Awadhis Erotic

The Awadhis are the people of Awadh, the wedge of fertile Gangetic plain in what is now central Uttar Pradesh — roughly Lucknow, Faizabad, Sitapur, Bahraich, and the country in between. The land is flat, river-fed, and densely farmed, and Awadhi identity is bound up with that geography in a way that survives even after generations in Mumbai, Surat, or Mauritius. To call someone an Awadhi is to place them on that plain, in its courtyards and mango groves, with a particular cadence of speech and a particular set of manners around food, hospitality, and elders.

Their language, Awadhi, sits in the Indo-Aryan family alongside Hindi, Urdu, and Bhojpuri, but it is not simply a dialect of Hindi — it is older as a literary tongue than the standardized Hindi taught in schools. Tulsidas wrote the Ramcharitmanas in Awadhi in the sixteenth century, and Malik Muhammad Jayasi wrote Padmavat in it before him. That literary weight gives the language a status its modern speakers don't always claim out loud, since under census categories most Awadhis return their language as Hindi. The everyday register has a softer, more rounded sound than Khari Boli Hindi, with verb endings and pronouns that mark it instantly to a Hindi speaker as not quite the language of Delhi.

Most Awadhis are Hindu, with the usual caste stratification of the Gangetic belt — Brahmins, Thakurs, the trading and artisan jatis, and the large agricultural and Dalit populations who do most of the actual farming. The Barhai, a carpentry caste, are one such sub-group, traditionally responsible for plows, cart-wheels, doors, and the wooden frames of village houses; like other artisan jatis, they have moved heavily into urban trades over the last two generations. Awadh's Hindu life is shaped strongly by Ram-bhakti devotion, since Ayodhya — the mythological birthplace of Rama — sits in the middle of it, and that has made the region a flashpoint in modern Indian politics in ways outsiders sometimes underestimate.

Layered over the Hindu majority is a long Indo-Islamic history, the Nawabi court at Lucknow having set the region's standards for poetry, cuisine, and etiquette for two centuries. The famously slow-cooked dum biryani, the kebab traditions, the elaborate tehzeeb of greetings and forms of address — these are Awadhi as much as they are Muslim, and Hindu and Muslim Awadhis share them as common cultural property even when politics is doing its best to pull them apart.