About the Book:
Lucknow Queerscapes offers methods of using queer strategies to read the colonial archival and write erased, overlooked, and suppressed histories. Following Nawab Asaf-ud-daula and Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, the book provides a queer architectural history of Lucknow bookending the nawabi phase which lasted a mere eighty years. Asaf and Wajid were both subjected to colonial ridicule—one on the pretext of his homosexuality and the other on the pretext of being effeminate in mannerisms. To situate this ridicule, the book brings out words of disdain in the colonial archive that describe Lucknow architecture commissioned by the two nawabs. Reclaiming those words, we reveal the capacity of nawabi architecture to contest, discomfort, and disadvantage the colonial gaze.
Nawabi architecture is presented as a form of drag embodied theatrically in the overlaps of the personal and the political ishq. Drawing upon the embodied experience of the nawabs, nawabi architecture is redescribed using disorientation, position, proximity, direction, alignment, and non-alignment that disoriented the British visitor and recentered the agency and power of the nawabi state through its socio-sexual overlaps.
About the Authors:
Sonal Mithal runs the research, conservation, and art studio People for Heritage Concern and is program chair of the conservation graduate program at CEPT University, India. Her work transects architecture, feminist ecologies, queer studies, and history. Her upcoming publications include IncLOOsive-Feminist Toilet Architecture (CEPT University Press 2025) and Living Together–More Than Human Ecologies for Architectural Thinking (Birkauser, 2025).
Arul Paul is an Associate Professor at Nitte (Deemed to be a University), Nitte Institute of Architecture (NIA), Mangalore, India. Arul’s research focuses on the intersection of architecture, urbanism, history, and queer studies. Arul’s recent publications include Lucknow Unrestrained (2021) and Queering Academia (2021).
Book Details:
Name: A Queer Reading of Nawabi Architecture and the Colonial Archive – Lucknow Queerscapes
Author: Sonal Mithal and Arul Paul
Publisher: Routledge, Oxon and New York
Publishing date: August 2024
No. of pages: 228
ISBN: 9781003370635, 9781040114353, 9781040114322, 1003370632, 1040114350, 1040114326
Available for Purchase on Routledge
