Awadh

Awadh (Hindi: [ˈəʋədʱ], known in British historical texts as Avadh or Oudh, is a region in the modern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, which was before independence known as the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh. Awadh is bounded by the Ganges Doab to the southwest, Rohilkhand to the northwest, Nepal to the north, and Purvanchal to the east. Its inhabitants are referred to as Awadhis.

Quotes

• England, by one stroke of the pen, has confiscated not only the estates of a few noblemen, or of a royal family, but the whole length and breadth of a kingdom nearly as large as Ireland, “the inheritance of a whole people,” as Lord Ellenborough himself terms it.
  • Karl Marx, 1858.quoted in Kishore, Kunal (2016). Ayodhyā revisited. ch 16

• Now, why was Lord Dalhousie so eager to deny the validity of a treaty which all his predecessors, and even his own agents, had acknowledged to be in force in their communications with the King of Oudh? Solely because, by this treaty, whatever pretext the King might give for interference, that interference was limited to an assumption of government by Britisn officers in the name of the King of Oudh, who was to receive the surplus revenue. That was the very opposite of what was wanted. Nothing short of annexation would do. This denying the validity of treaties which had formed the acknowledged base of intercourse for twenty years;this seizing violently upon independent territories in open infraction even of the acknowledged treaties; this final confiscation of every acre of land in the whole country; all these treacherous and brutal modes of proceeding of the British toward the natives of Indian are now beginning to avenge themselves, not only in India, but in England. (On Colonialism, p. 180)
  • Karl Marx, ‘The Annexation of Oudh’ on May 14, 1858, quoted in Kishore, Kunal (2016). Ayodhyā revisited. ch 16