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Hyderabad Public School at Begumpet was founded in 1923 by the seventh Nizam Mir Osman Ali Khan as the Jagirdars' College, set up to educate the children of the Hyderabad State nobility on the model of an English public school. It was placed within the old Nawab Bahadur Yar Jung estate at Begumpet — a hundred and twenty acres of mango groves and tanks — and was given over to a regime of boarding, rigorous classroom teaching, horsemanship, cricket and the polished social life of a school. It was renamed the Hyderabad Public School after the political integration of the state, and has run continuously since.
The founding plan
A princely-state school to train the heirs of the nobility
The Jagirdars' College was conceived on the lines of Mayo at Ajmer and the Rajkumar Colleges of Rajkot and Indore — princely-state schools modelled on Eton and Harrow that aimed to train the heirs of the nobility for service in the modern state. Its first warden was an English headmaster; its early houses bore the names of the great jagir families.
The campus
One of the most spacious school grounds in any Indian city
The campus at Begumpet remains one of the most spacious school grounds in any Indian city — a long avenue of mango and rain-trees, half a dozen large boarding houses in the late Asafi institutional manner, broad cricket grounds, an old chapel-like assembly hall and a tank on which generations of boys have rowed. Several of the principal buildings are now listed.
After 1948
A leading boarding school of independent India
Renamed Hyderabad Public School in 1951, the school opened its rolls to children outside the old nobility and grew across the 1950s and 1960s into one of the principal boarding schools of independent India. Its alumni include figures from across Indian and South Asian public life.