Asaf-ud-Daula

• 1. Introduction

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  Asaf-ud-Daula, the Nawab wazir of Oudh, built a monument so vast that it took over twenty thousand workers to construct it. But the real story of the Bara Imambara in Lucknow is stranger than a simple building project. During the famine of 1784, even the nobles of Awadh had been reduced to penury. So when Asaf-ud-Daula commissioned the great vaulted structure, he found a way to pay them without breaking their dignity. Every fourth night, under cover of darkness, the upper-class workers would come out and demolish whatever the common laborers had built by day. They were paid for tearing down, so no one would know they needed the money.

  This is the kind of ruler Asaf-ud-Daula was. He governed for more than two decades, from 1775 until his death in 1797, over a court contested by rival siblings, a formidable mother who commanded her own private army, and the ever-present pressure of the British East India Company. His name passed into a proverb still spoken in Lucknow. The questions worth asking are: how did he hold power together, what did he build, and what did it cost him to do it?

• 2. A Contested Succession

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  Asaf-ud-Daula was twenty-six years old when his father Shuja-ud-Daula died on the 28th of January 1775, and the throne of Oudh was anything but a gift waiting for him. His younger brother Saadat Ali led a mutiny inside the army almost immediately. British Colonel John Parker put down that revolt decisively, and it was with the active support of the British East India Company that Asaf-ud-Daula secured his position as Nawab. The cost of that help would define the rest of his reign.

  Asaf's own first Chief Minister, Mukhtar-ud-Daula, did not survive the uprising. He was assassinated during the revolt. In the aftermath, Asaf moved to surround himself with loyal figures. He appointed Hasan Riza Khan as his new chief minister, and though Hasan Riza Khan had little administrative experience, his assistant Haydar Beg Khan proved a capable support. Tikayt Ray was brought in as finance minister, giving the court a restructured footing.

  The second power center that threatened Asaf was inside his own family. His mother, Umat-ul-Zohra, known more widely as Bahu Begum, had accumulated significant control over the treasury and held her own jagirs along with private armed forces. She went so far as to seek direct Company assistance in placing ministers hostile to her son. When Shuja-ud-Daula died, he had left two million pounds sterling buried in the vaults of the zenana. Bahu Begum and the grandmother of the deceased prince both claimed the entirety of that treasure under the terms of a will that was never produced. The dispute over that fortune would pull in Warren Hastings himself.

• 3. The Company's Weight

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  Warren Hastings pressed Asaf-ud-Daula for payment of debts owed to the British East India Company, and the pressure forced a remarkable transaction. Asaf obtained from his mother a loan of 26 lakh rupees, equivalent to 2.6 million rupees, and in exchange gave her a jagir worth four times that amount. He then negotiated a further 30 lakh, or 3 million rupees, from her. In return, he offered her a full acquittal and a guarantee that the Company would not interfere with her jagirs for the rest of her life.

  That guarantee did not hold. The Begum's jagirs were subsequently confiscated on the grounds that she had been complicit in the rising of Chait Singh, a charge backed by documentary evidence. What had been negotiated as a lifetime guarantee collapsed under the weight of a separate political crisis. The relationship between Asaf-ud-Daula and the British was never a partnership of equals. It was one in which Company pressure shaped the financial and political terms of his reign, starting from the day Parker's troops secured his throne.

• 4. Lucknow Transformed

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  In 1775, the same year he took power, Asaf-ud-Daula moved the capital of Awadh from Faizabad to Lucknow. That decision set in motion one of the most concentrated bursts of urban construction in the region's history. Asaf came to be regarded as the architect general of Lucknow, a figure whose ambition was explicitly to outshine the splendor of Mughal architecture.

  The Rumi Darwaza, a gateway standing sixty feet tall, was modeled in 1784 after the Sublime Porte, known in Turkish as Bab-i Humayun, in Istanbul. It stands as one of the notable examples of exchange between Ottoman and Nawabi visual culture. The Qaisar Bagh area of downtown Lucknow, where thousands of people still live today in what are described as resurrected buildings, also traces its shape to Asaf's era.

  The painter Johann Zoffany captured Asaf-ud-Daula on canvas several times, a sign of both the court's cosmopolitan reach and the interest that European artists took in the Nawab's world. Asaf died in Lucknow on the 21st of September 1797, and he is buried at the Bara Imambara itself, the monument he raised to feed his people during the worst famine of his reign.

• 5. The Proverb and Its Weight

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  "Jisko na de Maula, usko de Asaf-ud-Daula." The phrase translates to: to whom even God does not give, Asaf-ud-Daula gives. It was a saying that circulated during his lifetime and is still repeated in Lucknow today. It attached itself to a ruler who is remembered for offering food and public employment during times of famine, but the proverb carries something more specific than generosity.

  The Bara Imambara, which Asaf is also remembered as the Asafi Imambara, is a vaulted structure surrounded by gardens. It was neither a mosque nor a mausoleum, which set it apart from the buildings typically raised by rulers of his era. The scale of the project, drawing over 20,000 workers from both the common population and the nobility, reflected a practical ingenuity about how to distribute relief without humiliating those who received it. The scheme of nightly demolition was not a flaw in the project. It was the point of it. Asaf-ud-Daula is buried within that same structure, a fact that ties his name permanently to Lucknow's most visited monument.