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Abstract
This paper examines the rise of urban space as locus of intervention, and planning as modality of state power in South Asia from the late nineteenth century to the early post-colonial period. I view these developments through the re-making of Hyderabad, a major metropolis and capital of a sovereign non-colonial state until 1948. The regime's autonomous status made the city a venue for political experimentations informed by varied global and regional circuits. A particular develomentalist idiom fusing an older ideology of ethical patrimonialism and emerging technocratic legitimising rhetorics underwrote planning work in Hyderabad. Tracing urban expansion, housing and infrastructural development, and state-led economic planning schemes, I suggest Hyderabad exemplifies the emergence of a crucial and enduring new form of power in South Asia.
Acknowledgments
Through its many incarnations and expansions, this paper has benefitted from the intellectual generosity and critical engagement of several friends, colleagues and institutions. Audiences and workshop participants in Hyderabad, Cambridge (Mass.), Houston, Honolulu and Palo Alto provided key feedback on written or oral presentations of this material. For especially incisive comments, I am grateful to Prachi Deshpande, Michael M. J. Fisher, Will Glover, Thomas Blom Hansen, Shekhar Krishnan, Gyan Prakash, Smriti Srinivas, and the anonymous South Asia reviewers. This piece was improved significantly by the comments and labours of this special issue's editors, Doug Haynes and Nikhil Rao, and the adept editorial assistance of Vivien Seyler at South Asia. Material support for the research and writing of this piece was provided by the Fulbright-Hays Program, Harvard University, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The current MIT Aga Khan Program staff, and the late Omar Khalidi, provided crucial map assistance. Special thanks to K. Venkateshwarlu and Aniket Alam for helping me locate and explore existing City Improvement Board Model Houses in Hyderabad, and to Javeed Alam for offering reminiscences about the social worlds therein.
Notes
1 The Persianate name means ‘court of the city's exterior’. The court was alternately called ‘Adalat-i Atraf-i Baldah’, or ‘court of the city's outskirts’. Both the terms birun and atraf, when paired with baldah (‘city’, interchangeable with balad) were already associated with the suburban areas close to a city's urban core, as shown by John T. Platts’ inclusion of ‘suburbs’ in dictionary entries for the words in A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English (London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1884), pp.59, 208. Atraf-i Baldah was the official name for the suburban administrative division of Hyderabad State.
2 Urdu-language farman from Jahangir Mansion, Delhi to Maharajah Kishen Pershad, 12 Zihaj 1329 H (3 December 1911), 37/1/339, Andhra Pradesh State Archives, Hyderabad (henceforth APSA); and Faridoonji Jamshedji, Camp Delhi, to Mr. Fazil Mooraj, Hyderabad, 5 Dec 1911, ibid.
3 In keeping with the existing convention, I refer throughout this paper to Hyderabad and similar formally sovereign, non-colonial polities as ‘princely states’. This term reflects British visions in which these states were subordinated within an imperial hierarchy. Such views were often not shared by state officials, who envisioned and governed their polities as sovereign states on par with others states in the world.
4 For a key use of the term for South Asia, see Stephen P. Blake, ‘The Patrimonial-Bureaucratic Empire of the Mughals’, in Journal of Asian Studies, Vol.39 (1979), pp.77–94. On pre-modern patrimonialism elsewhere, see Karen Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp.9–17, inter alia. Patrimonialism is used to discuss modern princely states in Margrit Pernau, The Passing of Patrimonialism: Politics and Political Culture in Hyderabad, 1911–1948 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2000); and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, Lloyd I. Rudolph and Mohan Singh, ‘A Bureaucratic Lineage in Princely India: Elite Formation and Conflict in a Patrimonial System’, in Journal of Asian Studies, Vol.34 (1975), pp.717–53.
5 Blake, ‘The Patrimonial-Bureaucratic Empire of the Mughals’, pp.77–94.
6 Pernau, The Passing of Patrimonialism, inter alia, pp.59, 271, 321, 358.
7 On transition narratives as a historiographical genre, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp.30–7.
8 For a critique of the presumed evolutionary relationship between patrimonial and bureaucratic state forms, and an argument that the latter can often be components of effective states, see Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, ‘Authority and Power in Bureaucratic and Patrimonial Administration: A Revisionist Interpretation of Weber on Bureaucracy’, in World Politics, Vol.31 (1979), pp.195–227.
9 Anne Pitcher, Mary H. Moran and Michael Johnston, ‘Rethinking Patrimonialism and Neopatrimonialism in Africa’, in African Studies Review, Vol.52 (2009), pp.125–56
10 Ibid., pp.127, 144.
11 I will describe parallels with planning in Mysore below. Political autonomy in the princely states also allowed the capacity to develop projects in other domains. On princely educational institutions, for example, see Manu Bhagavan, Sovereign Spheres: Princes, Education and Empire in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Kavita Saraswathi Datla, The Language of Secular Islam: Urdu Nationalism and Colonial India (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013).
12 The key exception here is the suburb of Afzal Gunj, located on the north bank of the river just northeast of the urban core. This area was developed starting in the second quarter of the nineteenth century and integrated with the nizam's city during the 1850s and 1860s. See Alison Mackenzie Shah, ‘Constructing a Capital on the Edge of Empire: Urban Patronage and Politics in the Nizams’ Hyderabad, 1750–1950’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2005, Chapter 2.
13 Benjamin Cohen, ‘Modernising the Urban Environment: The Musi River Flood of 1908 in Hyderabad, India’, in Environment and History, Vol.17 (2011), pp.409–32.
14 ‘Abolition of the Suburban Court and Distribution of Its Work’, 9 March 1896, and ‘Resolution for the Abolition of the Suburban Court’, 37/1/148, 1896, APSA. See also Mir Basit Ali Khan, Tarikh-i ‘adalat-i Asafi. (Hyderabad: s.n., 1937), pp.35–6; and M.A. Muttalib, Administration of Justice under the Nizams, 1724–1948 (Hyderabad: Andhra Pradesh State Archives, 1988), pp.153–5, 265–6.
15 ‘Jihangir and Lakkadawala's Petition to Marquis of Ripon, G.C.S.I., Viceroy and Governor-General of India’, 6 October 1880, L/P&S/7/358, file 35, Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library, London (henceforth OIOC).
16 ‘Abolition of the Suburban Court and Distribution of its Work’, 9 March 1896, 37/1/148, APSA.
17 ‘Projects for the Construction of Tramway between Hyderabad and Secunderabad’, 1887–1888, Hyderabad Residency Records, F.16-1888, Political Department, National Archives of India, New Delhi (henceforth NAI).
18 ‘Proposed Tramway between Hyderabad and Secunderabad’, 1897, Hyderabad Residency Records, J.332-1897, Judicial Branch, NAI.
19 Nawab Sir Vikar-ul-Umra Bahadur to Residency, 24 May 1897, ibid.
20 Eric Lewis Beverley, ‘Frontier as Resource: Law, Crime and Sovereignty on the Margins of Empire’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol.55, no.2 (2013), pp.241–72.
21 ‘Temporary Transfer of the High Court to the Public Gardens’, 1911, 37/1/339, APSA. The Hyderabad High Court complex (1914–21) was initially designed by Vincent Esch, a British architect active in British India since the 1890s, associated with the Indo-Saracenic colonial style. Esch was also responsible for the monumental Errannagutta Railway Station (1914; now Kacheguda Station). See G.H.R. Tillotson, ‘Vincent J. Esch and the Architecture of Hyderabad, 1914–36’, in South Asian Studies, Vol.9, no.1 (1993), pp.29–46. For a consideration of the construction of the High Court (and some of the CIB projects discussed below) from the perspective of architectural history, see Shah, ‘Constructing a Capital on the Edge of Empire’, Chapter 6.
22 Janaki Nair, Mysore Modern: Rethinking the Region Under Princely Rule (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), pp.158–9; Aya Ikegame, ‘The Capital of Rajadharma: Modern Space and Religion in Colonial Mysore’, in International Journal of Asian Studies, Vol.4 (2007), pp.15–44; and Janaki Nair, The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore's Twentieth Century (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005). See Stephen Legg, Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi's Urban Governmentalities (Malden, MA: Blackwell/RGS, 2007), pp.162–3 on Improvement bodies, and pp.164–82 on DIT; William J. Glover, Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp.149, 224 n58; Nikhil Rao, House, But No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay's Suburbs, 1898–1964 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); S. Manzoor Alam, Hyderabad-Secunderabad, Twin Cities; A Study in Urban Geography (Bombay/New York: Allied Publishers, 1965); Sandip Hazareesingh, The Colonial City and the Challenge of Modernity: Urban Hegemonies and Civic Contestations in Bombay City 1900–1925 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007); Prashant Kidambi, The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890–1920, (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007); and Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore (Kuala Lumpur/New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). The emergence of Improvement bodies often followed legislative acts enabling town planning activity across colonial administrative units, such as the 1922 Punjab Town Improvement Act and the 1919 United Provinces Town Improvement Trusts Act. See Glover, Making Lahore Modern for Punjab, and Nandini Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth Century India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) for UP. Much of this legislation followed from Great Britain's 1909 Housing and Town Planning Act. See Gooptu, ibid., p.77; and Walter Addington Willis, Housing and Town Planning in Great Britain, Being a Statement of the Statutory Provisions Relating to the Housing of the Working Classes and to Town Planning Including the Housing, Town Planning, etc., Act, 1909 (London: Butterworth & Co., 1910).
23 Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor; Legg, Spaces of Colonialism; Nair, Mysore Modern; and Nair, The Promise of the Metropolis. See Anthony D. King, ‘Exporting Planning: The Colonial and Neo-Colonial Experience on Planning’, in Gordon Emanuel Cherry (ed.), Shaping an Urban World: Planning in the Twentieth Century (London: Mansell, 1980) for planning as a mode of colonial and neo-colonial subordination to Europe of colonised or ‘developing’ countries; and Ambe J. Njoh, Planning Power: Social Control and Planning in Colonial Africa (London: UCL, 2007) for a comparative account of British and French planning in colonial Africa.
24 For the first Report, see Hyderabad, City Improvement Board, Report on the Progress of the Hyderabad City Improvement Board for the Years 1322–1327 Fasli (1914–1919 A.D.) (Hyderabad, Deccan: Government Central Press, 1919). The author, location, and publisher are the same for subsequent reports. The second report covers a ten-year period (1327–1336 F., or 1919–28 CE), and the subsequent ten reports cover one Fasli year each (from 1930–31 to 1940–41). Henceforth, I refer to all reports as RPHCIB and specify the CE years to which their coverage corresponds.
25 RPHCIB 1914–1919.
26 Bhavnani, initially a sanitary engineer, quickly rose to superintending engineer, and served as the Board's chief technocrat until his death in 1927. On response to the plague and the Bombay Improvement Trust's 1898 formation, see Kidambi, The Making of an Indian Metropolis, Chapter 3.
27 RPHCIB 1914–1919. RPHCIB 1939–1940 describes a grant-in-aid paid to Sub-Engineer Muzafferuddin Ansari ‘for one year's study in Town-planning in Edinburgh’.
28 RPHCIB 1914–1919.
29 Ibid. However, statistics indicate no substantial correlation of plague deaths with population density.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 On the CIB's role, and Hyderabad's prominence, in early use of reinforced concrete in South Asia, see Stuart Tappin, ‘The Early Use of Reinforced Concrete in India’, in by S.H. Fernández (ed.), Proceedings of the First International Congress on Construction History, Madrid 20th-24th January 2003 (Madrid: Instituto Juan de Herrera, 2003), pp.1931–40, see p. 1938 on the Hyderabad CIB.
33 RPHCIB 1919–1928. Bombay, Madras, Bangalore, Baroda and Mysore were denser large cities. The CIB also proposed to control development in open lands in a zone extending two miles beyond the municipal boundary.
34 RPHCIB 1914–1919.
35 RPHCIB 1933–1934; and RPHCIB 1934–1935.
36 RPHCIB 1935–1936. Here pucca refers to the term pakka, meaning permanent and solid, as opposed to kachcha, improvised and temporary.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
39 RPHCIB 1914–1919.
41 Sultan Bazar was referred to as Residency Bazar until 1933. The areas referred to here as Errannagutta and Lingampally are now known, respectively, as Amberpet and Bagh Lingampally.
42 The last two of these localities intersected the city wall.
43 Here, the term ‘Model Houses’ refers also to ‘Low-Rent Houses’. The two were architecturally similar and designed for working-class residents, but had different funding structures.
44 Over a third of this housing was put up in neighbourhoods that intersected the walls.
45 RPHCIB 1940–1941.
46 On preparation for the handover, see Nawab Mahdi Yar Jung Bahadur, political member, to Major G.T. Fisher, IA, secretary to the resident, 28 March 1933, ‘Rendition of the Hyd. Residency Bazaars to His Exalted Highness the Nizam's Government’, 71/32/88, 1933, APSA. See RPHCIB 1936-1937, 1937–1938, 1938–1939 and 1940–1941 on plans, apportioning of funds, housing development, and road work in Sultan Bazar.
47 Extensive documentation on the cantonment's retrocession, some dating back to 1931, is to be found in ‘Secunderabad Cantonment: Proposed Partial Retrocession of Jurisdiction to Nizam's Government’, L/P&S/13/1230, 1937–1946, OIOC. As with decolonisation in British India, World War II altered the timeline of the retrocession. The return of Hyderabad's cantonment to native sovereignty—along with similar areas in other princely cities, Bangalore, Indore and Bhopal—preceded formal decolonisation in the Raj's ‘directly ruled’ territories in South Asia.
48 The CIB's Pathergatti work extended from the World War I period into the 1940s. RPHCIB 1914–1919 through 1940–1941.
49 RPHCIB 1930–1931 through 1934–1935.
50 Hyderabad State, The Economic Life of Hyderabad (Hyderabad, Deccan: Government Central Press, [1937]).
51 RPHCIB 1940–1941 details the continued acquisition of property for inclusion in Azamabad Industrial Area and construction of roads linking it to other parts of the city.
52 ‘Proceedings of the Hyderabad City Improvement Board Meetings’, 1946, Hyderabad Residency Records, 127.A, Accounts Branch, NAI.
53 K.N. Gopi, Urban Growth and Industrial Locations (New Delhi: Oxford & IBH, 1980), p.6.
54 Ibid., p.21.
55 For example, Alladdin Buildings in Begumpet, just northwest of Hussain Sagar, was constructed by the original owner of Allwyn Metal Works in Sanathnagar Industrial Area. See ibid., p.21; and Omar Khalidi, A Guide to Architecture in Hyderabad, Deccan, India (Cambridge, Mass.: Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, 2008), p.241.
56 Hyderabad State, Town Planning in H.E.H. the Nizam's Dominions 1346–1353 (Hyderabad: Government Publication, 1944), henceforth TP.
57 The report also contained some proposals for maintaining healthy conditions in pilgrimage centres and provincial capitals.
58 Project sites were located in districts in the three main regions of Hyderabad: Telangana (Adilabad, Karimnagar, Warangal); Marathwada (Aurangabad, Bhir, Nanded, Osmanabad, Latur); and the Karnatak (Gulbarga, Raichur).
59 ‘Town and Country Planning in H.E.H. the Nizam's Dominions’, in TP, pp.7–12. For attribution of Fayazuddin as author of the Report as a whole and extended discussion of his planning work, see M. Ahmed Ali, Historical Aspects of Town Planning in Pakistan and India (Karachi: Al-Ata Foundation, 1971), pp.89–93.
60 ‘Town & Country Planning in H.E.H. the Nizam's Dominions’, TP, pp.8, 9.
61 Ibid., pp.7–8.
62 M. Visvesvaraya, Memoirs of My Working Life (Bombay: Burton, 1951), pp.36, 39–41; and M. Visvesvaraya, A Brief Memoir of My Complete Working Life (Bangalore: Government Press, 1960), pp.4–5.
63 Vinod Vyasulu, ‘Nehru and the Visvesvaraya Legacy’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol.24, no.30 (29 July 1989), pp.1700–4. See also works by M. Visvesvaraya, Industrializing India: Constructive Policies and Plan (Bangalore: Bangalore Press, 1933); Planned Economy for India (Bangalore: Bangalore Press, 1934); Nation Building: A Five-Year Plan for the Provinces (Bangalore: Bangalore Press, 1937); Prosperity through Industry, Move Towards Rapid Industrialization (Bombay: All-India Manufacturers’ Organization, 1943); and Reconstruction in Post-War India: A Plan of Development All Round (Bombay: All-India Manufacturers’ Organization, 1944). On Visvesvaraya's engineering and political work in Mysore, see Nair, ‘Introduction’, in Mysore Modern; and Nair, The Promise of the Metropolis, pp.14–16.
64 Dildar Husain, Glimpses of an Engineer-Statesman of Hyderabad Deccan (Hyderabad: Indian Institution of Engineers, 1961).
65 Husain, Glimpses of an Engineer-Statesman, p.39.
66 Dangoria was a graduate of the Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts. See Philip C. Fleming, ‘Low-Cost Housing in Hyderabad’, in Journal of the American Institute of Architects, Vol.6, no.2 (August 1946), p.76.
67 ‘Secunderabad Town Improvement Scheme’, Hyderabad Residency Records, 75-1929, Political Branch (index # 522), NAI.
68 Vijaya Bhole, Housing and Urban Development in India (New Delhi: Classical, 1988), p.145, notes that 77 percent of APHB land acquisition in the twin cities was outside municipal limits. On the scope of the Board's work, and expansion beyond the capital area in 1973, see ‘Administrative and Accounts Manual’, A.P. Housing Board RTI Act (2005), p.33 [ http://www.aphb.gov.in/RTI/RTI_Act_2012new.pdf, accessed 13 January 2013].
69 Bhole, Housing and Urban Development in India, pp.7, 135, 137–45.
70 Husain, Glimpses of an Engineer-Statesman, pp.8, 18.
71 The first full listing of ITPI members (one third of whom are from former princely states) appears in Journal of the Institute of Town Planners, India, no.9 (Oct. 1957). For Fayazuddin's own account of his work in Hyderabad, which references the US and UK as models, and draws considerable content from the 1944 TPD document discussed above, see M. Fayazuddin, ‘Planning in the States—Hyderabad’, in Journal of the Institute of Town Planners, India, no.2 (April 1955), pp.20–7.
72 In discussing development in late princely Mysore under Visvesvaraya and others, Nair argues that Mysore's brand of modernity was a product of ‘governance in lieu of politics’. See Nair, Mysore Modern, pp.16–18.
73 C.V. Subba Rao, Hyderabad, the Social Context of Industrialisation, 1875–1948 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007), Chapter 2.
74 Subba Rao argues that in other princely states such as Mysore, elites were creatures of colonial machinations. Ibid.
75 Ibid., p.29.
76 Ibid., pp.37–54, 69–70. Most of these developments were financed through a particular Hyderabadi institution, the Industrial Trust Fund, which provided heavy subsidies and tax relief.
77 Ibid., pp.144–7. The proportion of land revenue as total state revenue declined from roughly 50 percent in 1900–01 to 16 percent by 1947–48.
78 Ibid., p.121.
79 Ibid., pp.72–5, 153.
80 Ibid., p.50.
81 Vivek Chibber, Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp.30, 88–9, 103.
82 Ibid., pp.127, 129.
83 Fayazuddin, ‘Planning in the States’, p.20.
84 Ibid., p.25.
85 Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p.82.
86 Chibber notes the existence of princely states only in passing. See Chibber, Locked in Place, p.115. For a reading of princely states as endemic of the general tendency towards enduring weakness of centralised state power in colonial and post-colonial South Asia (particularly India) and local/regional despotic power, see Atul Kohli, State-Directed Development: Political Power and Industrialization in the Global Periphery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p.232, inter alia.
87 On engagements between colonial rulers and Indian capitalists, see Preeti Chopra, A Joint Enterprise: Indian Elites and the Making of British Bombay (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). On colonial urbanism, see Kidambi, The Making of an Indian Metropolis; Hazareesingh, The Colonial City and the Challenge of Modernity; Legg, Spaces of Colonialism; Glover, Making Lahore Modern; and Eric Lewis Beverley, ‘Colonial Urbanism and South Asian Cities’, in Social History, Vol.36, no.4 (2011), pp. 482–97.
*Zone 3 was also the location of a significant internal shift. SC&D in the areas immediately adjacent to the Residency were met with extensive housing construction further north towards Hussain Sagar and east along the Musa bank. CIB work here effected a population shift away from the existing core area around the Residency.
Source: Compiled by the author based on figures in cumulative statistical accounts in RPHCIB 1940–1941.