Lucknow

Lucknow is the city that taught India how to be gracious. The capital of Uttar Pradesh and the heart of the historic region of Awadh, it earned the title Nawabon ka Sheher — the City of Nawabs — during the 18th and 19th centuries, when the rulers of Awadh made it one of the most cultured courts in the subcontinent. Poetry, music, dance, cuisine, courtly manners and a distinctive style of hand embroidery all reached a kind of refined peak here, and the city has been trading on that legacy of politeness and pleasure ever since. The local shorthand for it is tehzeeb — a hard word to translate, somewhere between etiquette, courtesy and civilisation — and it is the thing residents are proudest of.

Set on the banks of the Gomti river in the fertile Ganges plain of central Uttar Pradesh, Lucknow grew from a modest Mughal-era town into an imperial capital after the Nawabs shifted their seat here from Faizabad in the 1770s. The building spree that followed left the city its signature monuments: the colossal Bara Imambara with its famous labyrinth, the jewel-like Chota Imambara, and the towering Rumi Darwaza gateway that has become the city's emblem. Then came the British, and with them a second, darker layer of history — the ruined British Residency, scarred by cannon fire, stands as one of the most evocative relics of the 1857 uprising anywhere in India.

But Lucknow is not a museum city, and that is much of its charm. It is a busy, growing state capital of well over three million people, with a genuine café-and-shopping culture centred on the colonial-era boulevard of Hazratganj, a spreading new city across the Gomti in Gomti Nagar, and a modern Metro threading it all together. What makes it special is that the old refinements are still alive in daily life. People really do speak a mannered, Urdu-inflected Hindi. The chikankari embroidery for which the city is world-famous is still stitched by hand in the lanes of the old town. And the food — slow-cooked Awadhi cuisine, born in the Nawabs' kitchens — remains a reason to visit in its own right.

That food deserves its own line. Lucknow is, for many Indian travellers, first and foremost a place to eat. The city gave the world the galouti kebab — so meltingly soft it was, by legend, invented for a toothless Nawab — along with slow-simmered nihari, fragrant Awadhi dum biryani, saffron-scented sheermal bread and a whole culture of unhurried, charcoal-scented cooking. The old-city food quarters of Chowk and Aminabad are pilgrimage sites for anyone serious about this cuisine.

Practically, Lucknow rewards a focused two-day visit built around the old city and the food, and it also makes an excellent base for one of India's most compelling spiritual and cultural circuits — Ayodhya, Naimisharanya and the Sufi shrine of Dewa Sharif are all within day-trip range. Well connected by fast trains, a busy airport and the Agra–Lucknow Expressway, it fits neatly into a wider Uttar Pradesh itinerary. Come for the monuments and the history; stay for the manners and the meals.