HYDERABAD DIARIES

HYDERABAD DIARIES PERSONAL EXPERIENCES TRAVELLING is a great source of gaining knowledge and perspective about the world we live in. I have been fortunate to travel around the world. The following is an account of one of my trips to Hyderabad. When I reached Delhi Airport, it was bustling with the usual hectic activity. In the general mass of people, there were faces which shone with tranquillity, but there were many others which bore the stamp of misery. I thought to myself, that’s life. Some are travelling beckoned by joy, others by tragedy. Some are heading towards material gain, others towards serious losses. At first glance, every wayfarer is bent on reaching a different destination, but as far as the ultimate lot in life, there is but a single destination—the grave. Death is the one certain goal in life, but it is the one of which everyone has the least awareness. Today, the name, Hyderabad, denotes a town, whereas it was once a State the size of Italy, with a Nawab who was reckoned to be the richest man in the world. The founder of this State was Sultan Quli Qutub Shah, an officer of the Bahmani Sultanate. Leading a rebellion in AD 1512, he established his own independent kingdom, which later came to be known as the Qutub Shahi Sultanate. This Sultanate came to an end when it was annexed by Aurangzeb to the Mughal Empire in 1685 and placed under the rule of a Mughal Governor. A later governor, Nizamul-Mulk Asif Jah cut himself off from the Mughal Empire to establish an independent Sultanate. In undivided India, it was the largest state. When India gained its independence, the then Nawab wanted to preserve the independent status of his realm, and he did succeed in obtaining a “Standstill Agreement” from the new Indian government, signed on November 29, 1947, which would have guaranteed Hyderabad a semi-independent statehood. But “his plan miscarried, largely because a local populist Muslim leader launched a militant movement (the Razakars: a private militia) that provided a motive for Indian military forces to intervene and restore order, in September 1948. Hyderabad accepted the same conditions as other former princely states and was later partitioned and disappeared from the map.” (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9/423).