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City College, on the south bank of the Musi just below the old city, traces its origin to 1865, when the fifth Nizam Afzal-ud-Dawla founded the Madrasa-i-Aliya — the "Higher School" — as the chief Persian-medium school of the Hyderabad State. Over the next sixty years, as the medium of instruction shifted from Persian to Urdu and then to English, it grew into a full secondary school and then a degree college. Its long ochre frontage, in the Indo-Saracenic manner of the late Asafi public buildings, has been one of the most recognisable institutional façades of Hyderabad for more than a century.
The founding
The Madrasa-i-Aliya for the children of the nobility
The Madrasa-i-Aliya was conceived as a state school for the children of the nobility and the administrative class, teaching Persian, Arabic, mathematics and the chancellery sciences. Its early masters were drawn from the older Persianate scholarly establishment of the city; by the 1880s English and the modern sciences had been added.
From madrasa to college
From state madrasa to an Osmania-affiliated college
Renamed the City High School in the early twentieth century and then City College after affiliation to Osmania University, it became one of the principal feeder institutions to the modern professions of the state. Its building on the Musi was rebuilt and extended several times — the present long Indo-Saracenic frontage dates largely from the reign of the seventh Nizam.
A civic institution
Educator of generations of Hyderabad's professions
City College has educated generations of Hyderabad's poets, civil servants, journalists and physicians, and remains an affiliated college of Osmania University. It is one of the small number of institutions of the old city that have continuously functioned, under one name or another, since the high Asafi period.