ABSTRACT
The chapter begins with a discussion on the politics of archives that privileges, validates, controls, constructs knowledge, and exercises power by defining and hence excluding certain audiences. It contextualizes the role of colonial archives in writing the history of Lucknow. Further, it gives a description of the breadth of the colonial archive related to 18th- and 19th-century Lucknow that has been accessed, studied, and queered in this book. Referring to terms of derogation used in the colonial archives to describe Lucknow architecture and nawabi culture, the chapter makes a case for reclaiming those terms. It describes our strategies of queer reading of the colonial maps, imagery, and text that have been instrumental in a careful reconstruction of sites that no longer exist, and have been obliterated from public memory. This way the chapter makes a case that queer reading of an archive is useful in writing architectural history.
