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Mahbub College at Secunderabad was founded in 1879 by Sir Salar Jung I, the great reforming wazir of the sixth Nizam. Named for the young sovereign Mir Mahbub Ali Khan, then ten years old, it was set up as a Western-style English-medium school for the sons of the state's officers and the British residency establishment at Secunderabad. With its elegant colonnaded main block — still in use — it became one of the earliest institutions of Hyderabad to teach the modern sciences and English literature alongside Persian and Arabic, and set a model that the later Asafi schools and colleges of the city would follow.
Salar Jung's reforms
Part of Salar Jung I's remaking of Hyderabad on modern lines
Sir Salar Jung I had taken charge of the Hyderabad administration as Diwan in 1853 and over the next quarter-century rebuilt the state on modern lines — police, revenue, public works, and education. Mahbub College was part of a wider programme that included the founding of City College, the engineering and survey schools, and the modern courts. It was, in its day, the most prestigious English-medium school in the state.
The campus
A colonnaded Anglo-Indian block and broad playing fields
The school occupies an extensive site at Secunderabad, with a colonnaded principal block in the late nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian institutional manner, a chapel-like assembly hall, and broad playing fields. The buildings have been added to repeatedly, but the original frontage remains.
A long roll
Educator of Hyderabad's civil and military officers
Mahbub College has educated several generations of Hyderabad's civil and military officers, and remains a leading school of the twin cities. It is now Mahbub College High School, affiliated to the state board, and continues on its original campus.