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ABSTRACT
This paper revisits the violent annexation of the erstwhile princely state of Hyderabad by the Indian army in 1948 as an inaugural moment of dispossession to reconstruct Hyderabad's twentieth century past along the axes of Muslim belonging and memory. I argue that we must situate twentieth and twenty-first century Hyderabadi Muslim migration in relation to Partition-related displacements and attempts to overcome them through economic conditions provided by migration. The partition of India prompted waves of migration—such as the later migration of Hyderabadi Muslims to the Persian Gulf in the wake of 1970s oil boom—and their sense of displacement persisted long past the mid-twentieth century, reshaping Muslim notions of belonging. The use of the nation-state as the dominant framework to analyze these shifts is insufficient for understanding Hyderabadi Muslims' sense of belonging and citizenship, which must be also contextualized in terms of upward class mobility along the axes of global and local contexts.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Akeel Bilgrami has emphasized the significance of the protests in India and Muslims role in them, particularly the “spontaneous burst of poetry and speech through which a deeper citizenship is forged via the many spangled ethos of Indian Islam … What is even more significant, however, is that this appeal, unafraid to give voice to the commitments and practices of popular religion of that longstanding pluralist tradition, is being seamlessly integrated by the movements of the past two months – in a way that has never happened before – with the most abstract commitments of the codes, rights and provisions of the law and of the Constitution. No leader had managed to do this before in the history of 20th-century India.” Akeel Bilgrami, ‘Two Historic Deeds: The Common Muslim Has Done What Even Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, or Azad Couldn’t’. Outlook India, February 17, 2020, https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/india-news-caa-agitation-muslim-voices-resorting-to-poetry-creativity-and-practices-of-a-centuries-long-indian-islam/302750 (accessed 3 October 2021).
2 Notable exceptions include A. G. Noorani, The Destruction of Hyderabad. New Delhi: Tulika Publications, 2013; Sunil Purushotham, ‘Internal Violence: The “Police Action” in Hyderabad’. Comparative Studies in Society and History (2015): 435–466; Taylor C. Sherman. ‘The Integration of the Princely State of Hyderabad and the Making of the Postcolonial State in India, 1948–56’. The Indian Economic and Social History Review Vol. 44. Issue 4 (2007): 489–516.
3 See K. M. Munshi, The End of an Era: Hyderabad Memories. Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1957; V. H. Desai, Vande Mataram to Jana Gana Mana: Saga of Hyderabad Freedom Struggle. Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1990; P. V. Kate, Marathwada under the Nizams, 1724–1948. Mittal Publications, 1987; V. P. Menon, The Story of the Integration of the Indian States. Longmans, Green and Co, 1955. For a recent example, see Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy. Pan Macmillan, 2017. Guha does not mention Operation Polo, and glosses over the violence undertaken by the Indian army in Hyderabad state in 1948.
4 Yamini Krishna and Swathi Shivanand, ‘BJP Made Gains in Hyderabad Using History as a Weapon: But How Accurate is its Version of the Past?’ Scroll, January 21, 2021, https://scroll.in/article/983875/bjp-made-gains-in-hyderabad-using-history-as-a-weapon-but-how-accurate-is-its-version-of-the-past (accessed 3 October 2021).
5 There may be no historical evidence for the existence of one “Bhagmati”, the Hindu courtesan who converted to Islam, marrying Hyderabad’s 16th century founder Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah (1565–1612), and renamed Hyder Mahal, but it is impossible to know for sure. The Deccan’s sultans often married Hindu women. However, the matter of Hyderabad’s name change is part of the broader agenda of the BJP, along the lines of the recent renaming of Allahabad as Prayagraj. The name ‘Hyderabad’ most likely derived from Hyder, the second name of Imam Ali (son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad) who is followed by Shi’a Muslims. Attempts to change the name of the city go as far back as the late 1930s by Hindu Maha Sabha activists as outlined by Sankara Ramachandra Datte in Bhaganagar Struggle: A Brief History of the Movement Led by Hindu Maha Sabha in Hyderabad State in 1938–39 (first published in Pune, 1940). As the former superintending archaeologist of ASI, Milan Kumar Chauley, recently noted: “The irony of this is that the Bhagyalaxmi temple that is attached to the Charminar is in fact an illegal structure which came up between or after the 1960s.” Y. Lasania, ‘BJP’s Push to Rename Hyderabad: Does ‘Bhagyanagar’ Stand a Chance?’ The Wire, December 3, 2020, https://thewire.in/history/hyderabad-bhagyanagar-bjp-push-further-renaming-project (accessed 20 December 2021).
6 Sangeeta Kamat, ‘Neoliberalism, Urbanism and the Education Economy: Producing Hyderabad as a “Global City”’. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education Vol. 32. Issue 2 (2011): 187–202.
7 In recent years, significant interventions on the history of Hyderabad have been made by Kavita Datla and Eric Beverley which have examined relationships between state and institutions and networks from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See Eric Lewis Beverley, Hyderabad, British India, and the World: Muslim Networks and Minor Sovereignty, c. 1850–1950. Cambridge University Press, 2015; Kavita Datla, The Language of Secular Islam: Urdu Nationalism and Colonial India. University of Hawaii Press, 2013.
8 Noorani, The Destruction of Hyderabad, op. cit. While the book reproduces the Sundarlal Committee Report in full, the historian Sunil Purushotham was the first to obtain the report and make it public.
9 Khatija Khader, ‘Mobile Communities of the Indian Ocean: A Brief Study of Siddi and Hadrami Diaspora in Hyderabad City, India’, in Toyin Falola and Cacee Hoyer (Eds.), Global Africans. Routledge, 2018, pp. 76–93.
10 Karen Leonard, ‘Reassessing Indirect Rule in Hyderabad: Rule, Ruler, or Sons-in-Law of the State?’ Modern Asian Studies Vol. 37. Issue 2 (2003): 363–379; Margrit Pernau, The Passing of Patrimonialism: Politics and Political Culture in Hyderabad 1911–1948. Manohar Publishers and Distributers, UK edition, 2000.
11 Beverley, Hyderabad, British India, and the World, op. cit.
12 For more on the practices around Karbala and ritual aesthetic phenomena of Shi’a mourning in Hyderabad, see Syed Akbar Hyder, Reliving Karbala: Martyrdom in South Asian Memory. Oxford University Press, 2006; See also Afsar Mohammad, ‘Sita is Fatima and Fatima is Sita: Performing Sita and Fatima in a Muslim Public Ritual’. Journal of Vaishnava Studies Vol. 20. Issue 1 (2011): 173–196.
13 Sheshalatha Reddy, ‘The Cosmopolitan Nationalism of Sarojini Naidu, Nightingale of India’. Victorian Literature and Culture Vol. 38. Issue 2 (2010): 571–589.
14 Sunderlal Committee Report. Reprinted in full, Appendix 14 in Noorani, The Destruction, op. cit., pp. 361–367.
15 Ibid.
16 Mohammad Mazheruddin, Police Action Ke Khofnak Mahol Mein, press unknown. 1952. See also his, Zaval-e Hyderabad Police Action. Hyderabad: Rafeeq Printing Press, 1982.
17 Confidential Notes Attached to the Sunderlal Committee Report, reprinted in Noorani, The Destruction, op. cit., pp. 368–373.
18 See Mazheruddin’s case against AP government: https://www.legitquest.com/case/state-of-andhra-pradesh-through-the-chief-secretary-v-s-mohammed-mazharuddin-ahmed/44b15 (accessed 20 December, 2021).
19 Purushotham, ‘Internal Violence’, op. cit., pp. 435–466.
20 Noorani, The Destruction, op. cit., p. 196. Noorani’s analysis focuses almost entirely on the Sunderlal Report and political correspondences between political elites: the Nizam of Hyderabad, the right-wing Patel, the secular nationalist Nehru, and founder of Pakistan Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
21 See ‘Untold History of Razakars: Prerna Thiruvaipati in Conversation with Journalist K. Raka Sudhakar Rao’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqVyXLVqXys&t=275s (accessed 20 December 2021).
22 Taylor C. Sherman, Muslim Belonging in Secular India: Negotiating Citizenship in Postcolonial Hyderabad. Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 17.
23 Shefali Jha, Democracy on a Minor Note: The All-India Majlis-e-Ittehād'ul Muslimān and Its Hyderabadi Muslim Publics. University of Chicago. Phd Thesis, 2017, pp. x.
24 Ibid.
25 One instance of such work is the new research proposed by Mohammad Afsar on narratives of Hyderabad police action of 1948, in his “No Longer a Nawab: The Making of a New Hyderabadi Muslim”, British Library: South Asia Seminar Series, August 2021. https://www.bl.uk/events/no-longer-a-nawab-the-making-of-a-new-hyderabadi-muslim (accessed 20 December 2021). See also Nazia Akhtar (2013) From Nizam to Nation: The Representation of Partition in Literary Narratives about Hyderabad, Deccan. University of Western Ontario. PhD Thesis, 2013.
26 I thank Anant Maringanti and Ali Hussain Mir for our conversations about stories related to Hyderabad’s police action.
27 Khurram Murad Bidri, ‘Hyderabad and Police Action 1948: Survivor Recalls Operation Polo’, Maktoob Media September 18, 2021, https://maktoobmedia.com/2021/09/18/hyderabad-police-action-1948-survivor-recalls-operation-polo/ (accessed 20 December 2021).
28 Karen Isaksen Leonard, Locating Home: India's Hyderabadis Abroad. Stanford University Press, 2007.
29 Syed Ali, ‘“Go West Young Man”: The Culture of Migration Among Muslims in Hyderabad, India’. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies Vol. 33. Issue 1 (2007): 42.
30 Ali, ‘Go West’, op. cit., pp. 37–58.
31 Family archives. Interviews with Khan’s family. Chicago, 2017 and 2018.
32 Afsar Mohammad, ‘No Longer a Nawab’, op. cit.
33 Interviews, Hyderabad, India. June, 2018.
34 ‘Revenue Acts Made Muslims Poor: Owaisi’. Times of India, September 12, 2020, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/hyderabad/revenue-acts-made-muslims-poor-akbar/articleshow/78067771.cms (accessed 20 December 2021).
35 Siasat Daily Newspaper Office and Archives, Hyderabad, India.
36 Siasat Daily, June 22, 1986. Ibid.
37 Ratna Naidu, Old Cities, New Predicaments: A Study of Hyderabad. Sage Publications, 1990.
38 Special Correspondent, ‘PM Sends Aide to Hyderabad’. Times of India, April 3, 1978.
39 ‘Policemen Raped Woman: Probe’. Times of India, August 9, 1978.
40 Kalpana Kannabiran, ‘Rape and the Construction of Communal Identity’, in Kumari Jayawardena and Malathi de Alwis (Eds.), Embodied Violence: Communalising Women’s Sexuality in South Asia. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1996, pp. 32–41.
41 Naidu, Old Cities, New Predicaments, op. cit.
42 ‘Extremists’ hand in AP Violence Alleged’. Times of India, December 18, 1978.
43 Azmatullah Khan, then Director of Industries, was a junior colleague of Khader Ali Khan. Interview, Hyderabad, India, July 2018.
44 Saville Davis, ‘Civil Servant in India Risked All to Aid Poor’, Christian Science Monitor, March 28, 1973.
45 It is also likely that Khan met Indira Gandhi at the National Seminar on Employment which was inaugurated by her in 1981. Hyderabad Gol Mez April-May 2021. I thank Muhammad Ayub Ali Khan for pointing this out.
46 Ali, ‘Go West’, op. cit., p. 42.
47 Somewhat a cliché by now, it is frequently asserted as common knowledge that South Asian Muslims who have worked in the Gulf states, return to their home countries having internalized more conservative ideologies about Islamic piety. The phenomenon has not been studied in depth. I would argue that while changes to ideas about religion are undeniable, there has also been the widespread tendency to overemphasize religiosity to the exclusion of local socio-economic conditions. One of the few works that explores the impact of Gulf migration on South Asian Islam is an anthology by Christophe Jaffrelot and Laurence Louer. While the work is an important contribution, its focus is almost entirely upon Pakistan, which has a unique role in its geopolitical connections to Saudi Arabia. See Christophe Jaffrelot and Laurence Louër, eds. Pan-Islamic Connections: Transnational Networks Between South Asia and the Gulf. Oxford University Press, 2017.
48 Beverley, Hyderabad, British India, and the World, op. cit.
49 In new online media groups such as “Paigahs of the Deccan” and “Hyderabad Social Diaries”, Hyderabadi Muslims share personal family memorabilia as well as articles about Hyderabad’s pre-1948 past.
50 On “translocality”, see Khatija Sana Khader, ‘Translocal Notions of Belonging and Authenticity: Understanding Race Amongst the Siddis of Gujarat and Hyderabad’. South Asian History and Culture Vol. 11. Issue 4 (2020): 433–448.
51 All names of interlocuters in Toli Chowki are pseudonyms in order to respect their privacy.
52 See also Christophe Jaffrelot and Laurent Gayer, Muslims in Indian Cities: Trajectories of Marginalization. Columbia University Press, 2012.
53 Interviews, Toli Chowki, Hyderabad, India. June 2018.
54 Ibid.
55 Manan Ahmed Asif, ‘Virulence of Hindutva’. in The Pandemic: Perspectives on Asia, Association for Asian Studies, 2020, pp. 153–165.
56 Interviews, Old City, Hyderabad, India. June 2018.
57 Javeed Alam, “The Burqa and The Rikshaw,” Seminar 585 (May 2008).
58 I thank the following people for offering support through our conversations about Hyderabad: Eric Beverley, Anant Maringanti, Sajjad Shahid, and Ali Hussain Mir. Additionally, I thank Hyderabad Urban Labs for providing me the organizational space to carry out my project, as well as Hyderabad Gol Mez, a series of round table discussions about the city that emerged April and May 2021. I am very grateful to my research assistant Aman Madan (Davidson College ’19) for conducting and transcribing interviews with me in Hyderabad, June-July 2018.
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Sarah Waheed
Sarah Waheed is a Research Affiliate of Davidson College, North Carolina, where she has taught courses in history and gender studies and served as Director of the Semester in India Program. She holds a PhD in South Asian History from Tufts University. Her first book, Hidden Histories of Pakistan: Censorship, Literature, and Secular Nationalism in Late Colonial India was published by Cambridge University Press (2022). She is currently a Fulbright Scholar carrying out research towards her second book, The Warrior Queen Who Died Thrice: Gender, Sovereignty and Islam in Premodern India.