Cawnpore Audio Tours

Kanpur -- or Cawnpore as the British named it -- grew up on the right bank of the Ganges as one of the most important military and commercial stations of the British Raj. The tanneries that gave it the nickname Leather City of the World still operate today, though they are now among the most significant industrial contributors to the Ganges's pollution. The city's other historical moniker, Manchester of the East, came from its cotton mills during the 19th century, when it was producing textiles that traveled across the subcontinent.

The Siege of Cawnpore in 1857 is the defining historical event in the city's colonial memory -- some 900 British soldiers, women, and children held out in improvised fortifications for 22 days before a complicated sequence of negotiations and betrayals ended in massacre.

The Memorial Church of All Souls, built in 1875 in a Gothic style unusual for this part of India, and the Massacre Ghat on the riverbank still stand as markers of those events. But 1857 is also the year of India's First War of Independence, and the city holds both readings of the same history simultaneously.