In Kipling’s Kim “no city – except Bombay, the Queen of all – was more beautiful in her garish style than Lucknow.” The city famously rose to prominence during the 1857 Indian Mutiny when it was the site of some of the fiercest fighting between British and Indian forces. The Raj era bequeathed Lucknow many fine colonial monuments including the former Residency and La Martiniere College, the finest and largest example of European funerary architecture in the Subcontinent. It was, however, under the Muslim Nawab’s of Oudh (Avadh) in the 18th century that Lucknow reached its apogee as a political and cultural centre. The architecture of this period is fascinating and prolific, exhibiting both a unique re-interpretation of existing indigenous styles and an experimentation in the fusion of European and Indian forms.