Writers need to struggle, delve deeper into the fabric of the city, to come up with new insights, experiences, and protagonists. I picked up The Untold Charminar: Writings on Hyderabad with some misgivings because I had just finished reading a fabulous tome on Hyderabadi cuisine with an extended foreword by 'Raja' Vijay Karan, also a former CBI director. Writings on traditions, couture and jewellery are accompanied by beautiful photographs from the family's personal collection. The reader is given a glimpse into customs, culture, and language in a detailed and first-hand way. So when I picked it up, the test for The Untold Charminar was how much of it would be 'untold'. |
I am happy to say that the essays put together by Syeda Imam, including writings by William Dalrymple, Mark Tully, Nagesh Kukunoor, Harsha Bhogle and Shyam Benegal, all of who have a Hyderabad connection, are compelling enough. Imam manages to bring together a collection that shows us not just an old, fading order, that evokes its share of nostalgia, but also a more contemporary city synonymous with Chandrababu, Azharuddin and the Banjara Hills (not to forget the IT sector).
But no evocation of the city is complete without the Nizams and accounts of their fantastic wealth. We learn about how Hyderabad was conceived as the earthly parallel to the Islamic heaven delineated in the various suras of the Quran.
Muhammad Quli named the city Bhagnagar after his favourite mistress, but it soon became 'Aidera-bad'(in Persian) and then Hyderabad "" a melting pot of cultures, including Deccani, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian and French, thanks to it being an important trading centre.
There are narratives that focus on women poets and Sufis and mushairas. There are also those mentioning paper-weight sized diamonds (the 187-carat Jacob was famously put to such use by the Nizam) and the many extravagances in a city "where an unreconstructed feudal aristocracy preserved extravagantly rococo rules of etiquette", as Dalrymple puts it. The writer talks about the fabulous wealth of the last Nizam "" 11,000 servants, 38 to just dust the chandeliers "" and recalls a conversation with Iris Portal, a Hyderabadi friend of his grandmother's. Portal says, in the late 1930s, when she had been taken to see some of the Nizam's treasures (Iris had befriended princess Niloufer), she had seen a row of trucks and lorries, with rusty bodies and old tyres, on the grounds of one of the palaces. They were all loaded with precious stones and gold. The Nizam had apparently lived in fear of either a revolution or an Indian takeover of his state and had kept the cargo ready to flee! Those interested in history will undoubtedly find such material fascinating.
But more than that, I found the account of Indian troops 'conquering' the state "" behaving the way any invading army does, killing, looting, raping "" particularly chilling since our sanitised history books obviously mention no such accounts.
The most interesting parts of the book for me were the personal encounters. Shyam Benegal talks about "The City I Knew" Meenakshi Mukherjee talks about her cultural collision: coming from the Hindi heartland where parsaun meant the day after to Hyderabad where it could mean any time in the future. Harsha Bhogle, in a brilliant piece, recalls the time when the mantle of captaincy fell on the simple-but-dignified shoulders of Mohd Azharuddin, a quintessential Hyderabadi.
When the chairman of the selection committee, Raj Singh, asked Azhar, "Miyan captain banoge?", Azhar thought he was being asked to captain the south zone. In sharp contrast, Mark Tully narrates his meeting with Chandrababu Naidu, reticent but razor sharp, quite the antithesis of the typical, gracious Hyderabadi.
THE UNTOLD CHARMINAR: WRITINGS ON HYDERABAD
Edited by Syeda Imam
Penguin; Rs 399;
pages: 335
