Ghazipur ( previously spelled Ghazeepore, Gauspur, and Ghazipour), is a city and
municipal corporation in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India. Ghazipur city is the
administrative headquarters of the Ghazipur district, one of the four districts that form
the Varanasi division of Uttar Pradesh. The city of Ghazipur also constitutes one of the
five distinct tehsils, or subdivisions, of the Ghaz
ipur district. Hindu tradition associates
Ghazipur with a Raja Gaadhi, father of Vishwamitra Maharshi, the great rishi regarded
as a Hindu saint, but although the area was an administrative center since the Gupta
Empire, Ghazipur probably derives its name from the sayyid Masud, given the title
Ghazi, who defeated the local Raja and established a town around 1330 CE. Located by
the Ganges, Ghazipur was a strategically important river port during the British rule of
India. Ghazipur is well known for its o***m factory, established by the British East India
Company in 1820 and still the biggest legal o***m factory in the world, producing the
drug for the global pharmaceutical industry. The city's perfume industry, especially
its production of rose oil and attar of roses has also long been famous. A Ghazipur firm
won a medal for these products at the British Empire Exhibition, and the perfume
industry remains important. Other important constituents of the city's commercial life
include handloom weaving factories, and Ghazipur's role as the market town for its
surrounding rural and farming areas. Sights in the city include several monuments built by Nawab Shaikh Abdulla, or
Abdullah Khan, a governor of Ghazipur during the Mughal Empire in the eighteenth
century, and his son. These include the palace known as Chihal Satun, or "forty pillars",
which retains a very impressive gateway although the palace is in ruins, and the large
garden with a tank and a tomb called the Nawab-ki-Chahar-diwari. The mosque
near this tomb was probably originally a Hindu building. The road that starts at the
Nawab-ki-Chahar-diwari tomb and runs past the mosque leads, after 10 km, to a matha
devoted to Pavhari Baba. The tank and tomb of Pahar Khan, faujdar of the city in
1580, and the plain but ancient tombs of the founder, Masud, and his son are also in
Ghazipur, as is the tomb of Lord Cornwallis, one of the major figures of Indian and
British history. Cornwallis is famous for his role in the American Revolutionary War,
and then for his time as Governor-General of India, being said to have laid the true
foundation of British rule. He was later Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, there suppressing the
1798 Rebellion and establishing the Act of Union. He died in Ghazipur in 1805, soon
after his returning to India for his second appointment as Governor-General. His tomb,
overlooking the Ganges, is a heavy dome supported on 12 Doric columns above a
cenotaph carved by John Flaxman. The remains of an ancient mud fort also overlook
the river, while there are many beautiful or impressive ghats leading to the Ganges, the
oldest of which is the ChitNath Ghat.
