The Fall of Hyderabad State

Until 1947, India's great tourist cities of Rajasthan were a side show for heritage lovers. Strange as it sounds today, the place that everyone flocked to was the Deccani city of Hyderabad.

Under the rule of the Asaf Jahi Nizams, Hyderabad was transformed into a playground for the Deccan's aristocracy. Palaces bloomed on hilltops, on lakes and overlooking the city's racecourse.

Ayman Garh and Hill Fort Palace were built as mock-Gothic castles while Falaknuma Palace combined a Palladian façade with a Scots baronial interior, and a ceiling brimming with Islamicate muqarnas.

Most extraordinary of all, however, was the palace of minister Salar Jung, the greatest art collector in India, whose teak baradaris were embellished with thousands of rare Chinese porcelains, renaissance Italian sculptures and Mughlai miniature paintings that made contemporary collections in Europe look provincial by comparison.

After the death of J. D. Rockefeller, the Nizam of Hyderabad was crowned the richest man in the world.

Indeed it was into his family - not the Shahs of Iran of the Sheikhs of the Gulf - that the Ottoman Caliph wanted to marry his daughters into.

With a third of people living under Indian princely rule and an income and expenditure rivalling ‘those of Belgium and exceed[ing] … those of twenty members of the United Nations’, Hyderabad, the Nizam argued, was not just a princely state but a country in its own right.

In time, Hyderabad came to be regarded as ‘the most prominent Muslim city outside of the Holy Land’, its name uttered in the same breath as Mecca and Jerusalem.

But Hyderabad was also immensely feudal, and its contradictions were catching up with it. In the Telugu-speaking countryside, South Asia's first great armed communist rebellion - the Telangana struggle - erupted against the state's landlords.

To put down the insurgency, the Nizam leaned increasingly on an Islamist militia, the Razakars.

Until this point he had been proud to call the Hindu and Muslim communities his 'two eyes', and his aristocracy was drawn from many faiths. But the Razakars soon turned from hunting communists to attacking Hindus across the countryside, triggering a vast migration out of the state. Indian partisans launched cross-border raids in reply, and Hyderabad slid towards civil war.

In September 1948 the Indian Army simply marched in - the euphemistically named 'police action' - and conquered the state in five days.

By the time the conflict was over, more people had fled Hyderabad State than fled Palestine during the Nakba that same year. Telangana rarely features in our imagination of Partition, yet its displacement rivalled that of Punjab and Bengal.