HYDERABAD

By 1590 the old Qutb Shahi seat at Golconda was overcrowded — its citadel walls were full, its wells were running thin, and the plague had passed through more than once. The fifth sultan, Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah (r. 1580–1611), decided on a new capital five miles east, on the banks of the river Musi.

Tradition records that the city was first called Bhagnagar, after Bhagmati, the consort he later married and styled Hyder Mahal — from whose name, in turn, the present Hyderabad is said to come. The geometric grid he ordered — four great avenues meeting at a central tetrapylon — was an act of urban planning unusual for its time anywhere in India.

At the centre of the four roads he raised the Charminar, in 1591, in thanksgiving for the end of an epidemic. From its arches the city was measured. The Mecca Masjid would rise at its foot in 1614; the bazaars of Laad Bazaar, Pathergatti and Madina would crystallise around it. Hyderabad was a planned city, designed and dated, and that planning still shows.

Before Hyderabad there was Golconda — a granite hill seven kilometres west of the new city, fortified by the Kakatiyas as early as the twelfth century, captured by the Bahmanis in 1364, and made capital by Sultan Quli Qutb-ul-Mulk in 1518 when he declared the independence of his Telangana governorate. For seventy-three years the dynasty ruled from inside its three concentric walls.

Golconda's wealth was diamonds. The Kollur mines at the river Krishna, an outwork of this kingdom, produced the Koh-i-Noor, the Hope, the Regent and the Daria-i-Noor — every great Indian diamond of the European cabinet rooms. Tavernier, the seventeenth-century French jeweller, said that the city's bazaar dealt in 60,000 pearls and rough stones a day.

The fort itself is a feat of acoustic engineering — a hand-clap at the Fateh Darwaza can be heard at the Bala Hisar pavilion a kilometre uphill. It fell to Aurangzeb only in 1687, after an eight-month siege and an act of internal treachery.

In January 1687 the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb personally led an army of more than a hundred thousand against Golconda. His pretext was the refusal of the last Qutb Shahi, Abul Hasan Tana Shah (r. 1672–1687), to extradite the Hindu Brahmin minister Madanna and his brother Akkanna, the most effective administrators in the southern Deccan.

Golconda's walls held for eight months. The Mughal mines failed; assault parties were repulsed; Tana Shah's general Abdur Razzaq Lari was wounded seventy times in a single day's combat and survived. The fort fell at last only because an Afghan officer, Sarandaz Khan, opened a postern at night for a Mughal bribe.

Aurangzeb annexed the kingdom into the Mughal subah of Hyderabad, kept Tana Shah a state prisoner at Daulatabad until his death in 1699, and absorbed the Kollur mines, the Hyderabad mint and the Coromandel trade into the imperial revenue. The dynasty was over after one hundred and seventy years.

Falaknuma Palace ("mirror of the sky") was built between 1884 and 1893 by Nawab Vikar-ul-Umra. Designed by an English architect in a scorpion-shaped plan, it has 220 rooms, one of the longest dining tables in the world (101 seats), and a marble Italian staircase. The sixth Nizam bought it on a whim in 1897 and used it as guest-house for visiting royalty including Edward VII and George V.

Chowmahalla ("four palaces") was the official seat of the Nizams from 1750 onward — a complex of four pavilions arranged around a long axial pool, with a Khilwat durbar hall lit by nineteen chandeliers from Belgium. Coronations were held here; the Nizam's clock has chimed without missing for two and a half centuries.

And the Salar Jung Museum, founded on the personal collection of Nawab Mir Yusuf Ali Khan Salar Jung III (1889–1949), the prime minister of the seventh Nizam, holds 1.1 million objects across thirty-eight galleries — the largest one-man art collection in the world.

At Indian independence in August 1947, the Nizam Mir Osman Ali Khan declined to accede to either Dominion. For thirteen months Hyderabad State remained a sovereign holdout, ringed by Indian territory, with its own currency, army and aspirations to United Nations observership.

On 13 September 1948 the Government of India launched a "police action" — code-named Operation Polo — across five fronts. The Hyderabad State Forces (Razakars and the Nizam's regular army together) numbered roughly 22,000 against 36,000 Indian troops. The campaign lasted one hundred and eight hours; on 17 September Major-General Syed Ahmed El Edroos surrendered the city.

The Nizam was retained as Rajpramukh (constitutional head) of the new Hyderabad State within India until 1956, when the State was trifurcated by language — Telangana to Andhra, Marathwada to Bombay, Kannada-speaking districts to Mysore. The political end did not erase the cultural continuity. The Dakhni dialect, the Hyderabadi cuisine, the qawwali at Yousufain, the durbar etiquette, the calligraphic letterhead — all of it is still here.