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A fort raised on the hill of Indur
How an ancient settlement on the Godavari plain became a Bahmani garrison and a Barid Shahi stronghold
Long before the Bahmanis arrived, the settlement was known as Indur — a name still current in local Telugu usage, and preserved in the epithet "the Indore of the Deccan" to distinguish it from the more famous city in Madhya Pradesh. The town sits on a low basalt hill above a tributary of the Godavari, commanding the trade road that ran south from the Manjira River towards Golconda and north towards Bidar. Its position on a natural rise, with water on two sides in the rains, made it a place worth fortifying.
The Bahmanis, who controlled all of northern Telangana from Bidar after the fragmentation of the Delhi-Tughluq hold on the Deccan, raised or substantially expanded the fort at Indur sometime in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. The Nizamabad Fort — also called Indur Fort — stands on the hill to this day: a roughly rectangular enceinte of coursed basalt rubble, with corner bastions and a gatehouse whose lintels carry the characteristic pointed arch of Bahmani military architecture. The fort was no great citadel like Golconda, but it was solid enough to serve as a thana — a garrison post — on the long road between Gulbarga and the Godavari.
When the Bahmani sultanate fragmented after the execution of Mahmud Gawan in 1481, northern Telangana fell within the sphere of the Barid Shahis of Bidar. Indur Fort passed to them, and the town became a modest pargana headquarters of the Bidar Sultanate — taxing the cotton and grain that moved along the Godavari road and supporting the small garrison that manned the hilltop. The Qutb Shahis of Golconda contested the district through the sixteenth century, and under their influence the town's Telugu-speaking cultivators were largely undisturbed while a Persian-inflected administrative class settled in the qasba below the fort.
A city renamed for the Nizam
From district capital to Nizamsagar — the Asaf Jahi transformation of the Godavari plain
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.
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.
Black bangles, silver motifs, a GI tag
The unique black lacquerware of Nizamabad — earthenware silvered and blackened, a tradition unbroken for centuries
Of all the things that mark Nizamabad as a place apart in the Deccan, the most distinctive is its craft. The city is the sole source of a particular kind of lacquerware known by several names — kaala ilam bangles, Nizamabad black pottery, or simply black lacquerware — whose technique is found nowhere else in India. The objects are made from local red clay, shaped on a wheel, fired, and then coated in a resinous lacquer compound that turns deep black in a second firing. Into this black surface the craftsman inlays or paints motifs in pure silver — geometric arabesques, floral scrolls, the peacock and the parrot — before a final burnishing that gives the finished piece its characteristic velvet-and-silver lustre.
The craft is practised by a small community of potters, most belonging to the Kummari caste, who have maintained the technique through continuous transmission from at least the Asaf Jahi period; some practitioners trace their family memory of the craft back to the Bidar Sultanate, noting a resemblance between the silver inlay of Nizamabad lacquerware and the silver inlay of Bidriware — the celebrated zinc-alloy craft of nearby Bidar. Whether the two traditions share a common court origin is contested, but the visual kinship is unmistakable.
Bangles are the most popular form — a Nizamabad black bangle is a standard gift at weddings across Telangana — but the craft extends to plates, vases, hookah bases and decorative panels. In 2017 the Geographical Indication Registry of India awarded Nizamabad black lacquerware a GI tag, formally recognising the tradition's inseparable link to its home district. The tag has done something to stabilise the market, but the community of active practitioners remains small, and the survival of the craft depends, as it always has, on the continuity of family knowledge.
From Hyderabad State to Telangana
Operation Polo, the Telugu States Reorganisation, and the long road to a separate Telangana
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.
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. Nizamabad — ancient Indur, the Nizam's city — became part of the new state, taking with it its fort, its dam, its Saraswati temple, its Dakhni-speaking old quarter, and its black lacquerware. The city today is a busy district headquarters of northern Telangana, where Telugu and Dakhni Urdu are heard in every bazaar, and the silver-on-black gleam of a lacquered bangle is as common as a greeting.
اِندور کی مٹی میں چاندی کا رنگ ہے
"In the clay of Indur there is the colour of silver."
— A saying of the Nizamabad lacquerware potters · transmitted in the Kummari craft community
From Indur to Nizamabad to Telangana
- c. 14th c.The Bahmani Sultanate garrisoned and fortified the hill at Indur; the fort — later called Nizamabad Fort — commands the trade road above the Godavari tributary.
- c. 1481Bahmani fragmentation after the execution of Mahmud Gawan; northern Telangana, including Indur, passes to the Barid Shahis of Bidar.
- c. 16th c.The Qutb Shahis of Golconda contest the Godavari plain; Indur changes hands between Bidar and Golconda through the century.
- 1687Aurangzeb's Mughal armies take Golconda; Indur passes into the Mughal subah of Hyderabad.
- 1724Mir Qamar-ud-Din Khan, Nizam-ul-Mulk, founds Hyderabad State; Indur a pargana within it.
- Early 20th c.Under Mir Osman Ali Khan, the seventh Nizam, the town is formally renamed Nizamabad and constituted a district headquarters of Hyderabad State.
- 1923Nizamsagar Dam completed on the Manjira River — one of the earliest and largest masonry dams in Hyderabad State, irrigating cotton and jowar across three districts.
- 17 Sept 1948Operation Polo; Hyderabad State accedes to the Indian Union. Nizamabad passes to the Indian administration.
- 1 Nov 1956States Reorganisation Act: Nizamabad assigned to the new Andhra Pradesh, joining the Telugu-language state formed from the merger of Hyderabad State's Telugu districts.
- 2017Geographical Indication Registry awards a GI tag to Nizamabad black lacquerware, formally recognising the craft's inseparable link to its home district.
- 2 June 2014Telangana becomes India's twenty-ninth state; Nizamabad is a district of the new state, completing the administrative journey from Bahmani garrison to Telangana district headquarters.