Lucknow’s native historian, Veena Talwar Oldenburg, has done pioneering work on the colonial impact on Lucknow’s gracious nawabi city. Her book, The Making of Colonial Lucknow (published by Princeton University Press and later by Oxford University Press in their Lucknow Omnibus) is an in-depth study of the aftermath of the bloody and heroic siege of the Residency by the rebels against the British forces in 1857. She has written on the transformation in fabric, governance and the cultural eths of the city. Her work on the Courtesans of Lucknow was both pioneering and trend-setting has been anthologized in many collections. Her anthology, Shaam e Awadh: Writings on Lucknow is part of the prestigious city series published by Penguin. She is the author of several other scholarly works, a specialist on gender and women’s history and the author of her critically acclaimed work on the history of dowry titled, Dowry Murder: The Imperial origins of a Cultural Crime, published by Oxford and penguin in two separate editions. She is a professor of history at the City University of New York and is currently writing a book on the history and astonishing growth of the Mellenium city: Gurgaon.
