The Many Faces of Hyderabad
by Geoffrey Clarfield (July 2013)
Four months ago when the evening crowds of the Dilsukhnagar, a bustling densely populated suburb of the Indian city of Hyderabad, were at their peak, two terrorist bombs exploded, killing 16 and injuring 18 people. Indian authorities suspect the possible hand of homegrown Islamic terrorists and have pursued a number of suspects, but the perpetrators remain at large. The bombs exploded near a movie theater and close by the Sai Babu Hindu temple. Experts believe that the temple was the original target but that in order to avoid police surveillance, the terrorists set off the bombs nearby, as Dilsukhnagar has one of the biggest fruit markets in Asia.
As I drove into the city of Hyderabad I passed by the Dilsukhnagar fruit market and decided to spend whatever spare time I had in the week ahead during a World Bank sponsored conference I was attending, to explore the many faces of this ancient city. This is what I found.
In order to understand Hyderabad you must start at the Golconda fort. It is a fairy tale looking edifice that rises steeply from the plain. To enter you walk through enormous gates and then climb steep stone stairs where you can explore the ancient citadel, its deserted mosque, storage, reception halls and living quarters. It also contains the remains of a Hindu temple for although the former rulers of Hyderabad, the Nizams, were Muslim, like many traditional Indian Muslim princes during the Raj they did not persecute their Hindu subjects. From the top of the fort you see out over the dusty plains. Clearly, it was the commanding military presence of the region until the 20th century.
Despite the fact that the urban sprawl of Hyderabad has grown right up to the walls of the fort, most of the area around it is home to a military base of the Indian army. Originally a Hindu fort, Golconda was conquered by Muslims from the north of India, the Qutbi Shahs, then by the Mughals under Emperor Aurangzeb and finally came to be ruled by the ancestors of the Nizam of Hyderabad, who managed this princely state first under the declining Mughals and then under the rising British East India Company cum British Empire. For centuries the fort contained the enormous financial treasure that these pleasure loving Muslim Indian princes accumulated and, the precious diamonds and gem stones which come from the mines of the region. The famous blue diamond, the Koh i Noor, which is now part of the crown jewels of England, comes from the treasure of the rulers of Hyderabad who before the rise of the oil sheikhs, were among the richest men in the world (Hyderabad has a school as well as a bakery by the same name.)
The Chowmallah is a grand series of low lying buildings set around an enormous water tank with fountains and birds who take refuge from the pre-monsoon heat of the city and which on some days reaches 50 degrees centigrade. People regularly die of heat stroke in this city and during my stay the papers reported the tragic case of a young high school student who, after writing his exam, took the bus home and arrived dead.
I strolled through room after room, with their high ceilings, marble pillars, silverware, uniforms, swords and armor and was stopped dead in my tracks by a large black and white photo of the Nizam and his guests in the palace entertaining British aristocrats or administrators at a state dinner, probably some time during the nineteen thirties. I felt as if I could step into the picture and time travel. But that Nizam is no more and whatever authority he once had, religious and/or secular, is gone.
Despite the very friendly relations with the Pakistani members of the conference, each day at five pm sharp they quietly left the proceedings to show themselves at the local police station, as a security precaution. One evening as I was reading the paper in the enormous dining hall I noticed that an Indian university, in the spirit of regional cooperation, was giving an honorary doctorate to Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan. The next day I read that a bomb had gone off beside the Indian Embassy in Kabul.
These new high tech Indian cities like Gurgaon near New Delhi, are also giving birth to a new generation of independent scholars like banker maven Sanjeev Sanyal, whose new book Land of the Seven Rivers provides a refreshing and nuanced non-Marxist history of India. Nevertheless, despite all this newfound wealth and leisure, there are still metal detectors at the entrance of most malls and many shops, a grim reminder that this new India is still the target of radical Islamists such as those who perpetrated the attacks in Mumbai.
Geoffrey Clarfield is an anthropologist at large.
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