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Nizam College, founded in 1887 under the sixth Nizam Mir Mahbub Ali Khan, was the first modern liberal-arts college of the Hyderabad State. It grew out of the Hyderabad School of the 1870s, was raised to college rank in 1887 and affiliated to the University of Madras, and for more than three decades — until the founding of Osmania in 1918 — it was the principal degree-granting institution of the state. Its old stone building on Basheer Bagh, in the Anglo-Indian classical manner with deep verandahs, remains one of the most graceful institutional campuses of Hyderabad.
From school to college
From the Hyderabad School to a degree-granting college
The institution began as the Hyderabad School in the 1870s, was reorganised in 1887 as Nizam College, and from 1888 prepared its students for the BA examinations of the University of Madras. When Osmania University was founded in 1918 it was the first college to be brought into the new university; it has been affiliated to Osmania ever since.
The building
A grey-stone classical frontage of the high Asafi city
The principal block faces Basheer Bagh in a long classical frontage of dressed grey stone, with deep verandahs, a central pediment, and tall arched windows. It is one of the finest examples in the city of late nineteenth-century institutional architecture and remains in daily use.
A long lineage
Trainer of the city's writers, lawyers and scholars
Nizam College has trained generations of the city's lawyers, administrators, scholars and writers. Several of the founders of modern Telugu and Urdu letters passed through it; its departments of history, economics and the sciences shaped the academic culture of the state long before they were absorbed into Osmania.