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The Print
8 hours ago
- Politics
- The Print
‘Marwari go back' isn't Telangana's first outsider protest. First came ‘idli-sambar go back'
The Telugu speakers from another state might have been more educated and qualified compared to the Telanganite population, but the protestors were Mulkis (natives). After being disempowered for the most part under princely rule, they were at loggerheads with those whom they saw as neo-colonisers. Four years after Hyderabad, the Nizam-ruled princely kingdom, which Telangana was once a part of, acceded to the Indian Union in 1948, students in Warrangal voiced their frustration against 'outsiders.' They weren't going to stay silent as Telugus from Madras Presidency monopolised government jobs. Whoever said Telangana's 'non-natives' have never had their indigeneity questioned should revisit the history of the 1952 Mulki Agitation . 'Idly Sambar! Go Back!' 'Non-Mulki! Go back!' shouted the students. Now, the more 'local' Telangana traders are directing a similar ire at the ever-enterprising Marwaris. The latter's go-getting tendencies are aptly encapsulated by the saying, 'Jahaan na pohonche gaadi, wahaan pohonche Marwari (However far-flung or inaccessible a destination, a Marwari will find his way there).' A lot of Marwaris in the state made their way to the Asaf Jahi dominions as early as the eighteenth century. During the late 1700s, Begum Bazar became a bastion for them. Their other strongholds were Puraana Kabootar Khana and Nur Khan Bazar. Also read: The Kayasthas of Hyderabad—why they were a key part of every Nizam's administration Financiers and jewellers Despite having internal autonomy over its affairs, the British loomed large over princely Hyderabad. Establishing the Hyderabad Contingent, a military force led by English officers but bankrolled by Nizam III Sikandar Jah, was a means to tighten the empire's grip as a paramount power over the kingdom. With the third Nizam unable to make payments, the East India Company became creditors to the Hyderabad government. Marwaris, on the other hand, served as more trustworthy alternatives for both Nizam III and his successor to finance the army. This support, as bankers and revenue contractors, didn't just extend to helping with military expenses. Small businessmen, monarchs, and even nobles short on funds for irregular troops within their private armies looked to this trader community as financiers. And for the finer things in life, 'valued customers' is too small a description for the Asaf Jahi elite's links to the city's renowned Marwari jewellers. Look no further than the websites of stores like Totaram and Sons. The pride in their clientele that once included Hyderabad's royal and aristocratic strata since the mid-1800s is apparent in the About Us section. A senior journalist once narrated a story to me about how jewellers set up shop on the Kali Kaman Road and Charminar Kaman Road with Nizam VII Mir Osman Ali Khan's blessing. A delegation, in which the forefathers of all those jewellers had folded their hands in obeisance toward Alaa-Hazrat (His Exalted Highness), made the following request. 'Sarkar! Jab bhi ap sheher mein aaye aur yahaan se guzre, ap ki nazar sone aur gehne pe padhna (Your lordship! Whenever you come to the city and pass through here, gold and jewels should grace your sight).' The munificent monarch happily obliged each of them with makeshift shops. About a century later, a lot of those shops from the 1920s now stand tall as full-fledged retail stores. But be it before or after the Asaf Jahi rule, the Hyderabadi Marwari wasn't without political inclinations. Also read: Stop telling South Indians to learn Hindi. In Hyderabad, languages coexist without imposition More than just traders The name Badrivishal Pitti still evokes respect among older Hyderabadi communists. Born to a business family with ties to the Nizam, he took to the Marxist ideals catching steam in the city and the Telangana region during the 1930s. He remained a Lohia socialist well into the 1960s. Another scion of a prominent business family was Srinivas Lahoti. City historians Sajjad Shahid and Oudesh Rani-Bawa mention how Lahoti's mother had prayed for a son during the holy month of Muharram. She was blessed with a boy months after vowing to bring her baby out to pay respects to the elephant that carries the alam (flagpoles topped with metal finials) every Ashura (tenth day of Muharram) procession. As an adult, Lahoti would always be clad in black during this month of mourning. Hence his moniker, 'Shia Marwari.' An active participant during the Telangana Armed Rebellion (1946-1951), he also remained a lifelong patron of the Urdu language. Like many Hyderabadis, Marwaris came to terms with the new Congress dispensation after the princely state's integration into India. However, the post-Independence political backdrop saw further polarisation along religious lines. Under Abdul Wahid Owaisi, the Majlis-Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen (MIM) began reviving itself within the mainstream political landscape of the late 1950s. This was after Owaisi's predecessor Qasim Razvi, who had pushed for an independent Hyderabad prior to the state's accession, left for Pakistan. According to scholar Muneer Ahmed Khan's thesis Muslim Politics in Hyderabad, the MIM consolidated its base in Old City and its surrounding localities. They did this by playing upon the insecurities of Hyderabadi Muslims as minorities in spite of the Leftist endeavours to bridge communal divides between the late 1940s and 1970s. While fomenting a more incendiary, religious brand of politics, Owaisi also capitalised on the sentiment through which Old City Muslims mourned the loss of their aristocratic grandeur. Some mercantile Marwaris, who once imbibed certain traits of the Hyderabadi feudal class, began patronising another firebrand politician—the Bharatiya Janata Party's Ale 'Tiger' Narendra. Also read: Afzalgunj to Begum Bazar—Hyderabad's markets don't look 'nawabi'. Marwaris, Gujjus built them Protectors of faith In his memoir, Recollections and Reflections, communist KL Mahendra recalled how Marwari businessmen funded Ganpati processions that only began to be taken out zealously in Hyderabad city during the 1970s. That newfound, aggressive fervour of the Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations helped with BJP's political posturing. Thus, the statements by Telangana BJP figures Bandi Sanjay Kumar and Gosha Mahal MLA Raja Singh against the anti-Marwari campaign aren't surprising. The former, who currently serves as Union Minister of State—Home, deemed the agitation a conspiracy against the community due to their support for the BJP and their role as defenders of the Hindu faith. Of course, there remain exceptions to any community's overall, as well as specific, political leanings. This includes Marwaris, who have called the state home for generations. Their presence in the healthcare, education and textile industries can't be denied. However, this rhetoric against Marwaris in Telangana isn't new. In 2021, the rallying cry 'Marwari Hatao, Toopran Bachao' had delegates from the community requesting then BRS Home Minister Mahmood Ali to act against such sloganeering. Hyderabad might not be afflicted with the 'son of the soil' vs. outsider syndrome to the extent of other cities. But even throughout the era of the city's founding Qutub Shahi dynasty, the 'indigenous' Deccani population was at odds with the Afaqis from various parts of the Islamic world. Clearly, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Daneesh Majid is a Hyderabad-based writer with a Masters in South Asian Area Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, He is also the author of the HarperCollins-published book The Hyderabadis: From 1947 to the Present-Day. Views are personal. (Edited by Theres Sudeep)
Hindustan Times
09-06-2025
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
Daneesh Majid: 'History has mostly been written by those in power'
What made you address this important piece of our history and the unjustifiably long gap in public discourse? How did you approach writing about that politically sensitive moment? An epiphany back in early 2020 propelled me into action. A little before Covid, a video interview I conducted with Arshad Pirzada crystallized something I had been thinking about when carrying out some Hyderabad-centric features for The Hindu Business Line's weekly magazine two years earlier. Pirzada is a former Gulf NRI whose family came from a priestly lineage and had ties to the bureaucratic Asaf Jahi establishment. Post-1948, they had to adjust to life as numerical minorities in a democratic landscape unlike the old feudal setup in which the ruling Muslim minority held sway. The then chief editor, Ayoob Ali Khan, chided both of us for not emphasizing this fall and rise aspect of Pirzada's journey, one which included him becoming an economic migrant to Saudi Arabia and paving the way for his family's economic revival. There are plenty of such stories in Hyderabad that have remained undocumented (not only because many elders are no longer with us) and diluted through generations. A lot of these accounts have not been brought to the fore through crisp, timely and accessible narratives in the vein of works by authors like Urvashi Butalia, Anam Zakaria, Aanchal Malhotra and yourself. As for my approach, I could not solely rely on oral accounts. Besides my own enormous bookshelf, I scoured various bookstores, accessed personal libraries and found some academic articles to recreate the eras and build worlds that the 11 different families featured in the book lived in. My editor Vikram Shah's nudges in the right direction were key to this. Hyderabad is a city of syncretism, but also of stark divides – linguistic, religious, and class-based. How did you navigate these complexities while telling its story? Some of these divides existed pre-1948. For instance, many people believe that the Mulki agitation which began surfacing in the early 1950s was the earliest harbinger of the Telangana-Andhra divide. One story an acquaintance told me was about his father, a participant in the anti-Nizam and eventually anti-Indian government struggle. When his father was hiding out among Andhra Telugu cadres and interacting with ordinary citizens during the late 1940s in Bapatla, Madras Presidency, some of them either wondered how he was able to articulately communicate in Telugu while many poked fun at his Telangana dialect outright. That too, despite the fact that the Andhra Jana Sangham, which helped foment revolt in Telangana brought the Telugu populations from Madras Presidency and Telangana together on the basis of language. He also spoke of how Andhraites monopolized decision-making out of a sense of organizational superiority. So rather than only looking at these divisions through post-colonial, contemporary lenses, finding and citing primary/secondary sources that mention previous iterations of these divisions helped in navigating those present-day discords. Please tell us about your most important sources, and share any stories that surprised you or changed your thinking. Two important ones which altered specific notions come to mind — both my own and commonly held ones. Dr Rafiuddin Farouqui's compilation of the Aurangabad (then a part of the Nizam state)-born Maulana Maududi's letters, in which he beseeches Qasim Razvi to negotiate the best terms of accession with the Indian government. It showed a more farsighted, accommodating side to someone that many, including my own great-grandfather, who served as a Director in the Religious Affairs Department of Princely Hyderabad, saw as a hardliner. Chukka Ramaiah, the now 98-year-old activist who participated in the early days of the Telangana Revolt not only abhorred the ruled Hindu vs. ruler Muslim angle of looking at the anti-Nizam struggle, but a cruder version of the Andhra versus Telangana binary too. He was all praise for a class of Andhraites who arrived in Hyderabad state during the early 1950s, not as monopolisers of the commercial and ruling dispensations. This group of egalitarian-minded teachers from Andhra uplifted Telangana Telugus who previously didn't have access to education, especially in their mother tongue. Our respective works (mine on the Sindhis) trace the afterlives of two distinct but parallel communities deeply affected by the reshaping of India after Partition. What does this say about how we remember the 'unwritten histories' of India – the ones lived not by governments, but by people? History has mostly been written by those in power. Today, various political figures have been rewriting history especially through their election rhetoric. Since 2018, state, municipal and national polls saw certain opposition factions referring to then Chief Minister KCR as the 'New Nizam.'. The 'Nizam culture' was also blamed entirely for the city's so-called inability to become a global IT hub. All this amounts to a constant rewriting of the past by the powers that be as they evoke the powers that were! But it is the ordinary citizenry of today, the majority of which doesn't have the time nor resources to (re)evaluate bygone eras, who gets polarized as a result. Cinema, social media reels and WhatsApp forwards, backed by a robust ecosystem don't help either. Yes, the Nizam possessed his shortcomings, and princely Hyderabad had a dark side to it. But this us-versus-them prism, with the Nizam and the Razakars being equated as the sole aggressors, has gained too much currency. I was told first and second-hand stories from Kayasthas and Telangana Hindus about Osman Ali Khan's personal generosity and his patronage of temples. A lot of Telugu and Urdu literature chronicles how religious Muslims took to the onset of leftism against a feudal set up spearheaded by their 'own.' Micro-histories that ask the 'big' questions about historical occurrences, in the 'small' places are the need of the hour. Food, tehzeeb, language, architecture – Hyderabad's cultural distinctiveness is legendary. Which elements do you think are still thriving, and which are slipping away? Shervanis as well as Rumi topis are still worn at weddings and various functions. The food, for the most part, is still around. The feudal mentality that makes things more hierarchical while also inducing inertia among Hyderabadis won't disappear anytime soon. That being said, to varying extents, these elements certainly haven't been immune to the onset of McDonaldization. The Dakhani dialect, which isn't in danger of being fully cannibalized by shuddh Hindi or khaalis Urdu yet, can still be heard widely. But the nastaleeq script in which one can read Dakhani and standard Urdu literary gems, is rapidly fading away. Signboards on streets as well as government offices and Urdu 'jashns/anjumans' that often take place are in no way indicative of any substantive revival. Unless the prose is translated, which to some is code for 'diluted,' so much literature risks becoming obscure or an exotic relic of the past. In the past three years, some of my favourite Old City bookstores have closed or aren't selling non-religious content. Did you find yourself having to leave certain things out – whether due to space, sensitivity, or complexity? Are there stories you wish you'd been able to tell more fully? Yes. Throughout my research and fieldwork, I learned of some interesting reasons regarding why some Hyderabadis did or didn't undertake life-altering migrations to the West, the Gulf, other Indian cities, certain parts of Telangana/AP, or even Pakistan. There are some intriguing anecdotes about why some Muslims decided to either stay in India or make the move to Pakistan. After 1948, even the apolitical, professional class of Hyderabad's Muslims, regardless of whether they had ties to the nobility, considered settling in Pakistan. Despite the 1965 War, which put spokes in the wheel of Indo-Pak travel, many left for Pakistan in the 1970s out of personal grievances. Including such sagas would have provided a more personal, interior context as to why people decided to leave their families and native soil. However, if an interviewee requests for the omission of any detail or anecdote, out of respect and sensitivity, I have to oblige. Who did you imagine as your ideal reader while writing this book – and what do you hope they will take away from it? My ideal reader was always someone who wants to look at how people remember tragic episodes alongside common, sometimes militantly mainstreamed interpretations. Irrespective of whether the reader approaches my first book as such, at the very least, I hope that they get to experience the flavour of Hyderabad through its 11 diverse families. After all, a city's cultural distinctiveness isn't only defined by its monuments, cuisine and languages, but also by those who call(ed) it home. Saaz Aggarwal is the author of Sindh — Stories from a Vanished Homeland.
