Princely State Of Hyderabad Research Articles

Contested Emotions of Masculinity. The Court, the Street, and the Negotiation Table in an Indian Princely State in the 20th Century

This article investigates the movement between contested styles of masculinity in the princely state of Hyderabad, situated in the south of India, in the 1930s and 1940s. Three spaces, at the same time emotional and institutional, dominated political interactions. The court required a masculinity premised on balance. A nobleman had to embody military virtues, but also cultivate himself through the fine arts. The masculinity of the street was premised on the regeneration of the community and on the glorification of burning passions, while the negotiation table needed the figure of a rational man, able to tone down his feelings. While these styles contested with each other, they were not mutually exclusive. As the case study of Bahadur Yar Jang, nobleman, orator, organiser of mass movements, and skilful negotiator in discussions within Hyderabad and between Hyderabad and Indian actors, shows, (some) men could move between these masculinities, divided by fluid boundaries. However, his case also shows that the fluidity has to be historicised: it was neither available to everyone, nor did it survive the radicalisation of Muslim politics in the 1940s and the annexation of the state by the Indian army in 1948.

Princely Films: The Silver Jubilee Film of 1937 and the Princely State of Hyderabad

Before 1947 India had more than 560 princely states. All these states were ruled by independent princes with their own systems and laws and were not directly under the control of British. There was a great fascination for the princely states in Britain, and the early films addressed this curiosity. Several travel films, instructional films and the Durbar films presented the princely states as exotic Oriental spaces. On the other hand, the princely states also actively patronized the audio visual technologies. This article examines the interrelationship between princely state of Hyderabad and non-fiction film. It locates this relationship in the broad history of Orientalist curiosity about princely states in Europe and the patronage to modern technologies in the princely states. It elaborates on the process of making of the Silver Jubilee film of the VII Nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan, and argues that princely films served different purposes for the European audience and for the princely state. The princely films played to the market for content on princely states in Europe but for the princely state of Hyderabad, films were a way to present itself as a modern state and enhance its stature.

Translocal notions of belonging and authenticity: understanding race amongst the Siddis of Gujarat and Hyderabad

ABSTRACT The Siddi community came to India mostly as slaves and sailors. In the Princely State of Hyderabad, Siddis were closely linked to the ruling elites of the Asaf Jahi dynasty (1724–1948) as soldiers, guards, riders and stable keepers. They worked in Nizam’s army, police forces and formed the Nizam’s Royal Body Guards, the Siddi Risala, which was exclusively made of people from African descent. As pre-colonial slavery in the Indian Ocean was not race specific, this article argues that in contemporary popular understanding, the stereotypes assigned to Siddis and their self-realization of a black African identity are deeply embedded in a global matrix of knowledge production. For example, Siddis are seen as an exotic presence who are ‘discovered’ every time someone publishes on them. Based on my fieldwork among Siddis in Hyderabad and Gujarat, this article elaborates on the idea of how race is constructed in a non-western location. The meanings immanent in race as a category do not preclude understandings borrowed from western discourse. I further argue that there is no authentic Siddi identity and the history that Siddis have come to internalize cannot be understood without locating it in the matrices of knowledge production.

Publicity, Civil Liberties, and Political Life in Princely Hyderabad

AbstractIn the 1930s, there were two glaring questions confronting the princely state of Hyderabad's Administration: the question of sovereignty (or the political future of the Hyderabad) and the problem of civil liberties. This article explores the complex socio-political conditions in the early decades of the twentieth century that gave rise to the formation of dynamic civil-society institutions in the princely state of Hyderabad. In particular, it asks how and why the discourse of civil liberties was taken up by these institutions and assesses the response of the Hyderabad Administration with respect to safeguarding civil liberties for its subjects. What the historical record reveals is that the early decades of the twentieth century in Hyderabad became a battleground between the Hyderabad Administration and the burgeoning public sphere that the Administration could not control nor manage.

Reviving rural economy: A study on Telangana, India

Revamping of rural economy is critical for the livelihood of majority people in Telangana. Of the 3.5 crore population in the state, about 2.13 crore population lives in rural areas. While agriculture has been mainstay of rural folk in Telangana, non-farm activities fetch additional income apart from providing direct livelihood to many. Non-farm activities in rural economy include animal husbandry i.e., production of milk, meat, poultry, fishing, agro-processing industries and storage etc. Sizable population also depend on traditional occupations and are engaged as black smith, bronze-smith, carpenter, goldsmith, potter, tailor, toddy tappers, washer man and weavers etc., for their livelihood. The chapter delineates the status of agricultural allied activities in the state along with initiatives undertaken by the Government on livestock, animal husbandry and fisheries. Telangana is one of the 29 states in India, located in southern India. Formed in June 2014 as the newest state in India, from the northern part of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana has an area of 112, 077 square kilometres (43, 273 sq. mi), and a population of 35, 193, 978 (2011 census). It is the twelfth largest state in India, and the twelfth most populated State in India. It's Major Cities. Include Hyderabad, Warangal, Nizamabad, Khammam, Karimnagar and Ramagundam. Telanga na is bordered by the states of Maharashtra to the north and North West, Chhattisgarh to the north, Karnataka to the west and Andhra Pradesh to the east and south. Telangana had a history as the Telugu-speaking region of the princely state of Hyderabad, ruled by the Nizam of Hyderabad. It joined the Union of India in 1948. In 1956, the Hyderabad state was dissolved as part of the linguistic reorganization of states and Telangana was merged with former Andhra State to form Andhra Pradesh. Following a movement for separation, Telangana was awarded separate statehood on 2 June 2014. Hyderabad will continue to serve as the joint capital city for Andhra Pradesh and Telangana for a period of not more than ten years.

Hyderabad, British India, and the World: Muslim networks and minor sovereignty, c. 1850–1950 by Eric Beverley

Reviewed by: Hyderabad, British India, and the World: Muslim networks and minor sovereignty, c. 1850–1950 by Eric Beverley Rama Sundari Mantena Hyderabad, British India, and the World: Muslim networks and minor sovereignty, c. 1850–1950 By Eric Beverley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Eric Beverley’s Hyderabad, British India, and the World: Muslim networks and minor sovereignty, c. 1850–1950 on the Princely State of Hyderabad at the turn of the twentieth century explores the worldly connections of a unique polity: one enclosed by the territories of British India and thus virtually limiting its territorial connections unless carefully mediated and negotiated through the British Empire. Hyderabad was one of several hundred princely states that remained autonomous enjoying varying levels of sovereignty until 1947 when British India gained independence from colonial rule. Precisely what the nature of Hyderabad’s sovereignty was forms the subject of Beverley’s research. Beverley proposes that Hyderabad was able to break free of this constraining relationship with British India by forging what he calls “Muslim internationalism” globally through a dynamic Muslim public sphere (49). Beverley further suggests that Hyderabad managed to forge international links through Muslim networks (transnational, pan-Islamist, Muslim internationalist) and with other “sub-imperial” polities. However, Beverley suggests that scholars of Hyderabad have obscured Hyderabad’s global presence by paying exclusive attention to British India and its historical trajectories as the outer perimeter of Hyderabad’s relations. This myopic view of Hyderabad limits our understanding of Hyderabad’s internal dynamics and its connections with the world outside. Beverley argues that because of its “minor” sovereignty, Hyderabad as a state managed to maintain a degree of autonomy which led to political experimentation (43). The book begins with two introductory chapters on the idea of sovereignty and minor sovereignty. Then the chapters are divided into three sections with two chapters each on “Ideas,” “Institutions,” and “Urban Space.” “Ideas” contains two chapters on the difference of Hyderabad and its cultivation of “Muslimness” and its self-representation as a modern progressive state. The second section moves to the everyday, to the workings of governance on the borderlands or frontiers of the state in its relations with the British Raj. The third moves to the theme of urbanism—specifically colonial urbanism—and how it impacted urban development in Hyderabad. All chapters cover overlapping themes of political experimentation and worldly connections that Hyderabad was able to foster and sustain until its forced incorporation within the Indian Union in 1948. With regard to the theme of political experimentation, Beverley notes: “Though thwarted by European world empires, smaller sovereign states that were not colonized provided fertile ground for refashioning political concepts and institutions in dialogue with other global examples as well as local and regional histories” (30). It is a suggestive thesis in the idea that Hyderabad provided dynamic political conditions that gave rise to alternative concepts and institutions for the political future of the region. It is an argument full of possibilities and one that needs to be made. However, this statement is made often without the author illustrating the global links that refashioned political concepts. What are these political concepts circulating in the transnational Muslim public sphere? Did political experimentation include both constitutional monarchy and representative governing bodies? How were they negotiated in the global public sphere? While the idea of experimentation is fascinating, one would like to know what social structures specific to Hyderabad allowed for political experimentation. For instance, pan-Islamism existed in British India. While it is true that British India had greater surveillance of its colonial subjects, it nevertheless did not put a stop to the expansion of political discourse (in the English and vernacular public spheres). Beverley also suggests that political experimentation was able to give rise to counter-colonial and anti-colonial geographies of power (50). This frames his discussion of pan-Islamism and “Muslim internationalism” that linked Hyderabad with global Islam or a wider Islamicate world. Another fascinating discussion Beverley explores is the bureaucratic-intellectual in Hyderabad. The question that lingers is whether outside of a racialized hierarchical structure of colonial power in British India these figures were able to function differently. Were they able to forge different moral relations with...

The Andhra Movement, Hyderabad State, and the Historical Origins of the Telangana Demand: Public Life and Political Aspirations in India, 1900–56

This article revisits the early twentieth century to rethink the forces that shaped discourses surrounding political community—specifically the political community in its regional articulation. As we begin to look at the particular ways in which the discourse of rights and political representation have emerged at the regional level in post-independence India, we begin to get a sense of the unique social, cultural, and political dynamics that constitute the region distinct from the dynamics of nationalism and national identity. Specifically, I examine the dynamics of a new discourse of politics in twentieth-century south India, primarily in the Telugu-speaking districts of the Madras Presidency and the princely state of Hyderabad. With the institution of representational bodies/institutions at the regional level, the extension of the franchise and the rise of a public politics based on liberal ideas of public reason, and debate at the turn of the twentieth century, we witness the emergence of the region as the site of a distinct set of political dynamics.

Alternate Histories

The past is never dead. It is not even past—William Faulkner This article reviews recent literature on the accession of the princely state of Hyderabad to the Indian union in 1948, in the context of events that have raised the temperature of communal confrontation in the region. Scholarship on nation formation has drawn attention to the role that the act of remembering only to forget, plays in cementing a sense of nationalist solidarity. By that criterion, the accession of Hyderabad presents a case of historical record that may have been abridged and in part effaced, without the consent of its more substantial minority group. This allows for historical tensions to emerge anew as fault-lines where modern democratic competition could spill over into communal antagonism. Recent efforts to restore the historical record, one by way of a memoir and the other, a work of archival scholarship, assume great importance in this regard.

Hindu temples in Hyderabad: state patronage and politics in South Asia

This article argues that Hindu temples in Hyderabad, a city in a territory ruled by Muslims from the fourteenth century until the 1948 incorporation of the princely state of Hyderabad into independent India, were resources in a multi-religious landscape, institutions that reflected the political power of their patrons and often performed functions for the state. Temples were built and managed as part of the Indo-Muslim or Mughlai urban court economy in Hyderabad, and temple patronage reflected the shifting patterns of prominence as one high-ranking Hindu noble or official replaced another and secured state support for major temples. Rather than defending Hyderabad state's policies and practices with respect to Hindu institutions and events, this article shows the development and implementation of an Indo-Muslim ruling tradition as Muslim rulers interacted with non-Muslims to become part of a distinctively South Asian tradition of secularism or pluralism. Rather than syncretism or synthesis, I emphasize ‘translation’, appropriate to the time and place, as the concept best able to capture the pluralism of India's historical Indo-Muslim cultures.

The Trans-Border Traffic of Afghan Modernism: Afghanistan and the Indian “Urdusphere”

In October 1933, two motorcars drove out of Peshawar towards the Khyber Pass carrying a small delegation of Indian Muslims summoned to meet the Afghan ruler Nadir Shah in Kabul. While Nadir Shah had officially invited the travelers to discuss the expansion of the fledgling university founded a year earlier in Kabul, the Indians brought with them a wealth of experience of the wider world and a vision of the leading role within it of Muslim modernists freed of Western dominance. Small as it was, the delegation could hardly have been more distinguished: it comprised Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), the celebrated philosopher and poet; Sir Ross Mas‘ud (1889–1937), the former director of public instruction in Hyderabad and vice-chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University; and Sayyid Sulayman Nadwi (1884–1953), the distinguished biographer and director of the Dar al-Musannifin academy at Azamgarh. The three were traveling to Kabul at the peak of their fame; they were not only famous in individual terms but also represented India's major Muslim movements and institutions of the previous and present generations. Ross Mas‘ud, grandson of the great Muslim modernist Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898), had fifteen years earlier been the impresario behind the foundation of Osmania University in the princely state of Hyderabad. A decade earlier, Sulayman Nadwi, the heir of the reformist principal of the North Indian Nadwat al-‘Ulama madrasa Shibli Nu‘mani (1857–1914), had been among the leading figures of the pan-Islamist, Khilafat struggle to save the Ottoman caliphate. And eighteen months earlier, Muhammad Iqbal had represented India's Muslims at the Round Table Conference in London that would shape India's route to independence.

Mystical missionaries in Hyderabad State

This article discusses the emergence of a Sufi-inspired movement of Muslim reform in the princely state of Hyderabad during the first half of the twentieth century. Attention is paid to the polemical religious context in which the movement arose, using archival material to discuss the activities of Christian missionaries in the city in which it first emerged. Located in Aurangabad, away from the capital of the Nizam's State, the history of the rise of Mu'īn Allāh Shāh's Sufi organisation shows the ways in which pan-Indian religious disputes and developments in Indian Islam were reflected in the provinces of princely India. The modernist character of Mu'īn Allāh's Sufi teachings is reconstructed and discussed in detail. Preaching a return to the core tenets of Islam in the villages of Hyderabad, Mu'īn Allāh and his successor Hamīd ‘Alī nonetheless envisioned this minimalism as central to the mystical rediscovery of the pure and unadulterated self. However, since the movement was closely connected to the expansion of the textile industry in Aurangabad, attention is also paid to its relationship with the social and religious effects of industrialisation in a provincial context.

Passive revolution meets peasant revolution: Indian nationalism and the Telangana revolt

An explanation of how the struggles by villagers in the region of Telangana in the 1940s evolved into the largest rural armed conflict in twentieth‐century India, requires an understanding not just of property relations in the region (the focus of most previous studies of the revolt), but also of the nationalist movement there, and the political conjuncture at the time of Indian independence. As much a nationalist mobilization as a revolt over land and grain, the Telangana struggle attained its success because the enemy was a decrepit sultanate ‐ the princely state of Hyderabad attempting to remain outside an independent India — against whom followers of both the CPI and the Indian National Congress fought.

The Demand for a Separate Telengana State in India

Research Article| May 01 1971 The Demand for a Separate Telengana State in India Hugh Gray Hugh Gray Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Far Eastern Survey (1942) 11 (5): 463–474. https://doi.org/10.2307/2642982 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Hugh Gray; The Demand for a Separate Telengana State in India. Far Eastern Survey 9 March 1942; 11 (5): 463–474. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2642982 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAsian Survey Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1971 Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Status of Hyderabad During and after British Rule in India

The relationship between the Government of the Union of India and the Princely State of Hyderabad has attracted world-wide attention. Through what seems to be complete misunderstanding of the legal status of Hyderabad, the United Nations placed the case on the agenda of the Security Council. Although the Nizam of Hyderabad, after the successful conclusion of the Indian Army's punitive expedition into Hyderabad, has petitioned the United Nations to withdraw the case, the question still remains on the agenda.