Asaf Jahi dynasty

The state

Qamar-ud-din Khan, titled Nizam-ul-Mulk and Asaf Jah, was the Mughal viceroy of the Deccan who made his position hereditary in 1724. The state that followed covered most of the Telugu, Marathwada and northern Kannada country — some two hundred thousand square kilometres and sixteen million people by the twentieth century.

It survived by early accommodation: a subsidiary alliance with the British in 1798, and consistent loyalty thereafter, including during 1857. The Nizams were rewarded with the style Faithful Ally of the British Government, and Hyderabad ranked first among the princely states, entitled to a twenty-one-gun salute.

Wealth and culture

The Golconda diamonds had made the region legendary, and the seventh Nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan, was described by Time in 1937 as the richest man in the world. He also endowed Osmania University — the first Indian university to teach in an Indian language, Urdu, at university level — the Osmania General Hospital, the State Library and the Nizamia Observatory, and gave substantially to institutions across India after independence, including to the Indian defence fund.

Hyderabad's composite culture — Dakhni Urdu, its cuisine, its Ganga-Jamuni idiom in music and manners — belongs to this period and to the Qutb Shahi centuries before it.

1948

At independence the Nizam declined to accede to either dominion and sought independent status. Hyderabad was landlocked within India, its population overwhelmingly Hindu and its administration and army predominantly Muslim, and the situation deteriorated through 1948: the Razakars, an irregular militia under Qasim Razvi, committed widespread violence against villagers, while the Telangana peasant rebellion, led by communists against the landlord system, was already in progress.

In September 1948 the Indian army entered the state in what was called Operation Polo and took it in five days. The Nizam acceded and remained as constitutional head until 1956.

The violence that followed the operation was severe. The Sunderlal Committee, appointed by the Indian government to investigate, estimated deaths in the tens of thousands — with figures between twenty-seven thousand and two hundred thousand discussed — mostly of Muslims. The report was not published at the time and was released only decades later, and the episode remains among the least examined events in the history of Indian integration.