The Kaiserbagh Was Built in Two Years for 80 Lakh Rupees, and After March 1858 a Military Plan Cleared the Ground Around the Machhi Bhawan and Drove Roads Through Lucknow

By the figure in the 1904 Lucknow district gazetteer, the Qaisarbagh palace cost ₹80 lakh (₹8 million) with its furniture and decorations, and was begun in 1848 and finished in 1850. Colin Campbell’s army took it from the rebels in March 1858. On 28 November that year the war correspondent William Howard Russell reached the city and wrote that it “resounded with the noise of excessive explosions” as engineers blew up houses to make way for new works.

The storming itself is in our piece on Begum Hazrat Mahal and Awadh in 1857, and the wider reprisals are in the British revenge for 1857. This one follows the buildings: what the Awadh court put up, what was blown up or cleared, and what Lucknow still has. The gazetteers spell the palace Qaisarbagh, and Russell spelt it Kaiserbagh.

What Wajid Ali Shah built in two years

The 1904 gazetteer calls the palace the only building of importance Wajid Ali Shah, the last king of Oudh, left behind. It walks a visitor in through the Jilau-khana, the gateway court where royal processions formed, across the Chini Bagh and under a gate flanked by green mermaids into the Hazratbagh. There stood the Chandiwali Baradari, once paved with silver, and the Chaulakhi, a pile of buildings the king bought from his barber, Azim-ullah Khan, for four lakh rupees and made the home of the queen and the chief wives. Past the Lakhi gate, named because it cost a lakh to build, lay the great open square where a fair open to the whole town was held each August.

The 1877 Gazetteer of the Province of Oudh gives the same cost and adds that the palace was “believed to have cost £800,000”. Russell walked through it on 14 and 15 March 1858 and compared its size to the Tuileries, the Louvre, Versailles, Scutari and the Winter Palace put together.

What the soldiers took out in March 1858

Russell’s entry for 14 March describes soldiers coming out of the broken doors with shawls, brocade and caskets of jewels. Some dashed china vases to pieces, and others prised stones out of sword hilts and pipe stems. He found a store-room holding at least a camel-load of jade and china in cases, and saw men burn brocades in a fire to get at the gold and silver thread.

On 15 March he wrote that plundering was “stopped by order”, that the palace was full of powder and that explosions were frequent. By 9 April the prize agents, who sold captured property for the benefit of the troops, were holding sales at the Kotwali, the city police office. Russell went and saw nothing of any value.

The Machhi Bhawan, blown up in 1857 and rebuilt after 1858

The Machhi Bhawan is the mound over the Gomti where Lucknow began. The 1904 gazetteer says it was once called Lachhman Tila, that the Sheikhs of Lucknow built the first fort there and that Safdar Jang rebuilt it. The name comes from the fish that was the crest of Safdar Jang’s rank.

The British blew it up themselves, in 1857. Brigadier Inglis’s report of 26 September 1857, printed in Kaye and Malleson, says that after what it calls the untoward event of 30 June, the defeat at Chinhat, there were too few men to hold both the Residency and the fort. On the evening of 1 July the garrison was signalled to evacuate and blow it up. At midnight the force marched into the Residency, and the report counts 240 barrels of gunpowder and 6,000,000 ball cartridges going up with the magazine. The gazetteer gives the explosion as the night of 1 July in its history section and the night of 30 June in its description of the city.

The rebels held the fort until 16 March 1858, when, the gazetteer says, they left it in haste. The army then rebuilt it. The gazetteer says it was “reconstructed on modern military principles”, then abandoned about 1865 and its works destroyed. The historian Veena Talwar Oldenburg cites a plan of July 1869 by an engineer, Colonel Nicholson, to reorganise the chief post at the Machhi Bhawan, which points to a later date, and she says fourteen such posts were kept until 1877. Felice Beato photographed the ruins between 1858 and 1860, and an inscription on the back of the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s print says the citadel was partly blown up when Sir Henry Lawrence took up his position in the Residency.

Napier’s plan of 26 March 1858

On 21 March Russell wrote that Robert Napier was drawing up a report on the alterations and defences of Lucknow, “imperial in conception”, and asked where the money would come from. Oldenburg’s 1979 doctoral thesis, published by Princeton in 1984 as The Making of Colonial Lucknow, dates the memorandum 26 March 1858. She quotes it from Napier’s report in the Royal Engineers’ Professional Papers of 1860.

Napier wrote that the city’s size and lack of prominent features made it hard to control without a large body of troops. He proposed military posts in prominent buildings, with the buildings around them and along their routes to the countryside cleared, and broad streets cut through the city. The Machhi Bhawan, which overlooked both bridges and the dense city, would be the main post. It would have an open esplanade 600 yards wide and roads radiating from it. He also wrote that every building and garden enclosure between the Martiniere and the Gomti not needed by the troops would go.

Napier allowed that owners would suffer hardship, and wrote that the community would benefit and could be made to compensate them. He added that much of the population had lived off the court, that their houses were mostly in ruins and that the city would shrink without the court’s spending.

Oldenburg writes that the plan was carried out with minor changes to some routes and a cut of the esplanade to 500 yards to spare the Chowk, the old market, and finds no evidence that anyone in the city was consulted. Her reading is that the plan was implicitly punitive toward the Muslim community, and she names the Jami Masjid and the Asafi Imambara as its two main religious targets. She notes that even Napier conceded converting the Jami Masjid into a barracks was “not absolutely necessary”.

The roads, and what stood in their way

The 1877 Gazetteer of the Province of Oudh says Lucknow had broader streets than most towns in the East because very many houses were destroyed for military purposes after the mutiny. It says a glacis, a cleared slope of open ground, half a mile broad was made for the fort. Three military roads radiating from it were “driven right through the heart of the city”, often some thirty feet above the neighbouring streets.

The 1904 gazetteer names them. Napier Road ran due west through Daulatganj to Kakori and Malihabad. Victoria Road ran south-west past the Chowk to the Cawnpore road at the Alambagh. Canning Road ran south to Charbagh. The Strand ran along the river from the old fort to the Chhatar Manzil and on through Hazratganj to the civil lines. Oldenburg describes Victoria Street as a north-south road from the fort that dissected the old mohallas (neighbourhoods), and she maps its effect on Firangi Mahal.

The Chief Commissioner’s memorandum of 23 July 1858, which Oldenburg cites from the National Archives of India, says that “what with demolitions, Prize Agents, uncontrolled police, oppression of the soldiery” the wonder was that anyone was left. It asked the city magistrate to give people on a demolition line three days’ notice and to see that houses were empty before they were blown up. On 29 May 1861 the municipal committee resolved that the levelling had “destroyed about a fifth of the best habitations in the city”. Oldenburg also quotes an Urdu newspaper, the Karnamah, complaining on 25 November 1872 that a graveyard had been dug out to form a road 150 feet broad.

Delhi’s Mughal buildings went through their own clearing, which our Red Fort piece covers. In Lucknow, the 1904 gazetteer adds that the oldest quarters near the fort, the Bajpei and Ismailganj mohallas, were destroyed. For many years the ground between the Chowk and the Gomti was a waste of rubble. In 1887 it became the Victoria Park, paid for from the Husainabad Trust’s funds.

The Kaiserbagh after the roads

The Report on the Administration of Oudh for 1859 to 1860, as Oldenburg cites it, records the Chini Bazaar, a large market, demolished to improve the view from the civil station, and says two broad roads had been made through the Kaiserbagh square.

Lord Canning gave the palace to the taluqdars, the landholders of Oudh, on condition that they keep it in repair. Oldenburg dates their association’s move in to November 1861, with a royal suite as its office and the rest divided into apartments. Samuel Bourne photographed the Mermaid Gate in 1864 and 1865, so it was standing then.

By 1877 the Oudh gazetteer says one entire side of the main quadrangle had been removed, the other sides were ruinous and the stone baradari, a pillared pavilion, had been fitted up as a theatre. The 1904 gazetteer says the Jilau-khana gateway was in ruins with little of the original left and that the site of the Chini Bazar no longer existed. It lists the stone baradari as the Maharaja of Balrampur’s property, and says a government training school stood on the military prison’s site. Neither gazetteer says who removed the quadrangle’s side or when. Sahapedia writes that the British partly demolished sections of the Qaiserbagh after 1857 in retribution.

What stands

The Residency stands as a ruin. The Archaeological Survey of India’s Lucknow circle says it was begun under Nawab Asaf-ud-daula and finished by Nawab Saadat Ali Khan in 1800, and that the complex today consists of the ruins of many buildings. The 1904 gazetteer says hardly a square yard was unmarked by cannon shot, yet the walls were firm, and that its graveyard holds the graves and cenotaphs of some 2,000 men and women who perished in the mutiny. Incredible India says the Survey declared the ruins protected monuments and that a museum stands inside.

The 1904 gazetteer says Asaf-ud-daula built the Bara Imambara in 1784, the year of the Chalisa famine, to give relief, and that no brick had fallen from its vast vault, 162 feet long and 53 feet 6 inches wide, in spite of its use as a gunpark and arsenal for many years after the reoccupation. Oldenburg writes that British troops used it as a barracks. Incredible India dates the building to 1780. A petition to Queen Victoria from the “Citizens of Lucknow”, sent when she was proclaimed Empress of India in 1877, asked for the Imambara and the mosque in the Machhi Bhawan to be returned to Muslims, and Oldenburg cites the file as December 1877. The sources consulted for this piece do not give the date of the return.

The Rumi Darwaza, which Sahapedia dates to 1784 and puts at nearly 60 feet, also stands. The 1904 gazetteer says the road from the Chhatar Manzil along the river to Husainabad passes along the north front of the Imambara courtyard and through the gateway. The same gazetteer says the Sikandar Bagh’s walls were mostly demolished and that its front portion and gate were rebuilt in 1903.

The Chhatar Manzil, the river palace the 1904 gazetteer says Ghazi-ud-din Haidar began and his son finished, was then the United Service Club. The Central Drug Research Institute was formally inaugurated there on 17 February 1951 and stayed for sixty years, according to the Lucknow Observer. A Times of India report of 20 November 2014 says the building had passed to the state archaeological department and that INTACH conservation architects had inspected it to list its damage.