. But taken together, the collection was remarkable chiefly “for its ridiculous assemblage of finery and trumpery jumbled together.”⁷² “He is fond of lavishing his treasures…above all, on fine European guns, lustres, mirrors, and all sorts of European manufactures, more especially English,” explained one Englishman,

from a two-penny deal board painting of ducks and drakes, to the elegant paintings of a Lorraine or a Zophani; and from a little dirty paper lantern, to mirrors and lustres which cost £2000 or £3000 each…Asuf-ud-Dowlah is absurdly extravagant and ridiculously curious; he has no taste and less judgement…[B]ut he is nevertheless extremely solicitous to possess all that is elegant and rare; he has every instrument and every machine, of every art and science; but he knows none.⁷³

This particular observer reckoned that Asaf ud-Daula spent some £200,000 per year on his collection. (The observer, for his part, collected a tidy annual salary of £1,800 from the nawab with “nothing to do but to enjoy his frequent entertainments of shooting, hunting, dancing, cock fighting, and dinners.”) Altogether, the Aina Khana offered yet another sign—as if any were needed—of the nawab’s excess.

But what most European visitors did not know was that the Aina Khana wasn’t just an expression of what they saw as Asaf ud-Daula’s incurable childish whimsy. It was part and parcel of the culture of Indian kingship. Kings make collections, and collections make kings. To own rare, precious, sacred, or just plain numerous things is a virtually universal emblem of royal power.⁷⁴ In many parts of the Muslim world, collecting meaningful and valuable objects enhanced a sovereign’s personal charisma, or barakat, and with it, his ability to command the loyalty and admiration of his subjects. In much the way that European princes assembled cabinets of curiosities, the Mughal emperors formed libraries and treasure-houses, called toshkhana. Elsewhere in India, regional rulers followed suit; the nizams of Hyderabad, for instance, started a toshkhana in the eighteenth century that would develop into India’s finest collection of jewels.

Never one to be modest where immodesty would do, Asaf ud-Daula embraced the genre with characteristic extravagance. Elaborate weapons crammed his armory, his jewel house shimmered with gorgeous stones. In his library, album after album of miniature paintings confirmed his princely cultivation. “Most of them are antique productions,” noted one British visitor, who generously allowed that “though widely different in manner from European matters, neither taste nor elegance are wanting to these compositions.”⁷⁵ For £1,500 (about twenty times the price of an expensive Old Master painting in contemporary London), the nawab acquired one of the finest Mughal illuminated manuscripts ever produced, straight out of the Delhi imperial library: the Padshahnama, a history of Shah Jahan’s rule, made for the emperor Shah Jahan himself. In 1797, Asaf ud-Daula presented the sumptuous manuscript to the new governor-general, Sir John Shore. “It was fit for a Royal library,” said Shore, declining the gift for his own collection; he forwarded it to King George III’s library at Windsor, where it remains today.⁷⁶

Asaf ud-Daula was certainly not the only Indian ruler to collect European objects. As early as the 1750s, for instance, the Maharaja of Bhuj, in Gujarat, built an extraordinary “European” palace (in truth, about as European as chinoiserie was Chinese) in order to house a collection of European art. The collection had been formed for him in part by his chief artisan, who had studied painting in Holland, and returned there several times to buy art for the king.⁷⁷ Tipu Sultan of Mysore, also questing for barakat, had European objects in his toshkhana, too. But Asaf was surely the only Indian ruler to see a major European collection up close, and that, of course, was Claude Martin’s. From cladding his walls with paintings by Zoffany to enthusiastically acquiring clocks and mechanisms of all kinds, Claude Martin was Asaf ud-Daula’s closest model, and one of the nawab’s key suppliers. He was also Asaf ud-Daula’s greatest rival. Collecting seems to have been something of a competitive sport between the nawab and the nabob. The nawab, it was said,

could never bear to hear that any person possessed any thing superior to his own. He had a large room filled with mirrors, amongst which were two of the largest size that could be made in Great Britain…The Colonel [Martin] seeing them, immediately wrote to France where plate glass is cast of larger dimensions…and procured two of the largest size, which he sold to the Vizier at a very extraordinary high price.⁷⁸

Asaf ud-Daula had good reason to compete with Claude Martin, a king of his own minting. He had to show the world who was really king.

So maybe the nawab was not such a dupe after all. Most kings collect to assert and display their power. Asaf ud-Daula collected to compensate for his lack of power. His hands were tied by the Company in virtually everything else, but in the sphere of art and culture he was free. Collecting was also a way to put Awadh on the map. Attracted by talk of the nawab’s lavish acquisitions, “merchants of large property from all parts of India” swept into Lucknow with curiosities to sell.⁷⁹ Even in distant Europe, Asaf’s desires were attended to: the Raikeses sent him objects, at Martin’s request; Polier procured him an elaborate organ, “a precious and rare gift in India, which in the hands of inexperienced people will go [to] waste.”⁸⁰ When his ministers chastised him for spending so much, Asaf ud-Daula smiled wanly and said, “how could he refuse one who had taken the trouble of travelling all the way to Oudh having heard of his generosity!” After all, he had a reputation to uphold.⁸¹

In the eyes of some outsiders, Martin and Asaf personified everything that was wrong with Lucknow. They, and their collections, were like the city itself: debauched, corrupt, extravagant. One civil servant (a thoroughly pompous young man of nineteen) found it “impossible to see without pain and shame the evidence which the Inah Khanah alone afforded of the weakness and extravagance of the Vizier, and of the dishonourable cupidity and deception with which this injurious dissipation was encouraged principally by British subjects…”⁸² Asaf ud-Daula could not possibly be a connoisseur because he was ignorant about European taste, value, and art—because, in a word, he was Indian. Claude Martin did not even have that excuse. He was accused not just of taking criminal advantage of “the Nawaub’s idiotical propensities” by selling him objects at usurious rates. In the words of his most savage critic, the aristocratic traveler Viscount Valentia, who visited Lucknow three years after Martin’s death:

With affluence to which he had never been brought up, and which, of course, he knew not how to enjoy, he never did a generous act, and never had a friend…[I]f he is handed down to posterity as a man who raised himself to riches and power…it will also be added, that his riches were contaminated by the methods employed in obtaining them, and that his character was stained by almost every vice that can disgrace human nature.⁸³

Martin was no connoisseur because he was unscrupulous, opportunistic, and a crook—and, above all, because he was nouveau riche. (So, incidentally, was Valentia, who will reappear in these pages.)

And yet, Martin and Asaf also personified what was right about Lucknow. For behind its sybaritic, eccentric exterior, something quite amazing was unfolding there. The game of empire was afoot, the Company was moving in. But some of the underdogs were winning. Despite the obvious differences among them, Claude Martin, Asaf ud-Daula, and Antoine Polier were all outsiders to the mainstream of imperial power—displaced persons, and disempowered ones. Yet living on the edge of empire opened up splendid opportunities. In Lucknow, as a collector, each managed to remake himself in extravagant style. Just as Polier collected manuscripts in the manner of a Mughal nobleman, so Martin and Asaf collected European objects to advertise their own Lucknow personæ: self-made combinations of power, wealth, and status. None of them, to be sure, was the typical representative of his own native culture. Yet neither did any of them completely adopt the ways of another culture. Rather, they were partners in a kind of third world, where an Indian environment absorbed European influences, where Europeans assimilated Indian ones. What was right about Lucknow was that it could, at once, be both. The only question was, how long could it last?

1John Prinsep, quoted in J. P. Losty, Calcutta City of Palaces: A Survey of the City in the Days of the East India Company, 1690-1858 (London: British Library, 1990), p. 36.

2William Hodges, Travels in India during the years 1780, 1781, 1782, and 1783 (London, 1794), p. 14.

3“Some account of the transactions in the Province of Oud from the 1st April to the end of June 1776,” OIOC: MSS Eur Orme Vol. 91.

4Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 9.

5I have compiled these statistics from the “General Register of the Military on the Coast of Coromandel 31 December 1766,” OIOC: L/Mil/11/109; “Register of the Honorable Company’s Effective European Troops on the Coast of Coromandel as they stood on the 31st December 1800,” OIOC: L/Mil/11/120. Religion is not listed, but county of origin is; the majority of Irish troops came from the counties of the south.

6Estimates range from 100,000 to 400,000, even before Plassey: P. J. Marshall, Bengal the British Bridgehead (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 24; Geoffrey Moorhouse, Calcutta: The City Revealed (London: Phoenix, 1998), p. 40.

7“List of Inhabitants etc. who bore arms at the seige of Calcutta, with their fate, whether killed or wounded July 1, 1756,” OIOC: MSS Eur Orme 19, pp. 61-64.

8OIOC: Clive Collection, MSS Eur G37/18, piece 9. This is a rare document, since the British did not compile regular lists of British civilians and protégés in Calcutta until later in the century. Marshall suggests that the names given here were male heads of household (p. 23).

9Many inventories also give full records of estate sales, with buyers’ names and prices. Only sales by Armenians did not seem to be attended by buyers from outside the community. For the years 1761-1770, see OIOC: P/154/62-69.

10Michael H. Fisher, Indirect Rule in India: Residents and the Residency System, 1764-1858 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 43-69.

11OIOC: L/Mil/9/103, Embarkation Lists, 1778-84. The Company had three recruiting stations in Ireland at this time, two of them south of Ulster. C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780-1830 (London: Longman, 1989), p. 127.

12R. M. Bird, Dacoitee in Excelsis; or, the Spoliation of Oude, by the East India Company… (London, 1857), p. 21.

13C. U. A. Aitchison, ed., A Collection of Treaties, Engagements, and Sunnuds Relating to India and Neighbouring Countries, Vol. II: Northwestern Provinces, Oudh, Nipal, Bundelcund and Baghelcund (Calcutta, 1876), pp. 74-78; Purnendu Basu, Oudh and the East India Company, 1785-1801 (Lucknow: Maxwell Co., 1943), pp. 101-2.

14Quoted in Desmond Young, Fountain of the Elephants (London: Collins, 1959), p. 101.

15Jean Deloche, ed., Voyage en Inde du Comte de Modave, 1773-76 (Paris: École Française d’Extrême Orient, 1971), p. 170.

16Abdul Halim Sharar, who believed that “as any community or nation progresses, its diet is the most salient guide to its refinement,” is especially eloquent on food: Abdul Halim Sharar, Lucknow: The Last Phase of an Oriental Culture, trans. E. S. Harcourt and Fakhir Hussain (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 155-68.

17Thomas Twining, Travels in India a Hundred Years Ago (London, 1893), p. 312.

18Muhammad Faiz Bakhsh, Tarikh-i-Farahbakhsh, trans. William Hoey, Memoirs of Delhi and Faizabad (Allahabad, 1889), p. 24.

19Warren Hastings to John Macpherson, December 12, 1781, quoted in Richard B. Barnett, North India Between Empires: Awadh, the Mughals, and the British, 1720-1801 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 204-5.

20For an itemization of some of Asaf ud-Daula’s expenditures, see “Estimate of the Expences of the Nabob Vizier for the Fussellee Year 1192 [1783-84],” BL: Hastings Papers, Add. MSS 29,093. On a more anecdotal note, see William Blane, An Account of the Hunting Excursions of Asoph ul Doulah, Visier of the Mogul Empire, and Nabob of Oude (London, 1788); Captain Charles Madan, Two Private Letters to a Gentleman in England, from His Son who Accompanied Earl Cornwallis on his Expedition to Lucknow in the Year 1787 (Peterborough, 1788); and “Account of Lucknow,” in Asiatic Annual Register, vol. 2 (London, 1800), “Miscellaneous Tracts,” pp. 97-101.

21Abu Talib Khan, Tahzih ul-ghafilin, trans. William Hoey, History of Asafu’d Daulah Nawab Wazir of Oudh (Allahabad, 1885; repr. Lucknow: Pustak Kendra, 1974), pp. 73-74.

22Twining, pp. 309-10.

23Pigeon-rearing and kite-flying were among the activities banned by the Taliban in 1996, for encouraging “wicked consequences.” Asne Seierstad, The Bookseller of Kabul (Boston: Little, Brown, 2003), p. 81.

24Sharar, pp. 198-201, 94. Sharar also perceptively observed one reason for the popularity of animal fighting in this emasculated city: “Unable to display deeds of valour one looks for them through the medium of fighting animals. One enjoys watching courageous acts and seeks acclaim by causing others to watch animal combat. This is what happened in Lucknow” (p. 116).

25Mir Taqi Mir, Zikr-i Mir: the autobiography of the eighteenth-century Mughal poet, Mir Muhammad Taqi ‘Mir’, 1723-1810, trans. C. M. Naim (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999); Carla Petievich, Assembly of Rivals: Delhi, Lucknow and the Urdu Ghazal (New Delhi: Manohar, 1992).

26Juan R. I. Cole, The Roots of North Indian Shi’ism in Iran and Iraq: Religion and State in Awadh, 1722-1859 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Sharar called it “the Baghdad and Cordoba of India and the Nishapur and Bokhara of the East” (p. 94).

27Amir Hasan, Palace Culture of Lucknow (New Delhi: B. R. Publishing, 1983), p. 183.

28Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, A Fatal Friendship: The Nawabs, the British, and the City of Lucknow (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985).

29L. F. Smith, “A letter to a friend containing a historical sketch of the late Asufud-Dowlah, Nawab of Oude (1March 1795),” quoted in Mildred Archer, India and British Portraiture, 1770-1825 (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1979), pp. 142-43.

30C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 102. On the structure itself, see Neeta Das, The Architecture of the Imambaras (Lucknow: Lucknow Mahotsav Patrika Samiti, 1991), pp. 64-71.

31Mir Taqi Mir, quoted in Ishrat Haque, Glimpses of Mughal Society and Culture (New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 1992), p. 69.

32Sharar, p. 48.

33Sharar and Basu note the practice, and the couplet is cited in Hasan, p. 181.

34Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, “European Fantasies and Indian Dreams,” in Violette Graff, ed., Lucknow: Memories of a City (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 51.

35See C. A. Bayly, ed., The Raj: India and the British, 1600-1947 (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1990), p. 116; Mary Webster, Johan Zoffany (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1976), pp. 77-78.

36I take implicit exception here with Beth Fowkes Tobin’s reading of British Indian portraits of the period as undermining, contradicting, or threatening an evolving ideology of British imperial dominance. As this picture so emphatically illustrates, the political, social, and cultural landscape of Lucknow was enormously complex; and “the British” were by no means its masters. See Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 110-38.

37Diary of Elizabeth Plowden, OIOC: MSS Eur F 127/94, March 4, 1787.

38Ibid., April 17, 1788; November 22, 1787.

39Ibid., September 18, 1788.

40Ibid., March 20, 1788; 8 October 1788.

41Quoted in Walter F. C. Chicheley Plowden, Records of the Chicheley Plowdens (London: Heath, Cranton, & Ouseley, 1914), pp. 173-74.

42See “Cases of Ozias Humphry and Mr. Paul at Lucknow,” BL: Wellesley Papers, Add. MSS 13,532; and John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997), pp. 316-18.

43Claude Martin to Elizabeth Plowden, June 5, 1796, OIOC: MSS Eur C 149. (This is, incidentally, Martin’s only surviving letter to a woman.)

44When selling his collection to the East India Company Library in 1807, Richard Johnson told Charles Wilkins that “the choicest pictures [cost me] from 20 to 150 rupees on each” (quoted in Mildred Archer and Toby Falk, Indian Miniatures in the India Office Library [London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1981], p. 27). On the opposite end of the price scale, Elizabeth Plowden said that “Cowper told me he had once in his possession a Persian Book valued at ten Thousand Rs. which when he went to England he presented to the King…[W]hat made it curious was that each Letter was written within the inside tracing of leaves flowers etc. in small beautiful characters and the intermediate leaf between each letter were beautiful paintings and round the leaves that were written on a variety of borders in a most elegant stile of painting chiefly flowers” (Plowden Diary, October 10, 1787).

45Sharar, p. 103.

46Archer and Falk’s Indian Miniatures in the India Office Library is a catalogue raisonné of the Johnson collection. His Lucknow commissions are Cats. 346-61; Cat. 431 was completed in Hyderabad.

47Rosane Rocher, “British Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century: The Dialectics of Knowledge and Government” in Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter Van der Veer, eds., Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p. 237.

48Plowden Diary, December 13, 1787. On Polier’s Orientalism, see also Muzaffar Alam and Seema Alavi, A European Experience of the Mughal Orient: The I’jaz-i Arsalani (Persian Letters, 1773-1779) of Antoine-Louis Henri Polier (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 50-56.

49Polier, quoted in Georges Dumézil, ed., Le Mahabarat et le Bhagavat du Colonel de Polier (Paris: Gallimard, 1986).

50Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880, trans. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); Jean-Marie Lafont, Indika: Essays in Indo-French Relations, 1630-1976 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2000). Schwab’s book remains perhaps the most eloquent celebration of Orientalist intellectual achievements, as well as a rare study of French Indology.

51Polier to Hastings, July 15, 1786, BL: Hastings Papers, Add. MSS 29,170.

52S. Chaudhuri, ed., Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Vol. 1: 1784-1800 (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1980), p. 390.

53Many portraits of eighteenth-century Europeans by Indian painters show them in Western dress—such as the Mughal gouache of Warren Hastings sitting on a chair (reproduced in Bayly, ed., The Raj, p. 115). Another Lucknow collector, John Wombwell, was also painted in his jama by a local artist; the image is reproduced in William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (London: HarperCollins, 2002).

54The original volume is in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and has been edited and translated by Muzaffar Alam and Seema Alavi as A European Experience of the Mughal Orient [hereafter cited as I’jaz]. See also G. Colas and F. Richard, “Le Fonds Polier à la Bibliothèque Nationale,” in Bulletin de l’École Française d’Extrême Orient 73 (1984): 112-17.

55I’jaz, pp. 108-9, 111, 125-26, 149-50.

56Ibid., pp. 261-62.

57Ibid., pp. 296-97.

58Ibid., pp. 164-65; 266-67.

59“Went after dinner into his Zinannah to see Col. Poliers family.” Plowden Diary, January 23, 1788; November 10, 1788.

60The best scholarly treatment of this fraught subject is Durba Ghosh, “Colonial Companions: Bibis, Begums, and Concubines of the British in North India, 1760-1830” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 2000). For a detailed portrait of an Anglo-Indian love affair at this time, see Dalrymple, White Mughals.

61I’jaz, pp. 153-56.

62I’jaz, p. 285. Polier’s second son, Baba Jan (John), was evidently too young to write to his father.

63I have relied here and in many places below on the splendid biography of Martin by Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, A Very Ingenious Man: Claude Martin in Early Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992).

64Ibid., pp. 155-76.

65“Inventory of the Effects of the late Major General Claud Martin,” OIOC: L/AG/34/27/24, Bengal Inventories, 1801, Vol. 1.

66“Inventory…”; Deloche, ed., Voyage en Inde du Comte de Modave…, p. 106.

67“Tribunus,” quoted in Llewellyn-Jones, A Very Ingenious Man, pp. 149-50.

68Martin to Raikes and Company, August 13, 1796; May 25, 1798. I am indebted to Dr. Llewellyn-Jones for transcriptions of these letters, held in the Archives du Rhône, Lyon. They have now been published in her A Man of the Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century India: The Letters of Claude Martin 1766-1800 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003).

69Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, “Major General Claude Martin: A French Connoisseur in Eighteenth-century India” in Apollo Magazine, Vol. 145 (March 1997): 17-22.

70Quoted in Llewellyn-Jones, A Very Ingenious Man, p. 87.

71Twining, p. 311.

72“Account of Lucknow,” p. 100.

73L. F. Smith, quoted in Archer, India and British Portraiture, 1770-1825, pp. 142-43.

74Clifford Geertz, “Centers, Kings and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power,” in J. Ben David and T. N. Clark, eds., Culture and Its Creators (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), pp. 150-71.

75“Account of Lucknow,” p. 101.

76Milo Cleveland Beach and Ebba Koch, King of the World (London: Azimuth Editions, 1997).

77Pramod J. Jethi and Christopher W. London, “A Glorious Heritage: Maharao Lakhpatji and the Aina Mahal,” and Amin Jaffer, “The Aina Mahal: An Early Example of ‘Europeanerie,’ ” Marg 51 (2000): 12-39.

78Daniel Johnson, quoted in Llewellyn-Jones, A Very Ingenious Man, p. 133.

79George Annesley, Viscount Valentia, Voyages and Travels in India, Ceylon, the Red Sea, Abyssinia, and Egypt, in the Years 1802, 1803, 1804, 1805, and 1806, 3 vols. (London, 1809), I, p. 156. Frederick Arnott brought a stock of European guns “Commissioned by Mr. Arnott for the Nabob at his express desire and a stipulated sum…agreed on.” His inventory also included a number of curiosities that would have been sold to Asaf-ud-Daula or his courtiers, like “2 Large Ivory Immaum Barrahs,” “192 China Toys and 62 Tumbling Boys,” and “2 China Temples.” (“Cases of Ozias Humphry and Mr. Paul at Lucknow,” BL: Add. MSS 13,532.)

80I’jaz, p. 326.

81Basu, p. 4.

82Twining, pp. 311-12.

83Valentia, I, pp. 164-65.