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Osmania University, founded by the seventh Nizam Mir Osman Ali Khan in 1918, was the first university of modern India to use an Indian language — Urdu — as its principal medium of instruction. Conceived as part of the wider Osmani reform of the state, it brought together the older Persianate scholarly tradition of the Deccan with the modern European disciplines of arts, sciences, law and medicine, and produced its own corpus of Urdu-language textbooks for every subject from quantum mechanics to Greek philosophy. Its vast Arts College building, designed by the Belgian architect Ernest Jasper and completed in 1939, is one of the great monuments of Indo-Saracenic civic architecture in India.
The founding charter
The first Indian university to teach in Urdu
The university was established by firman of the seventh Nizam in 1918 with a charter that specified Urdu as the medium of instruction at all levels. A Dar-ul-Tarjuma (translation bureau) was set up to produce the necessary Urdu textbooks — over six hundred volumes were translated and edited in its first decades, an effort unmatched anywhere else in the Indian Subcontinent.
The campus
A 1930s master-plan and the great Arts College
The chosen site at Tarnaka, north-east of the old city, was developed across the 1930s with a master-plan by the engineer-architect Nawab Ali Yawar Jung. Its Arts College, designed by Ernest Jasper of the Brussels academy and completed in 1939, combines a deep Indo-Saracenic frontage with a granite-and-sandstone palette drawn from the Bahmani and Qutb Shahi past — a modern building that consciously placed itself in the long Deccan line.
The change of medium and after
From the medium of Urdu to one of India's larger universities
After the Police Action of 1948 and the integration of the state into the Indian Union, the medium of instruction at Osmania was changed from Urdu to English. The university nonetheless remains one of the larger universities of India, with affiliated colleges across Telangana, and its Arts College has become an icon of Hyderabad.