Destroying Hyderabad
If
and Making the Nation
Sunil Purushotham
A
G Noorani’s latest effort, The
Destruction of Hyderabad, reminds
us of an important yet oft-
neglected episode in the making of the
republic. Shortly after the 3 June 1947
announcement of Partition, Mir Osman
Ali Khan, the Muslim Nizam of Hyderabad,
declared that he would not commit
colonial India’s most populous and
wealthiest princely state to either of the
newly announced dominions of India or
Pakistan. Almost all of the nearly 600
princely states acceded to either India or
Pakistan by 15 August, but war soon broke
out over Jammu and Kashmir, a legacy of
the ambiguities of transforming the colo-
nial order into a system of nation states
that still plagues the subcontinent. Within
the context of war and the upheavals of
Partition, India and Hyderabad engaged
in a series of tortuous negotiations until
their ultimate collapse in June 1948.
The Hyderabad Episode
The Nizam’s decision to appeal to the
United Nations and reports of a deteriorat-
ing “law and order” crisis in Hyderabad
caused by the Razakars – the para-
military wing of the Majlis-e-Ittehadul-
Muslimeen (MIM) – precipitated an inva-
sion of the state by the Indian military
in September 1948. The Government of
India, keen to assert the domestic
character of the conflict, euphemistically
labelled this a “Police Action”. The Nizam
surrendered after five days and offered
Hyderabad’s unconditional accession to
the Indian union. India’s unity may have
been won through non-violent struggle,
but it was forged through violence.
In the charged context of the Partition,
the Nizam’s reliance on the MIM’s support
for his claim to independence reinforced
a “communal” interpretation of the con-
flict. Further, it has long been alleged
that the police action was marked by
Economic & Political Weekly EPW May 31, 2014
book reviews
The Destruction of Hyderabad by A G Noorani (New
Delhi: Tulika Publications), 2013; pp 388, Rs 825.
widespread violence against Hyderabad’s
Muslims, who constituted roughly 12%
of the state’s population. Remarkably,
Noorani is the first scholar to make this
point the basis of his argument, and the
police action functions as the tragic telos
of his narrative. The vast majority of the
book is devoted to chronicling in great
detail questions of constitutional reform
and Hyderabad’s uneasy relationship with
the Indian national project in the decades
leading up to 1948. Noorani’s primary
argument is that the police action was at
once a product of this longer history and
entirely avoidable. A peaceful transition,
moreover, would have better preserved
Hyderabad’s “composite culture”, an in-
heritance that could have enriched Indian
secularism. The blame for the police
action, and thus the “destruction of
Hyderabad”, is placed squarely on the
“Hindu nationalist” Vallabhbhai Patel,
who, Noorani argues, harboured an enmity
for Hyderabadi culture and sought to
destroy it by force.
What is missed in Noorani’s attribu-
tion of Hyderabad’s destruction to Patel’s
ideological affinities – and more generally
in the current debate over the “founding
fathers” – is that, in 1948 there was a
broad consensus across the ideological
spectrum regarding the sovereignty of the
nation state, and importantly, for our pur-
poses here, state violence. B R Ambedkar
and Jawaharlal Nehru were equally hos-
tile to the Nizam’s bid for independence.
While Nehru approached military inter-
vention cautiously, he also saw in violence,
and in the conflicts in Kashmir and
Hyderabad in particular, the potential to
unite Indians around a state that many
vol xlix no 22
perceived to be in an existential crisis.
anything, Patel was the most sympathetic
towards feudal and landed interests,
and acted as a bulwark against more
radical land reforms and other interven-
tions in these formative years of India’s
democracy. It may have been an unavoi-
dable tragedy, but what do the police ac-
tion and its violence tell us, beyond a tale
of failed statesmanship, about the wider
transformations of this important period
in the making of postcolonial India?
While the colonial state was repressive
and violent, the nation state that deve-
loped in the years after 1947 was more
powerful. The nation state was endowed
with newfound agency, and its emanci-
patory potential and capacity for violence
expanded together and fed off each other,
a logic still visible in India’s political life.
The Hyderabad episode was integral to
and illustrative of this transformation, as
the coercive institutions inherited from
the colonial regime were deployed as in-
struments of popular will and liberation.
This, on its own, is always a dangerous
marriage. But the conflict over Hyderabad
was also central to the reconfiguration of
the relationship between the state and
popular violence, as consent for, and
thus, the power of the nascent nation
state was generated though the conver-
sion and co-option of non-state violence.
As a narrative of elite negotiations,
Noorani’s book stays true to the template
set by other scholarly treatments of the
subject.1 Understanding the role of the
princely states, and Hyderabad in parti-
cular, in the constitutional debates of the
interwar period provides a valuable alter-
native optic beyond the normal narrative
of Hindu-Muslim conflict inevitably lead-
ing to Partition and Pakistan. While the
book exhaustively sets the stage of 1948,
it leaves little space for discussion of the
police action itself or its aftermath; that
is, precisely the events and processes
that constituted, rather than led up to,
the “destruction of Hyderabad”.
Sunderlal Report
The greatest contribution of this book,
like Noorani’s others, is that it puts
important documents and information
29
BOOK REVIEW
into the public domain. Noorani’s coup
here is the reproduction in full of the
report composed by the goodwill mission
sent to Hyderabad by Nehru in the final
months of 1948. The so-called Sunderlal
Report, long considered lost or sup-
pressed, claims that, “at least 27,000 to
40,000 people lost their lives during
and after the police action”. Noorani’s
belief in the authoritative nature of
the Sunderlal Report, however, pre-
vents him from presenting any other
evidence to support, or even follow up,
its very important claims.
How then can the Sunderlal Report
serve as a starting point for rethinking
the events of 1947-48? How did such a
massive event of violence materialise?
How has it remained hidden or denied?
For one, it urges us to rethink events on
the ground that provided the context for
the elite negotiations. Specifically, the
Sunderlal Report claims that the “perpe-
trators” included “individuals and bands
of people, with and without arms, from
across the border, who had infiltrated
through in the wake of the Indian Army”,
as well as the members of the Hyderabad
State Congress. Who were these armed
men and what were they doing in and
around Hyderabad?
Mobilisation of Violence
Many of them were members of the State
Congress, who established around 79
camps with at least 1,600 men in Indian
union territory along the circumference
of Hyderabad. They created “border in-
cidents” by acts of sabotage, disrupting
rail and telegraph lines, and demolish-
ing customs and police outposts, among
other things. This violent campaign was
supported by top Congress leaders such as
Patel, who ordered the Andhra, Karnataka
and Bombay Provincial Congress Com-
mittees to aid the militants and drum up
propaganda. Perhaps the most important
leader to emerge from this movement was
the future prime minister, P V Narasimha
Rao. The State Congress cadres were
joined in the armed struggle by the
Socialist Party, who claimed that they
were acting in consultation with the states
ministry.2 K M Munshi, Patel’s loyalist and
India’s Agent-General in Hyderabad, wrote
to Patel in May 1948 that, the “border
30
incidents only provide justification” for
India to intervene militarily.3 This manu-
facturing of disorder was ultimately
crucial, as the police action was justified
on the basis that India needed to restore
“law and order” in Hyderabad.
The Arya Samaj, prominent in the
Marathwada and allied with the State
Congress, also joined the armed struggle,
and set up a number of camps, mostly
along the Solapur border, for displaced
Hyderabadi Hindus. In one of Partition’s
lesser known if mostly temporary migra-
tions, an estimated 5,00,000 “non-
Muslims” left Hyderabad and another
7,00,000 Indian Muslims entered the
state in the 13 months after August 1947.4
The press reports of Razakar depreda-
tions and incursions into Indian territory
were used by the Congress to build a case
for intervention and further heightened
“communal” tensions in the subcontinent.
The Indian Express, for example, reported
that a “well-laid Scheme to massacre,
on a vast scale, the Hindus of Hyderabad
is almost complete”.5 The Intelligence
Bureau reported from Nagpur, home to
both the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
(RSS) and Hindu Mahasabha, that “news
of the colossal oppression of Hindus in
Hyderabad has inflamed public opinion”.
Cadre from both groups likely joined
the armed struggle against Hyderabad.
R S Shukla, the chief minister of Central
Provinces (CP) and Berar, presciently
warned Nehru that “tales of atrocity and
woe” brought by Hindu refugees from
Hyderabad “inflame the feelings of Hin-
dus in our districts” and made “main-
taining peace and order and preventing
an outburst against the local Muslims”
increasingly difficult.6
There was some substance to depictions
of Razakar violence as directed against
“Hindus”, but it was in many ways a
response to the armed campaign being
conducted at the borders, and most
importantly, to the communist-led revo-
lution in Telangana, which is entirely
neglected by Noorani. This revolution
emerged during 1946-48 as a mass
movement with few, if any, parallels in
India’s recent history and heralded the
advent of Indian Maoism (indeed,
Maoism’s global career), the legacy of
which is still being played out today.
May 31, 2014
Days after the conclusion of the police
action, the Indian military and armed
police units initiated a brutal three-year
long counter-insurgency against the very
“Hindu” peasants that they were osten-
sibly sent to protect from the Razakars.
Understanding this economy of violent
contestation gives context to the anti-
Muslim violence of September 1948 and
widens the scope of our attention beyond
elite negotiations. Were the heroic peas-
ants of Telangana not also fighting for
the “destruction of Hyderabad”? While
the Telangana communists continued the
fight against the Indian state, they too
contributed to the “law and order” crisis
in Hyderabad that ultimately served
the interest of the Indian state. The
mobilisation of violence in and around
Hyderabad was a contingent ideological
conjuncture, which saw ostensibly secular
parties like the Congress and the socia-
lists come together with avowedly
“communal” bodies like the Arya Samaj
and Hindu Mahasabha in order to fur-
ther the nation state project, despite
their disagreements over what sort of
nation India should be and what sort of
state it should have.
Democratisation of Violence
Since the end of the second world war,
the Indian state increasingly lost control
of whatever monopoly on violence it
previously exercised, a process culmi-
nating in the fratricidal civil war in
Punjab. The state project of arrogating
violence after August 1947 included not
only the absorption of violence through
efforts at relief and rehabilitation for
the victims of Partition, but also the dis-
persal, channelling, and transformation
of violence in ways that affirmed rather
than subverted state sovereignty. The
conflict over Hyderabad was central to
this process of generating a new regime
available at
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vol xlix no 22 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

of sovereignty not through a “transfer of
power” or a Constituent Assembly, but
from the bottom-up.
While the military invasion was a
spectacular and highly visible display of
state sovereignty, the archetypal figure
in this hitherto obscured process of
generating state sovereignty through
the democratisation of violence was the
“Home Guard”. At the behest of Nehru
and Patel, governments in the provinces
bordering Hyderabad, as elsewhere, raised
tens of thousands of home guards. In the
border districts, the organising and
arming of men took on a distinctly com-
munal character. The Government of
Bombay, for example, reported without
concern that “Hindus on the borders of
the Nizam’s State are collecting arms
and ammunition”.7 The deputy mayor of
Solapur confessed to “issuing weapons
very freely in bordering villages” (Kamat
2000: 217). In CP and Berar, arms were
confiscated from Muslim licensees on
Patel’s orders, even as they were distrib-
uted to almost exclusively Hindu home
guard units.8 Home guards from the
province accompanied the Indian mili-
tary into Hyderabad during the police
action. The State Congress “Liberation
Groups” did the same: “3,000 cadets of
the State Congress served as guides to
the Indian Army when it entered”.9
After the police action, officials confi-
dentially conceded that the State Congress
was responsible for some, if not much,
of the violence. The military governor
J N Chaudhuri confirmed that “certain
members of the State Congress undoubt-
edly terrorised the Muslims”. The State
Congress chief, Swami Tirtha, admitted
as much, but insisted that
(the) communal minded section of the mili-
tary and police also indulged in (the vio-
lence) and even threatened the people to do
it…Some of the Congress workers, who hap-
pened to be with these incoming troops, got
implicated into it.10
However, in June 1949, on Patel’s in-
structions, the Hyderabad government
granted amnesty to all “Hindus in-
volved in retaliatory action just after
the Police Action”, although the military
governor ordered that “no publicity
should be given to it”.11 The State Con-
gress leaders implicated in the violence,
such as Phool Chand Gandhi, were soon
Economic & Political Weekly EPW May 31, 2014
appointed ministers in the Hyderabad
government.
The “destruction of Hyderabad”,
moreover, happened not only through a
single major event of violence, but also
through routine and bureaucratic means
that came in the wake of that initial
shock. The dismantling (in part, at least)
of the feudal architecture of the state,
the demobilisation of the Hyderabad
Army, and policies restricting Muslim
representation in state services to 12.5%,
for example, caused significant unem-
ployment among many Muslims, and the
middle classes in particular. Retrospec-
tively, this also led to one of the major
grievances of the Telangana statehood
movement, as migrants from the former
British India flocked to fill the posts va-
cated by their Muslim predecessors.
Sacrifice and Incorporation
Despite his efforts to portray Hyderabadi
culture as cosmopolitan and applying
equally to both Hindus and Muslims,
Noorani frequently falls into the common
trap of conflating “Hyderabadi” with
“Muslim”. This lapse is understandable
because the project of Azad Hyderabad,
led by the Nizam and supported by the
MIM, was not just an assertion of king-
ship as a basis for sovereignty, but an
effort among Deccani Muslims to main-
tain a share of state power after the ad-
vent of Pakistan had effectively territori-
alised Muslim sovereignty elsewhere and
further intensified their demographic
deficit. Another remarkable document
reproduced by Noorani reveals that
Muhammad Ali Jinnah advised the Nizam
as early as August 1947 to emulate the
example of Imam Hussain:
All the sanctions in the world then existing
were applied against him and his followers but
they withstood them and suffered wholesale
butchery. It was a moral triumph and they
gave their lives for it. That should be the
attitude which the Nizam and his advisers
and people should adopt (“Jinnah’s Advice
to Hyderabad’s Delegation, 4 August 1947”,
pp 327-29).
Jinnah often described the relationship
between Muslims in Hindu-majority areas
and Pakistani nationalism as a sacrificial
one. Indeed, the failure of Pakistan to
offer Azad Hyderabad any support lent
the Nizam’s quest for independence a
vol xlix no 22
BOOK REVIEW
distinctly suicidal or even sacrificial
character. Azad Hyderabad exacerbated
the indeterminacy and ambivalence of the
relationship between the Muslim and the
nation that characterised the immedi-
ate post-Partition period in India. It is
revealing that, according to the Sunderlal
Report, sacrifice and incorporation formed
the grammar through which the violence
of the police action was articulated. Acts
of naming such as tattooing, forced con-
versions and ritualised sacrifice can be
interpreted as a means of producing
certainty out of this ambivalence.
Unlike in East Punjab, where Muslims
were expelled en masse, in Hyderabad
this violent ordering was, among other
things, concerned with internalising the
Muslim within the emerging national
order. With the project of Muslim sover-
eignty failed in the Deccan and territori-
alised in Pakistan, the police action and
its violence were important events in the
transformation, or reversion, of India’s
Muslims from a “national” political com-
munity to a religious minority. This
transformation was marked by a general
withdrawal of Muslims from the political
sphere, and the Indian Muslim leaders
maintained a steadied public silence
regarding the violence of the police action.
This transformation deserves a more
thorough treatment than is possible here,
but it was precisely through victimisation
that a new relationship between the
Indian state and Muslims were forged,
with the latter remaining, at least in the
first decade or so after 1947-48, as a
depoliticised category and ward of the
state requiring protection. Silence was
borne not only out of fear, but was
an effort on behalf of India’s Muslims
to enter into a political relationship with
the very state responsible at once for their
persecution and protection. In the months
preceding the police action, many Mus-
lim leaders responded to widespread
calls for them to make public statements
in support of the Government of India,
and their subsequent silence can be inter-
preted as an attempt to demonstrate
“proof” of their loyalty that many Indian
nationalists – most infamously Patel him-
self – had been demanding.
Considering the shortcomings of both
the state bureaucracy and the Congress
31
BOOK REVIEW

Party in fulfilling its role as the trustee of
Hyderabad’s Muslims during this period
of post-1948 transition, it is perhaps
unsurprising that the eventual return of
Muslims to the political sphere in
Hyderabad came in the form of a revived
MIM, which remains the dominant political
force among the Muslims of Hyderabad
city. The considerable unease that the
MIM provokes in virtually all segments
of Indian political opinion, including
and perhaps, especially among the liberal-
left, is a continuing reminder of the
anxiety surrounding the Muslim as a
political category.
Conclusions
Partition and Kashmir have been the
subjects of a substantial and sophisti-
cated historiography. Noorani is right to
remind us of Hyderabad’s importance
and to place the conflict alongside those
two canonical and formative events in
the making of postcolonial south Asia’s
territorial order and, more specifically,
of the Republic of India. He is also right
to hold Patel responsible for his use
of state machinery to disenfranchise,
silence and humiliate Indian Muslims
after the Partition. But labelling him a
Hindu nationalist willing to deploy vio-
lence (against Muslims in particular)
will do little to tarnish Patel’s current
reputation, and may even validate the
efforts of another Gujarati strongman
to claim the mantle of the Sardar’s
legacy of muscular and unapologetic
nationalism.
However, there is much more to
be said apart from allocating blame
amongst India’s founding fathers or la-
menting the passing of a culture sus-
tained by a colonial feudal autocracy.
As an astute observer of contemporary
Indian politics, Noorani is aware of the
continuing importance of Hyderabad’s
history. His neglect of the revolution
in Telangana is surprising, especially
considering the ambivalent responses
of Muslims to the recent Telangana
statehood movement and the recrudes-
cence of debates over the Nizam and
his legacy, not to mention the reappear-
ance of the Razakar in the political lexi-
con. The insistence of the Telangana
Rashtra Samithi and the Bharatiya
Janata Party on celebrating the date of
the Nizam’s surrender to Indian forces,
17 September, as “Telangana Independ-
ence Day” has further muddied the wa-
ters and made a fuller accounting of
what happened during and after the po-
lice action urgently required. As we wit-
ness the birth of Telangana state, per-
haps 1948 also has something to tell us
about the current relationship between
elite instrumentality and political vio-
lence, especially in light of the phenom-
ena of self-immolation among young ac-
tivists seeking to materialise Telanga-
na’s statehood. Noorani’s book will
hopefully prompt a more thorough in-
terrogation not only of the events lead-
ing up to and following the police ac-
tion, but the ways in which violence con-
ditioned India’s early experiments in
freedom and democracy, and continues
to do so today.
Sunil Purushotham (sp536@cam.ac.uk) is
with the Faculty of History, University of
Cambridge, the UK.
Notes
1 The template was first set by Menon (1956).
Also see Pernau (2000), Benichou (2000),
Bawa (1991), Raghavan (2010) and Copland
(1997).

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32 May 31, 2014 vol xlix no 22 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

2 “Socialist Party’s Activities in Hyderabad”, The
Times of India, 30 April 1948.
3 Munshi to Patel, 21 May 1948; Sardar Patel’s
Correspondence 1945-50, Vol 7 (1973), p 156.
4 Nagendra Bahadur, “A Short Note on the Refu-
gee Problem of Hyderabad”, 1 December 1948,
National Archives of India (NAI), Ministry of
States (MoS), File No 103-H/48.
5 The Indian Express, Madras edition, 4 October
1947. NAI, MoS, File No2(5)-PR/47 Part II.
6 Shukla to Nehru, 11 July 1948, NAI, MoS, File
No 3(22)-H/48.
7 V T Dehejia to Ministry of States, 5 December
1947, MoS, 111-PR/47; See also “Premier
Condemns Misleading Propaganda”, The Times
of India, 9 August 1948.
8 “Letter from R S Shukla”, 21 July 1947,
Sardar Patel’s Correspondence 1945-50, Vol 7,
pp 36-37.
Economic & Political Weekly EPW May 31, 2014
9 The Hindu, 4 October 1948; Joseph 2006:
42-43.
10 Tirtha to Patel, 10 May 1949, cited by
Chaudhuri to Vellodi, 31 May 1949. MoS,
1(50)-H/49.
11 Chaudhuri to Ministry of States, 17 June 1949.
NAI, MoS, 1(50)-H/49.
References
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of Mir Osman Ali Khan (New Delhi: Penguin).
Benichou, Lucien (2000): From Autocracy to Inte-
gration: Political Developments in Hyderabad
State, 1938-48 (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan).
Copland, Ian (1997): The Princes of India in the End-
game of Empire, 1917-47 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press).
vol xlix no 22
BOOK REVIEW
Joseph, Uma T (2006): Accession of Hyderabad: The
Inside Story (New Delhi: Sundeep Prakashan).
pp 42-43.
Kamat, Manjiri N (2007): “Border Incidents, Internal
Disorder and the Nizam’s Claim for an
Independent Hyderabad” in Waltrund Ernst
and Biswamoy Pati (ed.), India’s Princely States:
People, Princes and Colonialism, London,
pp 212-23.
Menon, V P (1956): The Story of the Integration of
the Indian States (New York: The Macmillan
Company).
Pernau, Margit (2000): The Passing of Patrimonial-
ism: Politics and Political Culture in Hyderabad
1911-48 (New Delhi: Manohar).
Raghavan, Srinath (2010): War and Peace in Mod-
ern India: A Strategic History of the Nehru Years
(New Delhi: Permanent Black).
33