Engaging Scoundrels (True Tales of Old Lucknow)

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Old Lucknow was a place of pleasure, of beautiful gardens, extraordinary buildings, menageries maintained by the nawabs, music and dancing, exquisite food, fireworks and lavish parties, and a good share of rogues and villains. The wealthy nawabs were only part of the glittering scene that simultaneously enchanted and shocked visitors, not to mention the inhabitants. This book attempts to explore the more curious byways that lead off the main streets, to undiscovered corners of the city's past.

Using records not used before and information provided by the descendants of those who lived in Nawabi Lucknow, Rosie Llewellyn-Jones examines Nawabi entertainments, the true story of the notorious 'Babar of Lucknow', the sad history of the European graveyards, and the adventures of Indian men and women in eighteenth - and nineteenth-century England.

Containing a number of previously unpublished illustrations, these curious stories of people who inhabited this exotic and vanished world will appeal to readers interested in human stories and history, besides scholars who will find new insights into the life of Nawabi Lucknow.

About the Author:

ROSIE LLEWELLYN-JONES is Archives and Records Officer at South Bank University, London. A Ph.D. from the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS), London, her specialization is architectural ideas and urban history. She is the author of A Fatal Friendship: The Nawabs, the British and the City of Lucknow (OUP, 1985) and A Very Ingenious Man: Claude Martin in Early Colonial India (OUP, 1992).

List of Illustrations

Introduction

1. Entertaining the Nawabs

2. A Poorer Class of Person

3. The Barber of Lucknow

4. Indian Visitors to England

5. Before the Storm

6. Bones of Contention

   Appendix: The Lucknow Cemeteries

   Index