Free In the City of Gold and Silver by Kenizé Mourad, Anne Mathai in collaboration with Marie-Louise Naville Page A

lions, elephants, tigers, two thousand thoroughbreds from the royal stables, thousands of peacocks, parrots and homing pigeons. Everything is bought by Europeans and their “lackeys,” as no respectable Indian would contemplate acquiring the spoils of the kingdom. All the more so as the profits from the sales are to be handed over to the East India Company.
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    In May, Sir James Outram, who is unwell, is replaced by Coverley Jackson, the new chief commissioner, a man with brutal manners who does nothing to hide his contempt for the “natives.” With his zeal for reform, he turns a deaf ear to any advice advocating caution. He orders the demolition of some of the town’s ancient monuments in order to, he declares, make room for wide avenues and a railway track. The inhabitants of Lucknow watch, broken-hearted, as palaces and stately houses are razed to the ground. The great Khas Bazaar, the most important market for luxury goods in the whole of north India, is also destroyed. Many religious buildings are torn down too, in particular a small Hindu temple—a revered pilgrimage site. As for Kadam Rasul, the monument erected to house a stone believed to bear the impression of the Prophet Muhammad’s footprint, it is transformed into a storehouse for gunpowder.
    The population is sickened by what it perceives as arbitrary measures designed to destroy the capital’s beauty and to erase the very memory of its grandeur. All kinds of rumours circulate: “The king has been taken prisoner. Nobody knows where he is . . . The king has fallen ill with grief, they fear for his life . . . ”
    On May 15th, news declaring the sovereign has been reinstated and British rule is over draws everyone out into the streets. Yet again the information is false and the chief commissioner, furious at these challenges to the new order, has the ringleaders arrested and publicly hanged. He does not dare go so far as to have the publisher of the weekly
Tilism
executed for publishing this information, but, in order to set an example, he condemns him to three months’ imprisonment.
    Coverly Jackson has no compunction either about confiscating Wajid Ali Shah’s precious library for the Company, with its forty-five thousand works and ancient manuscripts of inestimable value. In vain, the Lucknawis accuse him of theft, but as with the sale of the king’s menagerie, he just does not care. In charge of administering Awadh, he takes the decisions he deems necessary and has no intention of allowing the population’s moods to influence him.
    To cap it all, on August 18th, Jackson delivers the final blow intended to destroy the very foundations of the previous regime. A decree is passed ordering the taluqdars to disarm the six hundred and twenty-three forts and the troops they maintained in order to preserve a certain independence
vis-à-vis
the capital. What the sovereigns of Awadh tolerated, British authority now opposes. It intends to centralise power and thus prevent any kind of resistance to the new agrarian reform.
    Under the influence of puritanical rigour and notions of social justice currently in vogue in England, the decision to dispossess the taluqdar, “this hedonist, this exploiter,” is taken to benefit the peasant who works the land. One way the British do this is to demand the payment of taxes before the sale of the May harvest. As most of the taluqdars do not possess the necessary funds, their land is confiscated and then handed over to the farmers. Thus, this is not only a “highly moral action” but also a means of decapitating the opposition—leaving the ruined feudal lords without the means to challenge the new regime—while the British gain the eternal gratitude of millions of poor wretches, who, in the event of problems, will surely come out in support of their recent benefactors.
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    â€œWe have to fight! We cannot just sit by and