Hyderabad is India's 6th largest city - with an official population estimate of about 6 million, and an unofficial estimate closer to 10 million. Like the other Metros (as India's 6-8 largest and most cosmopolitan cities are known), Hyderabad is a dizzying mixture of old and new, fantastic wealth and great poverty, and perhaps most of all these days, incredible aspirations. The wealthy are buying high rise apartments and BMWs, while the rural poor flock to these cities in search of a job carrying concrete in a bowl on their head up a rickety bamboo ladder to build those high rises, in the hopes that their savings might enable them to send their children to a proper school, or care for their aging parents. I've been in and out of Hyderabad for the last few weeks, and since I'm looking forward to welcoming many of my colleagues here next month for the IASC Conference, I thought I'd share some pictures and anecdotes about the city. I draw several of the anecdotes from Narendra Luther's charming
Hyderabad: A Biography, published in 2006 by Oxford University Press, and highly recommended for visitors who want a flavor for the history of the place.
The pearl bazaar near the Charminar in the old city. Charminar literally means 4 spires. This beautiful building was built at the chief crossroads of the original city on the banks of the river Musi by Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, founder of the city of Hyderabad, in 1591. His Persian architect designed the city to be a model of heaven. The center of the old city remains a heavily Islamic district, and, strangely for a landlocked city, is one of the best places in the world to buy high quality pearls. The Qutb Shahi dynasty fell to Aurangzeb, the last of the great Mughals, in 1671. Aurangzeb greatly enlarged the Mughal empire, but his endless wars against the Maratha guerrillas and other South Indian chieftains exhausted his treasury, and his religious intolerance earned him the enmity of many local populations. After his death, his sons fought bitterly over the throne (this was the established means of succession - Aurangzeb himself became emperor only after imprisoning his father, Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal, and killing all of his brothers). The Mughal governor of Hyderabad gradually claimed greater and greater autonomy. His descendants, the Nizams, became vassals of the British - the largest of the hundreds of princely states - and ruled until 1949.
At one point in the mid 19th century, the Nizam was so in need of cash that the British forced him to surrender his control over the region of Berar (centered on the city of Amravati in what is now Maharashtra). This ended up playing an important role in the American civil war. The greatest fear of Lincoln and his cabinet was that the British might join the conflict on the side of the Confederacy. An effective naval blockade by the Union Navy had crippled the southern economy, cutting off the crucial export of raw cotton to the British cotton mills. If the British, had decided to protect this flow of essential industrial material with their superior naval power, there would have been little the Union could have done to stop them, and as a result, the Union would have had great difficulty defeating the Confederacy.
Instead, the British realized that they could grow cotton in Berar, which turned out to be uniquely well suited to the crop (cotton is still one of the major crops of this region). The British provided incentives to farmers to clear forests in Berar and plant cotton, and then forced the farmers to sell the cotton directly to the Manchester mills, who then had a monopoly on the sale of cloth to India. Gandhi would later target this monopoly in his campaign to revitalize khadi, or handspun cotton cloth, which he made a centerpiece of both his spiritual practice and the larger non-cooperation movement with British rule.
Although the 19th century Nizams struggled to balance their books, the replacement of feudal vassals with a bureaucratic modeled on the British revenue districts, and the birth of Nizams who were a little more thrifty, led to phenomenal wealth. The last Nizam, whose rule began in 1911, was widely believed to be the wealthiest man in the world for much of his life, and stories abound both about his wealth (last night at dinner I was told that once, in Britain, he couldn't decide which shoes to purchase in a store, so he just decided to buy the store's entire stock; I also heard that in 1949 his estate was valued at what would be, in today's dollars, 270 billion) and his miserliness (a British officer who had tea with the Nizam in Hyderabad described how the Nizam lived in a single, ill kept room in one of his giant palaces, and when he asked the officer if he would like biscuits with his tea, produced a single biscuit from a locked cupboard). The Nizam's associates also grew fabulously wealthy. When he fired his prime minister, Salar Jung, the man couldn't decide what to do with his life. A visitor suggested that he take up collecting art. He soon amassed the largest art collection in the world, a small part of which is now on display in the museum housed in his former palace. I went there expecting some nice Indian art, but was shocked by the vastness of the place - rooms full of Ming vases and 19th century European paintings compliment the sizable collections of Persian and Mughal miniatures and South Indian brass and woodwork.
This is my fourth visit to Hyderabad. The first time I came to Hyderabad was for the wedding of friends-of-friends (who quickly became upgraded to friends) in December 2006.
A Puja (religious ceremony) for the newlywed couple moving into their new home.
The newlyweds greeting guests at their wedding reception (the bride complained to me that with the throne-like chairs, the thick silk saree, and the heavy gold jewelry, she felt more like a temple than like a bride).
After the wedding, we spent a couple days wandering the city, and some of these pictures date back to that time. The groom was from Hyderabad, but the bride was from Assam, in the northeast of India. They met as junior lawyers working at a law firm in Hyderabad, and have settled here in the city, where the bride reviews contracts for a large American company's business process outsourcing company (she gets paid about 1/10 of what an American corporate lawyer would earn doing the same work, or about the same as her parents, both tenured professors, make combined).
In the picture above, we are eating at a Macdonalds in a giant shopping mall. The groom and bride are seated next to each other, while the woman in the foreground is the bride's parents' servant, a woman from an impoverished village in rural Assam. For those of us who grew up in a world without servants, the servant-employer relationship is rather hard to understand. At home, this woman cooked meals, cleaned the house, and ate her meals after everyone else, seated on the floor of the kitchen. The mother of the family told us that in India, women of her class (she is a nursing professor, her husband teaches at the Agricultural University) are more free than in the West because they have servants to take care of household chores. They offered to help their servant get married, but she told them that she did not want to marry. A man from her tribe would probably beat her, and she would be less free than she is, living in the home of these educated liberals. In Hyderabad, where she had no household tasks to perform, she simply was another member of the family. In this mall, she rode on an escalator for the first time, which she thought was pretty neat. Too bad we didn't make it to Snow World, another mall, where you can experience the "magic of snow" for a hefty fee.
Incidentally, I don't generally choose to eat in International fast food chains, whether at home or abroad, but I have to say that my one taste of McDonalds in India left me impressed. It was pretty good! Of course, they serve no beef, and their vegetarian food is largely modeled after mainstream Indian snacks - the veggie burger was suspiciously similar to an aloo tikki. McDonalds has been successful in India largely because it has remade itself here. While in the US we think of MacDonalds as being cheap and poor quality - a place where you wouldn't want to hang out - MacDonalds in India has pursued a higher end clientele of people who are wealthy and westernized. MacDonalds food costs about the same in India and the US, which makes it an expensive restaurant in India. It is not uncommon to walk by a western fast food outlet in a big city and see well dressed professionals working on their laptops there.
Perhaps because in my subsequent 3 visits I've always stayed in Begumpet, a fancy neighborhood about halfway between the old city and the modern corporate campuses at HiTech City (they call it Cyberabad for a reason), I think of Hyderabad as a city of flyovers, traffic jams, and shopping malls.
Hyderabad Central shopping mall is about a 10 minute walk from where I'm staying, at the Hostel of the Centre for Economic and Social Studies, in Panjagutta. At this crossing, there is actually a traffic light, and so you can wait for it to change, and get across the road without risking life and limb. By contrast, if I want to go to the German-owned Spar supermarket, I have to find a way across 8 lanes of traffic which seems to come in about 8 different directions, without the benefit of a stoplight. I like the place - not only does it stock imported bread and cheese and American snacks (Pepperidge Farm anyone? Nature Valley Granola Bars?), which I generally avoid because I like Indian food and don't like the prices (they cost about the same as they would in the US, which makes them very expensive by Indian standards), but I also found baked namkeens there. Namkeens are salty and spicy Indian snacks, which are generally made by deep frying various things. I love them but I'm not such a fan of deep frying.
Golconda Fort, about 8 km from the Charminar, and now swallowed by the great expansive city, sits on one of the many massive outcrops of 2.5 billion year old gneiss that dominate the city. Every once in a while you'll be driving through some concrete jungle, and you'll find one of these ancient, rounded obtrusions sticking out from the middle of the earth. Unlike Nagpur, which is covered with the basalt of the Deccan trap formation - a huge series of lava flows that cover much of central India, and whose volcanic origin about 60 million years ago is considered an important alternative hypothesis for the extinction of the dinosaurs - here in Hyderabad the ancient core of the Indian continent is exposed, some of the oldest exposed rocks in the world.
Golconda predates Hyderabad by at least 500 years. When Aurangzeb, the last and most powerful of the great Mughal rulers decided to eliminate the Qutb Shahi dyntasty in 1671 (technically they were his vassals, but they were too independent, and also to Shia, for his tastes), the sultan abandoned Hyderabad and retreated to his fort, where Aurangzeb sat for months and months, in and endless and unproductive siege. He finally captured the fort by bribing away all the generals except one, who stood in the final passageway, fighting the invaders, until he was completely incapacitated. He survived, and recovered, but refused to abandon his principles and serve under Aurangzeb.
Now the fort is a popular picnic destination.
I love multilingual signs!
The day that I visited Golconda there was some kind of festival. The whole place was full of Hindu pilgrims, and devotional music to the mother goddess filled the walls of the ancient Islamic citadel. Near the top of the fort, the pilgrims gathered to make their way through a tiny cleft in the ancient gneiss, which apparently held some sacred significance.
The Charminar up close.
Unique among the major cities of modern India, Hyderabad was never ruled by the British, and this has shaped its skyline. Of the 5 larger cities, 3 (Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai) gained prominence as cities entirely because their position as British trading posts. Hyderabad's great buildings are all Islamic architecture, and the language of the city is still largely Urdu - a language that is essentially the same as Hindi, at least as it is spoken on the street, but is written in a beautiful flowing script derived from Persian. The language of the rest of the state is Telugu, which has about the same number of speakers worldwide as German. One of my favorite buildings in the city is the legislative assembly - unfortunately a difficult building to photograph because it is surrounded by big roads and security fences - a giant old palace built by the last Nizam, full of towering minarets, with a huge statue of Gandhi meditating in front of it.
I have already mentioned the last Nizam's great wealth. He built many of the most beautiful buildings in the city. Unfortunately the post-independence Hyderabadis have not kept up the tradition. There is only one post-independence building worth visiting - the Birla temple, built by a charitable arm of one of India's several giant family-run industrial conglomerates. Perched on a hilltop overlooking the Hussain Sagar lake (which is decorated with a giant statue of the Buddha), the temple is all white marble, and contains beautiful statues of several Hindu dieties, and provides 360 degree views of the city. Photography is not allowed - so no pictures I'm afraid.
While the Birla's made their fortune selling everything from textiles to cars (they make the distinctive Hindustan Ambassador, commonly used as a taxi or a limousine for high level government officials) to cement to metals to cell phone services, the Nizams made their (larger) fortune by taxing a kingdom that must be one of the poorest and least promising places on the planet. Most of the Nizam's domain is the arid interior of the Deccan plateau - cursed with uneven soil quality and sporadic and sparse monsoons, the region remains one of the poorest in India in spite of its location in the midst of 3 of India's most rapidly developing states (the Nizam's domain was carved up between the modern linguistically based states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Maharashtra). While the Nizam and most of his functionaries were Muslim, 87% of the population of the principality were Hindu. The great poverty of the region, as well as the deep gap between rulers and ruled, was not a recipe for stability. In the 1940s, as the non-cooperation movement with the British in the rest of India came to a head, a large scale communist revolution rose up in large areas of the Telugu speaking parts of the state. The revolutionaries murdered or drove out the landlords and bureaucrats, and began redistributing land and setting up a new and independent administrative system.
Meanwhile, as British India gained Independence in 1947, the Nizam struggled diplomatically to maintain his political independence, lobbying Mountbatten and the British to support him, and being pushed by the radicals in Hyderabad to merge with Pakistan. In September 1948, Indian troops marched into Hyderabad state. The Nizam expected assistance from Pakistan, but as the Indian troops marched in, Pakistan's founder, Jinnah, lay dying, and whatever his plans might have been for allying with Hyderabad, they were not realized. The Indian army, which included many soldiers who had seen action in World War II, and possessed modern weaponry, quickly overwhelmed the Nizam's antiquated army. The Nizam discovered that his army didn't even have up to date maps of the roads that his other departments had been building. An Indian general described entering a town at the head of a column of tanks, which were attacked by teenage boys carrying sticks and clubs. Thinking of his own son, then a student in University, he stood up on his tank, and ordered the boys to go home. Hyderabad became part of India.
The communist movement quickly faded away with the enthusiasm for joining newly independent India, but the region of the modern state of Andhra Pradesh that used to be part of the Nizam's domain (generally called Telangana) remains politically volatile. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the forest belt in northern Telangana was one of the headquarters of India's Maoist rebel movement, and only a concerted, and possibly largely illegal, effort by the state police has led to a decline in the violence over the last 5 to 10 years. Residents of Telangana have felt discrimanted against by the wealthier and more developed coastal region of the state, and there have been consistent calls to form a separate state. A major national commission on the question of separate statehood for Telangana is due to give its final report on December 30th. Finally, although the city seems to be a marvelous mixture of Urdu, Telugu, Hindi, and English - Islam, Hinduism, Christanity, and even some Buddhist iconography, the social situation remains volatile. Communal riots break out on occasion in the old city, and a friend of mine who is a long-time observer tells me that it is not a question of whether, but a question of when, another riot will take place. In May 2007, a bomb exploded in the largest mosque in the city, next to the Charminar, during Friday prayers, killing 9 people. 6 were reported to have been killed by police firing in subsequent riots. The bombings have purportedly been traced to a group of Hindu right wing extremists, associated with the RSS, but other sources claim the bombings were carried out by Islamic radicals. Which version you believe seems to depend on your pre-existing political leanings.
In any case, when I visited the Charminar a couple of years later, all was peaceful.
A man was selling mangoes in the plaza (it was June - Mango season)
And the only violence to speak of ws the great mob of people getting into and out of autorickshaws on the crowded shopping district - as seen from this picture taken from the Charminar itself. Still, when I hear people setting off firecrackers - which seems a popular thing to do on Sunday nights here, I always feel slightly nervous.
India is a strange place. I took this picture standing in a park overlooking hi-tec city, where the offices of every major IT corporation have been set up to take advantage of India's tremendous supply of inexpensive, educated, English speaking manpower, and where young people like me are earning salaries double or triple what their parents made, and are soaking up Western brands and cars like there was no tomorrow. In the foreground, a woman is carrying firewood to cook her dinner, harvested illegally from the city park. Here in India the contrasts between wealth and poverty are stark and glaring. But Actual levels of income inequality are dramatically lower in India than they are in the USA. Perhaps the glaring contrasts reminds the well off that some income redistribution is a good thing for maintenance of a stable and prosperous society - an idea that seems to have been forgotten in the US.
