Oudh Quotes

Throughout the ages the ideal of satya (truth) has permeated Hindu society. Marco Polo tells us that the Brahmins “would not utter a lie for anything on earth.” An English judge in India, William Sleeman, says in his Journey Through Oudh in 1849–50: “I have had before me hundreds of cases in which a man’s property, liberty, or life depended on his telling a lie; and he has refused to tell it.

I think I can explain her feeling,” Sakina said, patting Razia’s hand. “If it’s publicly known that Amina has wandered the city, her reputation will be ruined. We will never find a groom for her.We are praying for Allah’s blessing on her travels to Oudh. After that, we would humbly request your assistance in returning her to Bombay.

Much of the British conquest and expansion before 1857 took place against either benign, or not particularly oppressive, native rulers. The Maratha Peshwas, the Mysore rulers and the chess-playing Nawab of Oudh, to name three, were not accused of misgovernance: they were merely too powerful for colonial comfort or too rich to avoid attracting British avarice. (Indeed there were outstanding examples of good governance in India at the time, notably the Travancore kingdom, which in 1819 became the first government in the world to decree universal, compulsory and free primary education for both boys and girls.)

Humans wear perfumes produced by other organisms, and it is not uncommon for fungal aromas to be incorporated into our own sexual rituals. Agarwood, or oudh, is a fungal infection of Aquilaria trees found in India and south-east Asia and one of the most valuable raw materials in the world. It is used to make a scent – dank nuts, dark honey, rich wood – and has been coveted at least since the time of the ancient Greek physician Dioscorides. The best oudh is worth more, gram for gram, than gold or platinum – as much as $100,000 per kilogram – and the destructive harvest of Aquilaria trees has driven them to near extinction in the wild.

The Nagari Pracharini Sabha sought to popularize the Nagari script through its magazine Nagari Pracharini Patrika and the literary journal Saraswati founded in 1900. In 1897, when Madan Mohan Malaviya presented Sir Antony MacDonnell, lieutenant governor of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, with the Nagari Pracharini Sabha’s petition Court Character and Primary Education in N-W P. and Oudh accompanied by 60,000 signatures, the response was non-committal.6 Therefore, MacDonnell’s order in 1900 on the use of Nagari as a court script came as a surprise. It was a battle very smoothly won, from which a bruised Urdu would never recover. The division—Hindi for Hindus, Urdu for Muslims7—had more or less been completed, exemplifying

This great feudal court-city, the capital of the nawabs of Oudh, was much the most prosperous precolonial city in India.37 An Englishwoman who married a Lucknow nobleman (Mrs Meer Hasan Ali) was reminded by the city of the visionary castles of the Arabian Nights.