Reassessing Indirect Rule in Hyderabad: Rule, Ruler, or Sons-in-Law of the State?

Those of us who work on the Indian princely states sometimes seem to share a certain marginalization, a certain distance from the debates shaping the writing of South Asian history today. We also share, more positively, views of that history that do not focus on British colonial rule and are not based on colonial sources, views that arguably offer more continuity with pre-British history and alternative visions of the South Asian past, present, and future.


Introduction
Those of us who work on the Indian princely states sometimes seem to share a certain marginalization, a certain distance from the debates shaping the writing of South Asian history today. 1 We also share, more positively, views of that history that do not focus on British colonial rule and are not based on colonial sources, views that arguably offer more continuity with pre-British history and alternative visions of the South Asian past, present, and future.
In the late 1970s, A. G. Hopkins published the following comment: 2 Now, in the mid-1970s, internally-oriented approaches to the history of former colonies are in principle well established, even though most of the detailed work has still to be undertaken. Historians have become committed to aspects of the social and economic history of the Third World which either preceded or remained independent of colonialism, while colonial rule itself is now seen, at least in analyses which command the respect of area specialists, to have been varied in motives, means, and results.
But this does not seem to have happened. 3 The exercise of the historical imagination to reach beyond or beneath the British, the recovery of issues rooted in indigenous sources and agents, has been attempted by a valiant few but remains to be consolidated. 4 Historians of South Asia seem still obsessed with the British, with colonialism and postcolonialism, 5 overlooking ways of interpreting the past and present that do not make colonial rule responsible for all that has happened. Indirect rule and the so-called princely or native states of India provide opportunities for comparative investigation of modern South Asian cultural configurations. 6 Certainly Hyderabad State, the most important of all the princely states, provided a counter-narrative to Indian nationalism and another model for a modern pluralist state, however discounted the idea of an historical 'Deccani synthesis' might be now. 7 I have myself shown that this cultural synthesis, involving a predominantly Muslim ruling class and a Hindu peasantry, was a sociocultural construct of more or less reality depending on one's position in the old Hyderabad State and one's closeness to the Nizam's government and the Mughal court culture of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. 8 Yet an argument can be made that Deccani nationalism had several sources, several lives, and even some chance at success. And if one does not grant it that positive potential, it certainly had a negative one, in effect blinding the Nizam and many around him to political developments in twentieth-century British India.
Hyderabad State was technically under British indirect rule, but this status was one of the least significant things about it, I contend here. By refusing to imagine that the term 'colonial' 4 For the valiant few, I have in mind not only some members of the Subaltern School, but some working on the Dalits and those authors in Indu Banga's edited volume, The City in Indian History: Urban Demography, Society, and Politics (New Delhi: Manohar, 1991). 5 Even many of the Subaltern Studies scholars are being swept up in the seductive turn to postmodern and postcolonial thought and analysis: Richard M. Eaton, '(Re)imag(in)ing Otherness: A Postmortem for the Postmodern in India, ' Journal of World History 11:1 (2000), 57-77. 6 I would like to thank Manu Bhagavan and Michael Mahoney for putting together a conference at Yale University, March 30-31, 2001, Indirect Rule in Africa and India: Colonial 'Traditionalism' and its Legacy in the (post)Modern World, that stimulated my thinking about indirect rule and its possible role in shaping, as they put it in a pre-conference think-piece, 'current tensions between cultural nationalisms and a homogenizing globalization.' 7 'Kashmiriyat,' the possible analogue to the Hyderabadi synthesis, is weaker but simiar, I am told by historians of Kashmir. 8 Karen Leonard, 'The Deccani Synthesis in Old Hyderabad: An Historiographic Essay,' Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society (Oct. 1973), 205-18. indicates a transparent or predictable politics, or that the term 'indirect rule' similarly indicates a transparent or predictable politics, 9 I follow Nicholas Thomas's emphasis on 'colonialisms rather than colonialism,' his use of Bourdieu to situate 'colonial representations and narratives in terms of agents, locations, and periods.' 10 And who are the agents, what are the locations and periods, in the case of Hyderabad over the centuries? Long-established categories of agents, sets of indigenous people and immigrants, or natives and newcomers, can be discerned in India's Deccan plateau and compared over time (and with similar sets of actors in other places). Of course, the definitions and occupants of these categories in this location changed over historical periods: the Hindu Kakatiya rulers were followed by Irani Shia Bahmani rulers in the fourteenth century, then by Shia Qutb Shahi rulers in the sixteenth century, then by the Mughal conquest of 1687 and the gradual establishment of the Mughal governors, the first Nizam and his successors, as independent rulers of Hyderabad state from the eighteenth century. Persian and Urdu, the languages of power, 11 were the single most important continuing elements in the medieval and modern reconfigurations. In the Deccan, the terms used in medieval times were Dakhni (Deccani) and afaqi (stranger), and, more recently, mulkis (countrymen) and non-mulkis (non-countrymen, non-natives). 12 9 Margrit Pernau, speaking of Hyderabad state, says that 'this lack of clarity of the system, however, which on the one hand set the framework for arguments and on the other left the task of working them out to the actors, constituted the essence of indirect rule.' Margrit Pernau, The Passing of Patrimonialism: Politics and Political Culture in Hyderabad 1911-1948(Delhi: Manohar, 2000, 41-2. 10 Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 8-9. 11 By 'languages of power,' I mean languages whose reach and 'structures of feeling' went beyond political boundaries, not quite the same as the earlier 'sacred languages and civilizations' concept, or Benedict Anderson's language-of-state, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983), 67 et passim, or Bernard S. Cohn's language of command, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 16 et passim. 12 Mulki was used elsewhere too: see C. A. Bayly, 'Indian Merchants in a ''Traditional'' Setting: Benares, 1780-1830,' p. 173, in Dewey and Hopkins, The Imperial Impact, and similar concepts applied in Travancore, etc. In Pakistan, we now have the analogous territorially-based linguistic groups (sons of the soil) and the muhajirs (refugees), the latter group including many Hyderabadi Muslims after India's takeover of the state in 1948.
Hyderabad's indirect rule status allowed it to pursue its own dynamic well into the twentieth century, but I would also argue that Hyderabad was modernizing and that many of the same forces seen in British India, such as the development of western education, biomedicine, and urban services and public spaces, were proceeding in Hyderabad. The question I have raised in the title is, actually, under whose auspices were these forces proceeding: who were the agents, the British (indirectly), or the Nizam, or the sons-in-law of the state, the mulki or native Hyderabadis of both rural and urban, Hindu and Muslim etc., backgrounds? And in Hyderabad, I see the place of the British in colonial India filled by the non-mulki administrative elite. This further distances the British themselves from developments in Hyderabad but makes western-educated Indians from colonial India major agents of change, men who may have seen themselves as analogues of the British, rivals to some extent, in their positions in the princely states. That fact does, I think, have some consequences for current cultural nationalisms and globalization, as I will suggest at the very end of this essay.
The essay has three parts. First, I discuss interactions between British indirect rule and Hyderabad's rulers, the Nizams. Second, I discuss the sons-in-law of the state, by which I mean chiefly the indigenous graduates of Osmania University, members of a group expanding from the 1920s and seeking administrative and political empowerment in the state. Third, I look at the unsettling ruptures caused by Hyderabad's forced integration into India in 1948 and its dismemberment into its three linguistic regions in 1956 with the 'linguistic states' inauguration; I also try to trace some possible consequences of indirect rule for Hyderabadi emigration patterns and transnational identities outside India. The final section is brief and suggestive rather than definitive.

Indirect Rule and the Nizams
Historians of the princely or native states have not been able to treat Hyderabad State, the second largest and most populous such state, as 'just one of the boys (princes).' Again and again they recognize its nonconformity, the ways in which it resisted inclusion in the colonial 'indirect rule' category. Many scholars, most notably Michael Fisher, 13 Barbara Ramusack, 14 and Ian Copland, 15 give us the outlines of this story, and speaking to ex-Hyderabadis around the world has helped confirm it. 16 In 1991 in Britain, one of them held up my book on the Kayasths of Hyderabad and berated me for not having put Berar on the map of the Nizam's Dominions. Berar? The province ceded in 1853 to the East India Company for support of the Hyderabad Contingent Troops? Surely an issue long dead? Not so, however, 17 and his rebuke reminded me of the ways in which Hyderabad and Hyderabadis resist being shoved into other people's maps, memories, and histories. I have found this resistance everywhere in the diaspora, among Anglo-Indians, Hindus, and Parsis as well as Muslims. It is not an undifferentiated resistance, being strongly shaped by family background, 18 class, and occupation, but it is still discernible among ex-Hyderabadis in Pakistan, the UK, Australia, Canada, the US, and the Middle Eastern Gulf states.
Historians of various periods of Hyderabadi-British relations can be divided into two schools of interpretation (insider/outsider interpretations?). Those relying primarily on British sources judge certain figures in Hyderabadi history harshy (like William Palmer of the influential early nineteenth-century banking firm, Chandu Lal, Peshkar in the same period, and Salar Jung, Diwan from 1853-83), 14 Barbara N. Ramusack, The Princes of India in the Twilight of Empire: Dissolution of a Patron-Client System, 1914-1939(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978. 15 Ian Copland, The Princes of India in the Endgame of Empire, 1917-1947(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 18 The man questioning me about Berar, for example, was a descendant of the eldest son of the eldest son of the first Nizam (a line set aside centuries ago); but his concern was echoed by others not from the royal lineage. seeing them as either enemies or stooges of the British. 19 Yet those who rely more on indigenous sources and oral history see these figures as patriotic Hyderabadis, aiding the Nizam in fending off British attempts at greater intervention and control. 20 This dichotomy is too simple, but it is worth thinking about and brings to mind Fisher's caution about 'the variety of indirect rule in Asia and Africa and the frequent conflicts and incongruities between local practice and official policy.' 21 Interpretive difficulties specific to Hyderabad continue in the twentieth century. The seventh Nizam, Osman Ali Khan, often did not fulfill British wishes or did so for what can easily be seen as his own reasons. For example, responding to the British designation of him as leader of Indian Muslims and speaking out on the Khilafat issue, the Nizam initially declared, in 1914, that Indian Muslims could fight on the British side in the first World War since it was a political war, not a jihad. But later, the Nizam gave unwanted advice, asked for protection from press attacks on himself, and, in 1920, declined to influence Aligarh trustees with respect to Gandhi's request that they refuse government grants and affiliations.  bad and British Paramountcy, 1858-1883(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988, while using British and other English-language sources, views Salar Jung as an innovator and astute politician, going to Europe and England to press the Berar issue. 21 Fisher, Indirect Rule, 7. 22 Barbara N. Ramusack, The Princes of India, 53-4, 104-8. In 1930, the Nizam did issue a statement urging Muslims not to support the civil disobedience move-1917-18, the Nizam refused to be associated with those other rulers working toward constitutional arrangements and a Chamber of Princes. 23 From 1921 on, the Nizam again raised the question of the Berars, questioning Curzon's 1902 'settlement' of the issue and eventually prompting Reading's 1926 declaration that 'no Ruler of an Indian State can justifiably claim to negotiate with the British Government on an equal footing'. 24 In 1930, the Nizam did lobby for separate and adequate representation at the first Round Table Conference and got it. However, upon the delegation's return, Sir Akbar Hydari, Hyderabad's Prime Minister, questioned the federal arrangement proposed and subordinated that goal to the Nizam's desire to have his sovereignty over Berar again acknowledged by Berar's designation as distinct from any Central Provinces in any federation. 25 Another Government of India 'settlement' of the Berar issue followed in 1933: Osman Ali Khan was given the right to be consulted about the appointment of the governor of the Central Provinces, the right to fly his flag on public buildings and, with the Viceroy's permission, to hold durbars in Berar, the guarantee of an annual payment of 25 lakhs from the Berar revenues, the guarantee of 'undiminished' British military support, and the title of 'Prince of Berar' for his eldest son. 26 Even in the 1940s, when the British were ment and he also threatened to withdraw his annual grant from Deoband, when asked by the British to pressure the school's head, who was supporting the civil disobedience movement (163). These actions were allegedly taken to bolster his position as 'faithful ally' of the British but ones to his own advantage as well. Uncharacteristically, in the same year this 'miserly' prince volunteered 20 lakhs rupees to the Government of India to counteract the civil disobedience movement, but the offer was declined (167). At this time the All-India Hindu Mahasabha was agitating for Hindu rights and positions in Bhopal, Kashmir,Hyderabad,. 23 Ramusack, Princes, 77-8, 84, 89; Ramusack sees this as 'princely willingness to sacrifice unity to personal ambition and pride' (84) and mentions Mysore, Indore, and Baroda as other important states which did not join the Chamber (90-1). In 1930 the Nizam did give some money to the Chamber but his support was shortlived (193). 24 Ramusack, Princes, 105, 108, 131-2. Ray, Hyderabad, 107-31, covers Berar well. 25 Ramusack,Princes,209; McLeod, Sovereignty, shows that the pursuit of sovereignty as 'the overriding interest' of the princely rulers throughout the last decades of British rule (30), but the Nizam failed to appreciate that it was not Berar but all of Hyderabad State that was threatened. 26 Copland, The Princes of India, 131-2; 25 lakhs had been paid annually since 1860, yet the revenues returned annually to the Central Province far outstripped that (54). Pernau, The Passing of Patrimonialism, discusses Berar succinctly, 218-20, saying that the British conceded symbols in 1932, regarding them as substitutes for clearly going, the Nizam tried to bargain for a seaport by renouncing his rights to Berar. 27 Obviously the issue of 'the return of Berar' again and again deflected the Nizam's attention from what was going on in the rest of India; this actually strengthens the arguments made by some that there was a possible 'nationalist' movement within Hyderabad. 28

Sons-in-law of the State
In fact, political developments in twentieth-century Hyderabad were being initiated not by the British or the Nizam but at levels below them, by the modernizing non-mulkis and the mulki or indigenous, educated class growing in Hyderabad. An indigenous, educated elite was developing in Hyderabad, and the state was slowly beginning to devolve administrative, but not political, power. 29 The 'traditional' nobles and Mughal officials had been shunted aside by non-mulki officials during and after Salar Jung I's diwanship in the nineteenth century, but in the early twentieth century bright young mulkis were being taken as sons-in-law to both non-Mulki administrators and old Hyderabadi nobles. Their upwardly-mobile position is captured by the kinship term sons-in-law, meaning those close to power but not in the direct line of inheritance. 30 This group included both city and district young men who were acquiring western educations in local languages and Urdu. These young men still lagged behind those attending the English-medium intermediate schools and colleges in Hyderabad but they felt newly-empowered by the establishment of Osmania University in 1917. real power, while Hyderabad remained 'tragically unaware' of this change (220). Later, in 1945, the new Labor government, considering repudiation of the princely alliances, faced the possibility of retrocession of territories like Berar, which would have left the Central Provinces crippled, or paying high cash compensation; by October of 1945, it was conveniently decided that the treaties had been 'rendered nugatory by the passage of time' (Copland,Princes,218,221 The importance of Osmania University has not been adequately recognized. Osmania was established as a modernizing project by the non-mulki administrators, really 'symbolic of the age-long reaction against the continuance of English as the medium of University education in the country' and against 'the subservience . . . to Madras University,' as H. K. Sherwani wrote in 1966. 31 The British learned of it only after the vernacular press in North India announced its sanction by the Nizam. 32 Osmania appeared to offer mulkis a route to government service, but it also increased Mulki-Non-Mulki conflict. First, it set North Indian Urdu as the standard, as pushed by the non-Mulki heads of the Translation Bureau and Persian department but opposed by the Mulki heads of the Urdu and Arabic department. This fed into developing, and competing, ideas of Deccani nationalism. 33 Second, the best jobs still went to Nizam College graduates and non-mulkis. 34 The Mulki movement, pulling together London graduates and their Society of Union and Progress and the local Osmania Graduates' Association, was formalized in 1935 as the Nizam's Subjects' League or the Mulki League and did have some genuinely nationalist potential. As I was told in Karachi in 1993 by an Osmania graduate who migrated to Pakistan after 1948: 'If not for the fall of Hyderabad, no one would have thought of going out, Osmania had produced a revolution, a multiclass society was developing and changing the state.' 35 Communalism in present-day India, Dick Kooiman and others suggest, may be credited not so much to colonial 'divide and rule' policies, conscious or not, but to the inauguration of constitutional reforms and consequent political mobilizations. Thus the political 31 'The Osmania University, First Phase: The Urdu Medium  backwardness of the states under indirect rule, their failures to provide for electoral arrangements, merely delayed political processes of group mobilization, 36 processes that built on groups not necessarily religious but ones historically meaningful in their various regions. 37 Hyderabad had no income tax, but this touted advantage over British India was offset by the late development and low level of municipal politics. 38 The 1934 introduction of limited municipal elections came far too late to have the effect of Ripon's 1884 municipal reforms in Bombay, where Jim Masselos argues that they stimulated interregional unity and promoted local and regional public activity, setting the political preoccupations for ensuing decades and producing experienced local, regional, and national politicians. 39 Above the municipal level in Hyderabad, political devolution was severely limited. I have argued that politics in Hyderabad really moved beyond the court and the city only in the late 1930s, and even in 1947 and 1948 it was very weakly linked to nationalist politics in 36 (2000), 137-62, comes at this somewhat differently but seems to agree that there were 'no other recognizable principles of collective identity' than as Hindus or Muslims: 151.
38 It did introduce, in 1869, British Indian urban administrative policies, but then it did nothing until 1934, when it finally adopted a new Municipal Act modelled on Bombay's 1884 one. In 1869 the city and suburbs were divided into 9 areas; in 1881 the suburban area was made separate and termed the Chadarghat or Residency municipality. A 1935 overview of municipal developments in Hyderabad began with a long quote about municipal government from Abu Fazl's Ain-i-Akbari, then men-  (Bombay: Thacker and Col, Ltd, 1945), 258-9. He defined Mulki thus, 256-7: 'Literally, it means one belonging to the country, but technically, it means a person who alleges that he belongs to the country in order to acquire the rights and privileges of citizenship. His chief desire is to be considered eligible for government service. The person who puts forward such a claim with great volubility is generally an alien by birth, whom a patronising rule of domicile has furnished with a 12 years' Free Pass! This benevolent rule enacts that a man who has lived in the Hyderabad State for 12 years, or who has served the government for 12 years (however long ago) shall be a Mulki in perpetuity!' 43 Ian Copland, ''Communalism'' in Princely India: The Case of Hyderabad, 1930-1940,' Modern Asian Studies 22:4 (1988, 802-10; and see Lucien Benichou, From Autocracy to Integration: Political Developments in Hyderabad State (1938-1948) (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2000, whose coverage of Bahadur Yar Jung's Ittehad ul-Muslimeen movement is outstanding for its detail and empathy: 88-127. See also V. K. Bawa, The Last Nizam, and Ashutosh Varshney, who completely misses key mulki-non-mulki distinctions in his discussion of the Arya Samaj activities in Hyderabad before 1948 and in his generalizations about politics and the Ittehad ul-Muslimeen after 1948: 'Postmodernism, Civic Engagement, and Ethnic Conflict: A Passage to India, ' Comparative Politics, Oct. 1997, 1-20. down. In his incisive account of the last years before Police Action, Ali Yavar Jung tellingly likens members of the Ittehad ul-Muslimeen given jobs in the Nizam's government to 'some grown-up daughters whom it had to get married in order to keep them above mischief,' 44 an image very different from that of sons-in-law chosen for their promise. 45

Ruptures, Emigration, and Transnational Identities
The political interventions of both 1948 and 1956 disrupted the narrative of the 'Deccani synthesis' and the Mulki movement. Yet I think that Hyderabad's former 'indirect rule' status is less salient to the difficulties Hyderabadis experienced after integration into India than other factors. Hyderabad had in fact undergone many of the same 'modernizing' processes associated with British colonial rule. Western education had come to Hyderabad, through many channels including Osmania, and it produced in Hyderabad the same kinds of voluntary associations, caste and linguistic mobilizations, Masonic orders, and sporting clubs as in British India. The Hyderabad government undertook significant modernizing projects, many of them initiated in the nineteenth century like the postal, railway, telegraph, public works, medical, and education departments. 46 There was a modern medical establishment in Hyderabad by the end of the nineteenth century. 47 Hyderabad's abolition of capital punishment in 44 Ali Yavar Jung, 'Hyderabad in Retrospect,' 177; he also comments negatively on the untouchable leader working with the Ittehad, a leader now lauded by people taking a 'Hyderabadi Muslim nationalist' tack who argue that Muslims and lower castes should be seen in opposition to Brahmanical Hindu society. 45 The same spirit of grudging concessions marks the Nizam's letter to Jinnah in 1946, where he links political representation to the payment of income taxes and says the government 'is preparing to give all these [reforms, responsible government and adequate representation] to them [the people of Hyderabad] very shortly. ' Razvi, Betrayal, 169, letter dated July 14, 1946, in which the Nizam misquotes the slogan of the American War of Independence as 'no representation, no taxation.' 46 Pernau's analysis, Passing, 173-4, confirms that the expansion of education and its movement from traditional patronage to a state system was due not to colonial influence but to non-mulki administrators. 47 The Ronald Ross Institute is now being preserved as part of Hyderabad's heritage, but one must recognize that Ronald Ross's discovery of the anophelines mosquito as the carrier of malaria owed much to Ross's membership in the (British 1911 and its separation, in 1921, of the executive and judicial spheres put it ahead of British India. Christian missionaries were active in Hyderabad, and St Georges Grammar School and other educational institutions were wellaccepted and used by leading families. Many Anglo-Indians served the state, building churches and schools in the districts and in Hyderabad city, and their marriage networks linked them to kinsmen in Poona, Madras, Lahore, and elsewhere in British India. The kind of defenses of Hinduism (so evident in Madras Presidency next door) or of Islam did not arise and contribute to communalism in Hyderabad, arguably, until interjected from British India.
The arts and architecture were not neglected. The famous Diwan Salar Jung's 'capture of the west' for Hyderabad through his European travels and acquisitions for his Museum can be seen as a late nineteenth-century modernizing project, and the last Nizam initiated a fine Department of Archaeology and numerous other endeavors. The buildings erected for these projects reflect state ambition not just for its own continuity but for the development of 'public spaces' and perhaps an emergent civil society (although there is no space to make the case here).
Thus it was not Hyderabad's former 'indirect rule' status that produced ruptures after its integration into India, but the changing configurations of non-mulki and mulki. 48 The coastal Andhras formerly under British rule became political masters of a reconstituted Telugu-speaking Andhra Pradesh, with Hyderabad city as its capital. Both Police Action in 1948 and the linguistic states reorganization of 1956 reallocating the old Hyderabad State districts to three different states certainly produced redefined and expanded mulki-non-mulki tensions. The change of language policies immediately redirected students and officials alike, from Urdu and English to Hindi and English and then (after 1956) Telugu, diminishing the achievement of Osmania University and signalling new languages of power.
By the start of the twenty-first century, Hyderabad city and the constituent regions of the old state are integral parts of India, but the changes have still not been consolidated. There are now three groups, the old Hyderabadis based in the city, the Telugu-speakers from the Nizam's old Telingana districts, and the Telugu-speakers 48 Support for this comes from the material in Omar Khalidi and Mu'inuddin Aqeel (eds), Madh va Qadh-e Dakan (Watertown, MA: Hyderabad Historical Society, 1993), but see C. M. Naim's review of the book in The Annual of Urdu Studies 9 (1994), 242-4. from coastal Andhra, from formerly British India. Among many 'old Hyderabadis' who know Urdu, and even among their children, there is a lingering sense of loyalty to a state that they viewed as equal to British India and which they remember as free or relatively free from communal tensions and violence. Many in Telingana also subscribe to this view, and, in addition, defend their use of the Telugu language against standards brought by the Andhras. Among the dominant Andhras, the 'cultural synthesis' created under the Qutb Shahis, with its strong Telugu components, is valued, while that created under the Nizams is not. 49 The rifts between these three groups are clear not only in municipal and state politics 50 but in urban and regional geography and the city's built environment. The defining features of the present city evoke competing versions of the past. The natives and the newcomers have very different senses of architecture, decoration and color, and the renaming of streets and localities emphasizes the disjunctions. The buildings from the Nizam's period, especially those so proudly constructed in the twentieth century just before Police Action, still are much in evidence, but the harmonious design they imposed on the city has been broken by new buildings clearly contesting their right to represent it. Thus the meaning of the city to its inhabitants depends very much upon which inhabitants one is talking about: there is as yet no shared vision, no real urban community comparable to earlier ones. 51 As the urban historian, Howard 49 These are two different cultural syntheses, and both confined largely to the capital city, but both should be celebrated! See Leonard, 'Deccani Synthesis,' and a longer discussion of the 'non-consolidation' in my forthcoming 'Hyderabad, Deccan: Past and Present Trajectories,' in Anand Yang and Peter Sluglett (eds), Urban History in the Middle East and South Asia. 50 Hyderabad's urban impact on its hinterland had exceeded, surprisingly, that of cities like Poona and Ahmedabad, centers of more 'developed' regions, in tests using 1961 census data (Sharma 229-30 in David E. Sopher (ed.), An Exploration of India: Geographical Perspectives on Society and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980). The location and connections, the lines of trade and communication, were more important than size of the city or the level of development-Hyderabad's very backwardness apparently made its impact stronger on the hinterland. Obviously, I am taking the 1961 census data to measure, still, the infrastructure of the old state (dismembered in 1956). 51 Of course this is debatable, and clearly a book like Harriet Lynton and Mohini Rajan's Days of the Beloved (Berkeley: University of California Press, 19 ) overstates the earlier case. But today there is little shared knowledge. The Andhras commemorate Pandit Viresalingam, social reformer, leader of the widow marriage movement and innovator in Telugu language and journalism. 'Old Hyderabadis' still think of Ram Mohan Roy when they think of social reform, or perhaps of Ranade when widow marriage is mentioned, while the man who embodied both movements and Spodek, comments, 'the cognitive geographies of different groups [do] not coincide.' 52 So within Andhra Pradesh and Hyderabad city, ideas of citizenship and public space draw on different visions and are debated and embodied differently.
With their old 'center' 'disappeared,' some Hyderabadis moved into all-India positions, yet they can be said to have a markedly different relationship to independent India than do people from other parts of India today. These cosmopolitans have tended to uphold Hyderabad's 'composite culture' or 'cultural synthesis' as a model for all of India, along with the pioneering role of Osmania University in the development of vernacular education for the masses. Indirect rule, perhaps, had made these leaders (especially the non-mulki or recently-mulki) administrators, feel equal to the British and gave them confidence to do this, but both inside and outside of Hyderabad this asserted legacy aroused ambivalence and controversy. These ideas about a Deccani synthesis and Hyderabadi culture were qualified in their time, and they are harder to maintain now in the face of rising Hindu communalism and prejudice against Urdu-speakers.
I would also argue that Hyderabadis may have a different relationship not only to India but that they may fit diaspora characteristics better than other Indians in some respects. 53 Perhaps they have less reluctance than other Indians to leave India, to settle permanently outside. And they have a special relationship to the UK, Australia, comes immediately to the mind of the Andhras is Pandit Viresalingam, from Rajahmundry. The Andhras know nothing of major Urdu poets and Osmania University figures who shaped the intellectual landscape for those growing up under the Nizam in earlier decades. 52 Howard Spodek and Doris Meth Srinivasan (eds), Urban Form and Meaning in South Asia: The Shaping of Cities from Prehistoric to Precolonial Times (Washington: National Gallery of Art; Hanover, NH: Distributed by the University Press of New England, 1993), 263. 53 The characteristics of a diaspora community, as set out by William Safran, are: first, that members or their ancestors should have been dispersed from a center to two or more other regions; second, that members retain a collective memory of the original homeland; third, that they believe that they are not and perhaps cannot be fully accepted by the host society; fourth, that they regard the homeland as the true home to which they or their descendants should eventually return; fifth, that they are committed to the maintenance or restoration of the homeland; and sixth, that they continue to relate to that homeland and to define their collective consciousness importantly by that relationship. William Safran, 'Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,' Diaspora 1:1 (spring 1991), 83-99, especially the definition pp. 83-4 and 88-9. He does not think that Indians fit this definition well. Syed Ali, whom I thank for general comments on this article, noted, and I agree, that the second generation Hyderabadis abroad do not fulfill these characteristics: personal communication, March 16, 2001. and Canada because of the state's indirect rule status, as my interviews in those countries show that they perceive themselves migrating not as dependants or ex-colonials but as citizens of a former ally. The Hyderabadi Anglo-Indians going to the UK and Australia reinforce rather than undercut this view, since they take pains to say that they worked for the Nizam, not for the British in India. 54 Another group that saw itself differently in the diaspora because of Osmania University and Urdu-medium education (developments I attribute to indirect rule) was that of young Muslims who migrated to Pakistan and the UK soon after Police Action; they consisted largely of aspiring young writers from the Orient Hotel coffee house group of the eary 1950s in Hyderabad. In Pakistan, they thought, their Urdu would position them well since that was the new state's official language; however, some became disillusioned for various reasons and moved to join classmates in the UK, where Hyderabadis have joined with others to build important Urdu-medium institutions and voluntary associations. Thus their commitments to Osmania and Urdu both pushed and pulled these young men away from India; rather than a Hyderabad association, in Pakistan, an Osmania old boys association is a vehicle for Hyderabadi collective life. 55 The disproportionately Muslim participation in emigration from Hyderabad right after 1948 is arguably still characteristic; while not the result of forcible expulsion, it did and does stem to some extent from a loss of power and status. Hyderabadi Muslims might feel less stake in the homeland than some other Indians, a feeling probaby increased by the 1992 Babri Masjid crisis. Further, it is likely that those Hyderabadi Muslims who migrated to Pakistan and envisioned it as a homeland now feel less stake in Pakistan, because their status as muhajirs persists and they do not like being non-mulkis. 56 And in the US, Muslim ex-Hyderabadis might feel freer to enter into American 54 'The safety of Hyderabad was not because of the Resident but because of the Nizam, whose rule catered for every community without favoritism,' said one in Australia; in the UK, Jimmy Adams' father named his house in Middlesex 'Osman Sicca' (the name of the state's currency, actually Osmania sicca) because the money for it came from 'the good old Nizam.' 55 A Hyderabad association, commonly found elsewhere in the diaspora, would threaten national unity by emphasizing muhajir status in Pakistan; there, the earliest institution built by Hyderabadis was the Bahadur Yar Jung Academy in Karachi, which invokes links to Jinnah, the founding of Pakistan, and the loss of Hyderabad. 56  Muslim politics, where they have become conspicuous leaders, less bound by constraints of either Indian or Pakistani politics. 57 Most first generation Hyderabadi immigrants abroad do retain a collective memory or myth of old Hyderabad, a vision which is an important part of their consciousness and often of their collective life abroad. Surely this collective consciousness is stronger for excitizens of a very important former native state than for others from India and stronger for those of its ex-citizens who were part of or close to its former ruling class. The membership of Hyderabad associations worldwide confirms this, since most members are Muslims with memories of close connections to the court or the state administration. Yet this ruling class ideology was and remains one of cultural synthesis.
The idea of a cultural synthesis is one that well suits immigrants settling in multicultural or pluralist nations like Canada, the US, and Australia. And, as a postscript here, my major finding about Hyderabadis in the diaspora, that the strongest networks maintained among first generation immigrants are those of classmates, actually supports this nostalgic notion since these networks cross the lines of religion and community. The networks do reflect class and residential divisions based on the schools attended back in Hyderabad, but the 'old boys' and 'old girls' who cross national boundaries today to attend the weddings of each others' children strikingly validate their assertions of a former cultural synthesis in Hyderabad. The children of these immigrants, however, are forming quite different networks, ones formed along the lines of community, class, language, religion, and ethnicity in the new settings. Although their parents may anxiously inform me of the mulki or non-mulki status, in their opinion, of others whom I am interviewing, the younger generations abroad cannot fully learn or appreciate the meanings of such distinctions, grounded as they are in old Hyderabad's political culture. While some elements of Hyderabadi identity useful to the young people in their new contexts can be affirmed and used, their friends and classmates more strongly reflect the new contexts, new languages, and new understandings of natives and newcomers.