Flora's Empire: British Gardens in India by Eugenia W. Herbert

Author:Eugenia W. Herbert [Herbert, Eugenia W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Architecture, Landscape, Gardening
ISBN: 9780812243260
Google: ye0nmQEACAAJ
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Incorporated
Published: 2011-09-21T20:40:34+00:00

Fig. 33. Qaisar Bagh, post-1857

[From Edith Cuthell, My Garden in the City of Gardens, 1905]

Fig. 34. The Lucknow Residency restored

[From Edith Cuthell, My Garden in the City of Gardens, 1905]

The “awful interlude” finds a curious parallel in the history of Shi‘ite Lucknow. Here, too, an even more distant past was part of the present. The Great Imambara is the largest religious complex in the world devoted to the rituals and cult of the martyred Imam Husain, the grandson of the Prophet who was killed in an ambush at Karbala by the Caliph Yazid in 680 c.e. (AH 61). The Passion of Husain, like the crucifixion of Christ, became the defining event of Shi‘ism. Every year in the month of Muharram the faithful enact the sufferings and sacrifice of the Imam, sufferings and sacrifice that have “transcended time and space to acquire importance of cosmic magnitude.”

Lucknow exists but to mourn Husain.

Rightly it can be called the home of Husain.

Since Karbala was too far for many to make the pilgrimage, Karbala and the mausoleum of Husain were re-created in India in the imambaras of Lucknow.26

Whether Europeans, caught up in their own history of suffering and sacrifice, would have made such connections is doubtful. In their telling and retelling of the story of the Uprising of 1857, Lucknow shared the tragic stage not with Karbala but with Cawnpore (Kanpur), forty-six miles to the south. If anything the horrors at Cawnpore surpassed those at Lucknow. A contingent of Europeans who had surrendered to the rebels was massacred at the riverside ghat where they had assembled with a promise from Nana Sahib (Nana Rao) of safe passage to Allahabad. Then a further group of surviving women and children confined in the Bibighar were butchered, the bodies of living and dead thrown down a well. These events unleashed a frenzy of vengeance on the part of the British, who cared little whether the innocent were struck down equally with the guilty. Nothing was left of the Bibighar (the zenana garden of a Hindu favorite in calmer times) when the viceroy, Lord Canning, held a durbar at Cawnpore in late 1859, but he commissioned both a memorial church and a monument for the site of the infamous well. His wife, Charlotte, drew up the design for a sculpture, Angel of the Resurrection, surrounded by a stone screen, which Carlo Marochetti followed with only a few changes.27

The garden laid out around the well was, if anything, lovelier than that of the Lucknow Residency; Constance Gordon Cumming wrote that it was “a garden of such richness and beauty as to be exceeded by none in England,” adding “It is little short of a miracle to see such a triumph of art over nature— to pass from the world of dust outside to those smooth green lawns, with masses of such roses as might excite the envy of a Devonshire rose-gardener” (Fig. 35). And not just roses: stands of golden bignonia, lilac creepers “more exquisite still,” bougainvillea, “whose long sprays of delicate lilac leaves festoon each shrub that comes within reach.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.