Home›Landmarks of the Deccan›Institutions of the Deccan›Anwar-ul-Uloom College
Anwar-ul-Uloom College, founded at Hyderabad in 1922, was the principal community-founded institution of higher Urdu learning in the Deccan. Its parent body was the Anjuman-e-Taraqqi-e-Urdu, the great society for the advancement of Urdu founded at Aligarh in 1903 and led at Hyderabad by Imadul-Mulk Sayyid Husain Bilgrami and his circle. The college began as a high school in the Mallepally quarter of the old city and grew across the twentieth century into a full degree-granting college and, more recently, an engineering and management institution. It was conceived from the beginning as the community's own complement to the state-founded Osmania.
The Anjuman
The Anjuman-e-Taraqqi-e-Urdu and its energetic Hyderabad branch
The Anjuman-e-Taraqqi-e-Urdu had been founded in 1903 to coordinate the modernisation of the Urdu language and its literature. Its Hyderabad branch — under Bilgrami, Maulvi Abdul Haq and others — was particularly active, and Anwar-ul-Uloom was the largest of its educational foundations in the city.
The college
An Osmania-affiliated college built around Urdu letters and Islamic studies
Built up across the 1920s and 1930s in a modest but dignified institutional manner on Mallepally, the college taught the standard Osmania syllabus in Urdu and later in English, with a particular strength in Urdu literature and Islamic studies. It produced several generations of Urdu writers and journalists of the city.
Continuing life
One of the largest community-run educational complexes of the city
Now run by the Anwar-ul-Uloom Educational Society as a federation of arts, science, commerce, engineering, pharmacy and management colleges, it remains one of the largest community-managed educational complexes of Hyderabad.