Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850. Maya Jasanoff

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.