NIZAMABAD

The Asaf Jahi dynasty — the Nizams of Hyderabad — inherited Indur along with the rest of the northern Deccan when Mir Qamar-ud-Din Khan, Nizam-ul-Mulk, broke from the weakening Mughal empire and founded Hyderabad State in 1724. For more than two centuries the district was administered from a collector's office in the town below the old Bahmani fort. It was under the long reign of the seventh and last Nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan, that the town received its modern name: the old Indur was formally styled Nizamabad — the city of the Nizam — and made the headquarters of a reconstituted district of Hyderabad State.

The Asaf Jahi investment in the district is most durably expressed in water. In 1923, the Hyderabad State Public Works Department completed the Nizamsagar Dam across the Manjira River, a Godavari tributary that flows past the district's western edge. At its completion, Nizamsagar was one of the largest masonry dams in peninsular India — a gravity dam nearly two kilometres long, impounding the Manjira's monsoon flow in a reservoir that irrigated hundreds of thousands of acres of cotton and jowar across three districts. It was, and remains, a monument to the Asaf Jahi state's ambition for scientific agriculture in the Deccan.^[1]

Under the Nizams, the town acquired the institutional apparatus of a proper district headquarters: a talukdar's court, a civil hospital, a railway station on the branch line from Secunderabad, and the mixed population of a Hyderabadi administrative town — Telugu cultivators in the surrounding villages, a Dakhni-speaking Muslim qasba around the old fort, and the Persian-literate revenue clerks of the Dar-ul-Daftar. The bazaar Dakhni of Nizamabad, overlaid on a Telugu substratum, became recognisably of the same family as the Dakhni of Hyderabad — softer in its vowels, coloured by the Telangani countryside.^[3]

On 17 September 1948 — the day Hyderabad State formally acceded to the Indian Union following Operation Polo, the military action of the Indian Army — Nizamabad passed from the administration of the Nizam's government to that of the Indian state. The transition was, in the Nizamabad district, less violent than in some parts of the state; the district's relative distance from Hyderabad city and the absence of large private armies or Razakar concentrations meant that the town was occupied by Indian forces without significant resistance.^[4]

The question of which linguistic state Nizamabad would join was contested for nearly a decade. The district was predominantly Telugu-speaking in its villages, but its administrative class and the Dakhni-speaking Muslim community of the qasba had been shaped by the Hyderabadi Urdu-medium administration. In the States Reorganisation Act of 1956 the district was assigned to the new Andhra Pradesh — the Telugu-language state formed by the merger of Hyderabad State's Telugu districts with the old Andhra State — and Nizamabad became a district of Andhra Pradesh.

The long campaign for a separate Telangana state, which argued that the former Hyderabad State Telugu districts had distinct administrative, cultural and economic identities that were being subordinated to the coastal Andhra leadership of the combined state, resulted, after decades of agitation, in the formation of Telangana as India's twenty-ninth state on 2 June 2014.^[3] Nizamabad — ancient Indur, the Nizam's city — became part of the new state, taking with it its fort, its dam, its Saraswati temple, and its Dakhni-speaking old quarter. The city today is a busy district headquarters of northern Telangana, where Telugu and Dakhni Urdu are heard in every bazaar.