A sense of history

Now that we had only ourselves to please, we could do the things we wanted to do.  One of these was a visit to the Residency, the seat of British military power in Lucknow during the Raj.  Aparna had pretty much dismissed this as a place we might want to visit, but that was her opinion.  She saw it as a ruin, for that is its condition now, much damaged during the Indian mutiny of 1867, and why would one want to visit a ruin? We saw it as history, something to be studied and understood, with the application of a little knowledge and the use of one’s imagination. Unsurprisingly, we both adored it, from the moment we entered the grounds.  Once again, as with Bara Imambara, there was not a guide to be found, someone who could have explained it all to us, but actually I much preferred it that way, for it allowed us to discover its story all by ourselves; a far more preferable way of learning.

Almost immediately after entering, while exploring the first prominent ruin, we met an Indian family, a man and his wife, with their grown-up daughter.  We nodded hello, and I then broke the ice by apologising, as an Englishman, gesturing to the ruins around us. I was to make the same joke on a number of occasions during our visit, but they were the first to receive it with anything more than puzzlement.  After only the briefest moment, they all saw the joke, and laughed.  I was most gratified, even more so when he referenced the new world order, mentioning Trump as a new would-be colonialist, a threat to us both – a most intelligent observation. 

We took our time wandering around the various ruined buildings, imagining them in their pomp, and wondering at the scale and grandeur they must have displayed.  The doctor’s residence was an extraordinarily grand edifice; I observed that he must have marvelled at his good fortune at being in India at such a time.  An educated man, no doubt, but so far as we could tell nothing more.  In England he would have enjoyed, had he prospered, a comfortable middle-class life; here he lived like a duke.

The brief descriptions on boards around the site provided the barest information.  At another grand building there was the mention of an indoor swimming pool; climbing the grand steps at the entrance, we peered in to to the shell of the building, and there was where it must have been: it even had a gently sloping floor, surely the seep and shallow ends.  Can one imagine such opulence, in the middle of an Indian city teeming with poverty?

The grandest building of all housed a small museum.  I did not have high hopes of it, but actually it was perfect.  As I say, small, but this meant manageable; it was possible to read everything (and Val does like to read everything.)  But even in its operation and administration, it said a huge amount about India.  First, I was asked my name, to be entered by hand in a large ledger.  “Chris,” I began, and started to spell it, but that was not necessary: it was transliterated phonetically into Hindi, and he clearly required no more (Val, of course, was not required to say anything at all.)  He then asked for our contact number, and when I could not provide anything more than a WhatsApp number, he put a line through that entry.  As a result, the records will state that on the 3^rd of September 2025, a man called Kris entered the museum; nothing more.

He did go on to explain that video and flash photography inside the museum was not allowed, but that we were permitted to take photographs otherwise.  So when we climbed the few steps and entered into the building, and then attempted to take a picture of one of the four life-sized statues of Indian soldiers of the time that stood guard in the small lobby, it should have come as a surprise when a guard informed us sternly that this was not allowed.  Except, of course, that this is India, where such contradictions occur all the time.  In other circumstances, I might have attempted to argue the toss, even become angry, but I was in a good mood, and merely shrugged.  It would, no doubt, have been a rule, and rules, however illogical, were not to be broken.

The museum itself was pretty much divided into three sections.  The central room, into which we entered, was dominated by a large model, with a glass covering, of what the site would have looked like prior to its destruction.  It was rather crudely made, more like a school project than a detailed architectural model that might be made nowadays, but it looked to be accurate, and gave a clear view of just how busy and extensive the place must have been.  Ruins of the grand buildings are now dotted around, with large areas of mown grass between, but the model showed almost a small town, with everything that that implies.  Presumably the other smaller buildings were razed, either during the battle itself, or in the subsequent clear-up of the site.

On the walls surrounding this were huge portraits of the principal Indian characters involved in the story, both the Nawabs (or Princes), growing increasingly fat through the two or three generations depicted, and the leaders of the rebellion, starker depictions in black and white, though equally impressive in size.  Interestingly, two of them were women; it would be good to know more of their story, for the information provided was relatively scant.  There was also a large portrait of one young, bearded revolutionary, who joined the revolution in 1856, but was betrayed and killed in 1858.

(Later, I messaged Laksh – Goat in Aesop – to make sure he knew about this.  He is a great fan of Che Guevara, and it seemed to me that here was a homegrown hero with a very similar story. I should not have been concerned.  He told me the man’s name – Mangal Pandey – plus the interesting fact that he refused to use rifles.  “A tad idealistic,” I suggested.)

The room to the left mostly contained lithographs (prints taken from drawings, used as illustrations in newspapers before photography) of contemporary pictures of the damage: a smashed billiards table, for example.  For the most part, they were pretty similar to the reality outside.  But for me the most fascinating was its equivalent room to the right, dedicated to the British side of the story.  There was a large cannonball hole in the wall, and a fibreglass bas-relief showing the death of a nineteen year old British girl, Susannah something, who had been killed by it.  Elsewhere, there were letters to and from the British governor-general, desperate pleas for assistance and their replies, plus some revealing lithographs of the British officers at leisure, including a lively cock-fighting scene.  Fascinating.

I asked if they had any books for sale about it all, as both of us were desperate to now more.  They did indeed have some books in a locked cupboard, which the man showed me.  All were of archaeological finds in the area, not a thing about the conflict.  So we made our way to Hazratganj and found a bookshop.  There we were offered various volumes, and both of us found something to our liking.  Mine was a history of the Indian Mutiny by Christopher Hibbert, a famous British historian; Val’s a hardback but equally substantial history of the struggle to colonise India by the British and the French, The Lion and the Lily.

The following day we fulfilled a desire since arriving to explore Dilkush Kothi, the ruins of another victim of the Mutiny, but rather different, being a Nawab’s palace. Again, it was little more than a shell, in similar condition to those at the Residency, and we might have not realised its significance, had we not seen a lithograph of it in the museum the day before.  It too marked some British deaths, two British lieutenants, as well as a general who died (sadly but hysterically) of dysentery.  I need to know more; hence the history books.

But history is written by the winners, hence the title, the Indian mutiny – an uprising by rebellious underlings against their legitimate lords and masters – rather than a heroic but doomed struggle for independence by an enslaved people.  Or,  perhaps, since it was marked by Indian fighting Indian, a civil war.