Alison Mackenzie Shah, copyright 2005

CONSTRUCTING A CAPITAL ON THE EDGE OF EMPIRE: UBRAN

PATRONAGE AND POLITICS IN ASAF JAHI HYDERABAD

INTRODUCTION

ASAF JAHI HYDERABAD:

AN INDO-ISLAMIC CITY IN THE AGE OF COLONIALISM

In 1945, a short article on the urban development of Hyderabad, India appeared in

the British journal The Builder.1 This article outlined three distinct phases of Hyderabad
city’s growth. The first was its foundation in the sixteenth-century under the Qutb
Shahs, which was lauded for its well-ordered, axial street plan. The last stage was the
Government of Hyderabad’s early twentieth-century urban initiative, which, while
embracing many of the principles of European design, was nonetheless criticized as
lacking a comprehensive plan. The second stage presented in this article, however, was
troubling to the British author. The second stage, which reached from the early
eighteenth- to the early twentieth-century, consisted of “the encirclement of this town
by fortification, outside which it continued to grow while the central area became
congested and confused. Lack of control resulted in a straggling and ill-organized
agglomeration extending over a wide area.”2 The two centuries of Hyderabad’s
“confused,” “straggling” and “ill-organized” urban development are the central focus of
this dissertation.
These two centuries mark the era during which Hyderabad was the capital of the
Indo-Muslim dynasty, the Asaf Jahs, (known more popularly as the Nizams – a
shorthand designation that identifies the dynasty by their Mughal political title, Nizam
ul Mulk). And as the article in The Builder hints, development in the Asaf Jahi city was
not focused on urban infrastructure, such as comprehensive systems of roadways, or on
citywide drainage programs undertaken by public works departments. Rather, the
Nizams’ capital developed primarily through buildings that shaped cores and nodes, and
played upon the politics and symbolism embedded in urban space.3 Many of these
buildings, such as Palladian hilltop palaces, elaborately carved personal tombs, and
Indo-Saracenic institutions such as hospitals and courts have become famous, primarily
through well-circulated photographs.4 Such buildings represent Hyderabad’s urban
identity both to local residents and foreign observers. Yet the buildings that became

1
H. V. Lanchester, “Planning Hyderabad City,” The Builder, vol. 169, (1945), p. 173.
2
Ibid.
3
Efforts to do comparative studies that use Public Works Department records as the model for development
have made Hyderabad appear derivative, as though it lagged behind British India on the evolutionary path of
modernization. See following section “Mediating Discourses” for elaboration.
4
The documenting of the city’s landmark buildings was done in large measure by the Nizam’s photographer
Lala Deen Dayal. I discuss the fame of some of the publications with his photographs in the section,
“Reconstructing Hyderabad: The Politics of Hyderabad’s Heritage and the Question of Sources” in this
Introduction. I elaborate on Deen Dayal’s role as a photographer in Chapter 5. In Chapter 6, I discuss the
circulation of images of buildings by the architect Vincent Esch, who publicized his work in India very well.
Appendix 3 lists the buildings photographed in private collections in the India Office Library in London. This
gives a sample of the buildings that were representative of Hyderabad over time.

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famous are known today only out of their historical urban context; that they arose out of
broader urban visions bears examination.
Hyderabad’s landmark buildings are the tip of the iceberg of an urban social
history, which begins to reveal the underlying logic of the city’s urban development
during the reign of the Asaf Jahs. I will argue in this thesis that architecture played a
central role in Asaf Jahi social and political struggles, and I will show how the best-
known buildings in Hyderabad were richest in their symbolic potency in these struggles.
In analyzing the urban development of Hyderabad, I document how architectural
patronage in its ritual and material urban environments, or urban patronage, records the
social transformations of an Indo-Islamic political elite in the age of European
colonialism.
From the mid-eighteenth-century to the mid-twentieth-century, Hyderabad
served as the capital of the Asaf Jahs, a provincial Mughal successor dynasty. The Asaf
Jahs rose to power in the course of the eighteenth-century struggles which propelled the
British East India Company to the center of the South Asian political stage. As allies of
the British, the Asaf Jahs’ power was ensured — and curtailed — by treaties with the
British East India Company and later the British Raj. This relationship became
formalized as indirect rule, or, conversely, played out as imperfect sovereignty. The
limits of Asaf Jahi sovereignty created certain pressures on processes of continuity and
change. The constraints created by the British Empire’s visions of governance, as well
as the opportunities afforded by being on its periphery, shaped the broad axes on which
the Asaf Jahs plotted out a political trajectory. Hyderabad, as their capital, was a city on
the edge of Empire.
For these two centuries, the character of the city was always defined by its status as
the Asaf Jahi capital. Urban identity centered on the identity of the landholding elite and
the patrimonial ruler, the Nizam, but the Asaf Jahi aristocracy was not, culturally,
deeply rooted in their Deccan state. Within the Nizams’ Dominions, Hyderabad was the
sole urban center surrounded by thousands of miles of rural dominions. And led by an
Indo-Islamic elite that emigrated from Mughal India, Hyderabadi urban society became
a world culturally separate from, though economically dependent on the rest of the
Deccan state.
Between 1750 and 1950, Hyderabad developed as a cosmopolitan city with links to
vastly different regions of the Islamic world and Europe. It was a Muslim city,
attracting immigrants from north India, Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iran, Turkey,
Yemen, and highland East Africa.5 It was a product of the colonial era as well, with
French, British, and American residents associated with military officers and missions.
The city was populated by a small middle class of merchants and craftsmen, and large
body of laborers grew over time, but a patrician class of landowning families
(jāgīrdārs) defined the Asaf Jahi aristocracy for the duration of the regime. This
capital’s stable aristocratic community faced an era of dramatic political change.
How did these Hyderabadi elites negotiate the transitions from premodern
institutions and patterns of organization to the modern ones that transformed urban and
political life across South Asia? What were the vital interests of Asaf Jahi society?
How did changing social organization reshape political identity over two centuries of
Asaf Jahi rule? The answers to these questions, I argue, are recorded in the ways that
5
Called Abyssinian in English sources and Sidī in Urdu and Persian sources.

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Hyderabad was constructed as the Nizams’ capital, in relationships between striking

innovations and claims to continuity that urban patronage documents.
The city, I suggest, developed through a series of symbolic and material inscriptions
of urban space. Urban environments provide potent settings for political life because
power is inscribed in city forms in symbolic ways through material inscriptions at new
landmarks and historic sites, and through kinetic inscriptions of urban space such as
processions and festivals.6 Acts of urban patronage, which shape material and ritual
urban environments, activate built environments as political domains.
My examination of Hyderabad’s urban patronage and politics in Hyderabad is
highly interdisciplinary in approach, but is rooted in the city’s physical, architectural
record. Six trends defined diverse social centers of urban investment shaped the
development of Asaf Jahi Hyderabad. (See Appendix 2.) These are courtyards (1750-
1800), audience halls (1808-1868), mosques (1800-1840), shrines (1840-1880), palaces
(1875-1910), and government institutions (1910-1940). Each represents a distinct
direction of urban development in the Nizams’ capital. Each also documents a distinct
trend of social organization.
To explain the relationship between architecture’s role in shaping social groups
and its role in political performance, my framework for analysis hinges on the kinds of
activities that took place in the buildings. The buildings constructed in Hyderabad
under the Asaf Jahs served practical purposes. Courtyards enabled the muster of
military troops. Audience halls framed diplomacy. Religious institutions facilitated
prayers and festivals. Shrines highlighted charismatic power. Hilltop palaces permitted
lavish entertainment of foreign visitors. And government and educational institutions
individually organized numerous governmental initiatives. The activities that took place
in each type of building can be used to trace the construction and emphasis of particular
collective identities, through which social groups coalesced. By taking into view
political change, I explore how social and political upheavals were negotiated through
the processes of patronage trends.
The kinds of rituals and activities that took place at buildings also spilled out
into broader urban politics festivals. And I use documents such as government records,
photographs, and urban lore to examine the ways that the vital interests of communities
that were expressed through patronage filtered into the Nizams’ ritual constructions of
their political identity. I view political rituals as events of struggle and claim rather than
as enactments of order and dominance and see them, as Dirks suggests, as “a
tremendously important arena for the cultural construction of authority and the dramatic
display of the social lineaments of power.”7 Connections between the patronage of

6
As Geertz suggests, the people need to see “the fact that [the ruler] is in truth governing.” Clifford Geertz,
“Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power” in J. Ben-David and T.N. Clark,
Culture and Its Creators: Essays in Honor of Edward Shils (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 151. See
also others who follow such as David Cannadine, “The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The
British Monarchy and the ‘Invention of Tradition’ c. 1820-1977”, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds.,
The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1983), pp. 101-164. From a different
approach, art historian Richard Krautheimer coined the term “political topography” in Three Christian Capitals:
Topography and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
7
Nicholas B. Dirks, “Ritual and Resistance: Subversion as a Social Fact,” in Douglas Haynes and Gyan
Prakash, eds. Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992), p. 219.

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buildings and urban rituals explains interventions of the political into spheres such as
religious identity and leisure life. These were ways of managing social and political
change, both within the city, and on the edge of empire.
The salience of each trend of urban patronage was tied to political innovations,
but Hyderabadis consistently chose to build with styles that developed first in other
times and places. This use of heritage enabled patrons to mobilize broad pasts and
provide historical depth for the positioning of new identities. The control over the past
was also essential to political rituals. As Bernard Cohn has pointed out, “[t]he power to
define the nature of the past and establish priorities in the creation of a monumental
record, and to propound canons of taste are among the most significant instrumentalities
of rulership.”8 I tie social processes to the construction of collective memories, as each
new identity was emplotted in a different past through the selection of specific kinds of
heritage. My analysis of urban patronage documents how cultural heritage is deployed
strategically as part of processes of social and political change.
Rather than constructing a tale of acculturation or Europeanization, my history
of the Asaf Jahi capital shows how patronage of buildings was employed to identify the
capital city and its rulers in relation to shifting cultural communities and shifting
histories. Political changes in Hyderabad tracked transitions to modernity that took
shape in different chronologies across South Asia. The foundation of Subsidiary
Alliance, the rise of the government bureaucracy, the demise of the court, the
construction of an Indian Princely community, and the growth of representational
politics provided contexts that made new collective identities salient. I focus on ritual to
argue that the agency in managing the fractures and flows of tradition in these processes
was clearly in the hands of Hyderabadis.
At the same time, the approach employed in this thesis shifts out of a linear
narrative of political change, which is usually the setting for studies of modern urban
development.9 The necessity of interaction between active social centers and political
power is neither the exclusive domain of a “traditional” nor of a “modern”
administration, but as studies of ceremonial and invented tradition confirm, the quest for
charismatic power has remained a fundamental feature of political life.10
As a study of architecture and the changing symbolic geographies of
Hyderabad’s urban environment, this is a local history of a city under the rule of a
Muslim Prince: it is the history of one of South Asia’s many Indo-Islamic capitals.
Since the Nizams’ Hyderabad was a city that developed in the age of colonialism, this
study is therefore also a study of colonialism’s cultures. The local implications of the
global changes in balance of power, from a time when the British first established a
stronghold in Hyderabad, to the time when the fifth Nizam was granted a secure
political status in 1858, to the deposition of the Ottoman Sultan and Caliph after World
War I, which left the Nizam as a ruler of the largest Muslim-led state in the world, bring
out the ways through which European and Islamic identities were constructed and
articulated at different points in time in a capital on periphery of both the Islamic world
and the British empire. By the nature of its diversity of patronage trends and the ways

8
Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. (Princeton: Princeton
Univeristy Press, 1996), p.10
9
I discuss this at length in the following section of the Introduction.
10
David Cannadine, “The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual.”

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in which Islamic and European identities were continually re-imagined and re-
positioned, Hyderabad is then is a potent site for examining the constructions and
interactions of two supra-regional or “world” identities: Islamic and Imperial.

Mediating Discourses: History, Art History, and the Place of Asaf Jahi Hyderabad

As a history of a capital — a built urban domain into which Asaf Jahi power was
socially embedded and ritually expressed — my study mediates between history and art
history. It therefore reverberates into a number of fields in Indian scholarship such as
studies of Indo-Islamic and Princely State architecture, colonial urban form, and
Princely ritual, which have for the most part remained separate. My thesis is, however,
positioned most directly in relation to studies of Asaf Jahi Hyderabad.
Hyderabad history is a relatively freestanding topic of scholarly inquiry.
Hyderabad was the largest of the Princely states, and the Nizams were the highest-
ranking Princes in India. It was also the longest lasting Mughal successor state,
outlasting Awadh by almost a century. Yet Hyderabad rarely falls into comparative
studies of wider social or political issues; from Indo-Islamic architecture, to studies of
cultural change in princely states, to the dismantling of empire, Hyderabad is essentially
absent from the main thrusts of international scholarly interest.11 Hyderabad followed a
unique cultural trajectory: its Islamic identity and colonial era context creates a lack of
comparability with its Mughal predecessors and its Hindu Princely contemporaries. Its
uniqueness has rendered Hyderabad on the cultural periphery of both fields. Held in a
balance between its significance and its provincialism, Hyderabad has essentially
become its own specialized field of study.12 And, perhaps as a result of this position,
Asaf Jahi Hyderabad has been studied primarily by Hyderabadis.13
The relationship between culture and power that my thesis focuses on is absent
from historical scholarship on Asaf Jahi Hyderabad, but I build on a set of political
narratives of governance and administration that cover the main transition points in
governmental organization. Sarojani Regani’s Nizam British Relations plots the course
of power struggles through treaties and diplomatic correspondence that culminated in
the definition of Hyderabad as a Native State.14 Sheila Raj’s Medievalism to
Modernism, Vasant K. Bawa’s The Nizam between the Mughals and British are clear
chronicles of the impact of Sir Salar Jung, the later nineteenth-century reformist
Minister (diwan).15 Both are based heavily on diplomatic correspondence and English

11
Modern Asian Studies, vol. 24, pt. 3, (1990), pp. 417-578, was dedicated to civil ritual in India and British and
Princely modes of symbolic representation. Barbara Ramusack, The Princes of India in the Twilight of Empire: the
Dissolution of a Client-Patron System, 1914-1939 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press: 1978), and The Indian
Princes and Their States (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
12
There is a Hyderabad group that meets at the Association for Asian Studies annual meetings, for example.
13
A few other scholars such as Magrit Pernau have recently entered into community of Hyderabad historians,
but none has had a lasting impact in terms of repeatedly publishing articles and a set of scholars from
Hyderabad still dominate the field. These center on Narendra Luther, Vasant K. Bawa, Sheela Raj, Daud Asjraf,
and to some extent the Hyderabadi expatriate, Omar Khalidi.
14
Sarojini Regani, Nizam British Relations, 1724-1857, (Hyderabad, India, 1963).
15
Sheela Raj, Mediaevalism to Modernism: Socio-Economic and Cultural History of Hyderabad, 1869-1911 (Bombay:
Popular Prakashan, 1987); Vasant K. Bawa, The Nizam between Mughals and British : Hyderabad under Salar Jang I
(New Delhi: S. Chand, 1986).

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language sources. The transformation or modernization of the last Nizam’s government

also has a following of local and increasingly international scholars. Yazdani’s Seventh
Nizam: Fallen Empire, Bawa’s The Last Nizam: the life and times of Mir Osman Ali
Khan, held the twentieth-century stage for some time. 16 Pernau’s Passing of
Patrimonialism, and Lucien’s Autocracy to Integration, suggest Asaf Jahi’s
Hyderabad’s entry into international scholarship may be starting at the conclusion of the
dynasty, but even here the focus on administration and political transformations
remains.17 As straightforward narratives of governmental change, these studies provide
a solid foundation on which to build a more cultural study of power negotiations.
While these studies focus on the bureaucratization of the government and the
rise of representational politics, a patrimonial system was continuously one of the
defining characteristics of the Asaf Jahi regime. My thesis owes a heavy debt the
extraordinary work of Karen Leonard whose social history studies on Kayasths,
Bankers, and the Hyderabadi elites known as ”Mulkis” illuminate the social world of
the patrimonial politics and the role of kinship groups in the administration in Asaf Jahi
Hyderabad.18 My numerous citations to Leonard's work display the importance of her
work to our understanding of Asaf Jahi political culture.
The city has been taken up as a subject by a few Hyderabadi scholars as well.
Shah Manzoor Alam’s Hyderabad and Secunderabad is a solidly mid-century urban
study, in which human agency is subsumed by shifts in structural and infrastructural
patterns.19 Dharmendra Prasad’s A Social and Cultural Geography of Hyderabad is
quite the opposite, a collection of lore and meanings of names of urban areas.20
Together they provide documentation to serve as opening points to begin analyze both
macro and micro histories of the city’s physical form. More focused studies of religious
institutions offer insights into the Shia and Sufi communities’ heritage in the city; lists
of Sufis shrines in the four volume Tazkīrah–yi Auliya-i Haidarābād and Mulim
Religious Institutions and the Role Under the Qutb Shahs by a Shia scholar Sadiq
Naqvi, have been particularly useful for my study.21
S.P. Shorey’s grand, comprehensive study of the city’s historic architecture,
Conservation of Historical Buildings and Areas, deserves special mention as it is the

16
Zubaida Yazdani with Mary Chrystal, The Seventh Nizam : the fallen Empire. (London: Distributed by Z.
Yazdani, 1985); Vasant K. Bawa, The Last Nizam: the Life and Times of Mir Osman Ali Khan, (New Delhi: Viking,
1992).
17
Pernau, Magrit. The Passing of Patrimonialism: Politics and Political culture in Hyderabad, 1911-1948 (New Delhi:
Manohar, 2000); Lucien D. Benichou, From Autocracy to Integration: Political Developments in Hyderabad State, 1938-
1948, (Chennai : Orient Longman, 2000).
18
Karen Leonard, "The Hyderabad Political System and Its Participants," Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 30, no. 3.
(May, 1971), pp. 569-582, and Social History of an Indian Caste: The Kayasths of Hyderabad. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1978); “The Mulki-non Mulki Conflict,” in Jeffery Robin, ed., People, Princes, and Paramount
Power: society and politics in the Indian Princely States (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978). Karen Leonard,
“Banking Firms in 19th Century Politics,” Modern Asian Studies vol. 15, no. 2, (1981), pp. 177-201.
19
Alam, Shah Manzoor. Hyderabad and Secunderabad: A Study in Urban Geography, (Hyderabad: Osmania
University Press, 1965).
20
Prasad, Dharmendra. Social and Cultural Geography of Hyderabad City: A Historical Perspective, (Delhi: Inter-India
Publications, 1986).
21
Tali, Sayyad Murad Ali, Tazkīrah–yi Auliya-i Haidarābād (Hyderabad: Minar Book Depot, 1969-1972); Sadiq
Naqvi, Mulim Religious Institutions and the Role Under the Qutb Shahs (Hyderabad, 1995).

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most thorough endeavor to reconstruct the histories of individual sites of architectural

significance in the city.22 Shorey and his Hyderabad Urban Development Association
team collected information from oral and written histories, with the intention of
evaluating sites for protection and preservation. They documented sites from the city’s
foundation in the sixteenth-century to the post Asaf Jahi era. His focus was on the city’s
heritage, such that rather than organizing around the practices of patronage, the total
heritage is catalogued by stylistic attribution, and is presented by district rather than
chronology. The fact that number of buildings he lists have since been demolished
suggests the gulf between scholarly studies and urban politics in Hyderabad.23
Asaf Jahi Hyderabad, then, is known through its specific sites of architectural
heritage and the broad trajectory of its political transformations. Culture and power
have not been posed in relation to one other. My study brings them together using both
the political chronicles and the architectural documentation as context for a study of
Hyderabad’s construction as a political capital.
Examining the history of the Asaf Jahi capital provides a significant contribution
to other fields of study in South Asia. I situate my study of Hyderabad city in relation to
the broad historiographies of Islamic architecture and colonial urban development.
Hyderabad’s development as the Asaf Jahi capital provides a critical comparative site
for the discursive frameworks that structure these fields. Histories of the urban form in
South Asian cities and studies of monumental architecture have focused on the display
of imperial strength of Mughals and British. By focusing on a provincial dynasty and a
non-colonial environment, I seek to enhance our understanding of processes of
interaction and patterns of cultural change in South Asia. I take the gaze away from
center, away from dominant power to where we can better observe nuances of cultural
change and examine the choices behind appropriations, borrowings, and inventions.
In narrating the cultural history of Hyderabad’s urban development through its
architecture, this dissertation has two broad goals. The first goal speaks to architectural
history by focusing on analyses of the design and function of buildings. In providing a
survey of an urban site that is “Islamic” in its patronage practices but not medieval, it
disaggregates the current, dominant model of Indo-Islamic cultural production as a
phenomenon of pre-modern India. Islamic architecture in India is primarily examined
as visual enactment of imperial power; the buildings of Islamic India are catalogued
according to the succession of Sultanate rulers and Mughal emperors.24 However,
monuments, because they tie in economic, political, and social negotiations are
powerful tools for constructing social histories of power outside the imperial center,
especially in eras in which written documentation is often composed primarily of

22
Hyderabad Urban Development Authority, Conservation of Historical Buildings and Areas (Secunderabad: The
Authority, 1984).
23
I turn to this important topic in the following section.
24
This includes articles on specific sites such as tombs and palaces of Mughal Emperors and surveys of
architecture from Catherine Asher, Architecture of Mughal India. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992);
Ebba Koch, Mughal Architecture : an outline of its history and development (1526-1858) ( Munich: Prestel, 1991).

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dynastic histories.25 But in India the imperial sources are so rich and the buildings so
magnificent, that the sub-imperial has attracted little attention.26
Not only is our understanding of the uses and variety of architecture limited, but
also our essentialization of the technologies that define Islamic buildings—dome and
arch—set limits on the wealth of options that Muslim patrons had over the centuries.
The concentration on the pre-modern also freezes the networks of cross-cultural
interactions between regional, national and international centers of power in terms of
the Timurid legacy and the “gunpowder empires”.27 This “Islamic world” sphere of
cultural interaction is replaced with only highly localized British East India company
influence before Indo-Islamic architectural studies peter out all together.28 Needless to
say, there was a changing Islamic world of which Muslims in modern India were
conscious—and are still.29
The second goal speaks to historians, by analyzing agency in processes of
change. Locating Hyderabad’s buildings within a local history, the dissertation
problematizes the narrative of modern urban development as a Western European
initiative or imposition and the role of architecture as the primary visual artifact of the
Raj's modernizing process.30 Architecture is a particularly useful site for discussing
cultural change in the late nineteenth-century since it has come to identify the Princely
State more than any other cultural expression. Because the British expressed their
imperial vision through architecture and tried to encourage certain architectural forms in
Princely States that would mirror their ideals, there is much discussion about
architecture in English language historical sources.31
European architecture in India is generally discussed as one of the processes of
domination and control or one of the by-products of colonization. Studies of Princely
State architecture point to the power relations between Prince and Raj, and the narrative
lies in the history of imperial power. 32 In questioning either derivative culture or

25
See Sheila Blair, The Ilkhanid Shrine of Natanz, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).
26
Catherine Asher’s work “Subimperial Palaces: Power and Authority in Mughal India.” In Ars Orientalis vol.
23, 1993, is an unusual break in this trend. Anna Sloan’s Ph.D. thesis, “The Atala Masjid: Between Culture and
Polity in Medieval Jaunpur” (University of Pennsylvanis, 2001) is another example.
27
Lisa Golombek, “From Tamerlane to the Taj Mahal,” in Essays in Islamic Art and Architecture: in honour of
Katarina Otto-Dorn; Edited by Abbas Daneshvari, (Malibu: Undena Publications, 1981); Thomas dirLentz and
Glenn Lowry, Timur and the Princely Vision: Persian Art and Culture in the 15th Century, (Washington, D.C.: Arthur
M. Sackler Gallery, 1989); Gulru Negipoglu, “Framing the Gaze in Ottoman, Mughal, and Safavid Palaces” in
Ars Orientalis vol. 23, 1993; Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom, The Art and Architecture of Islam, 1250-1800, (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
28
Rosie Llewelyn Jones, A Fatal Friendship: The Nawabs, the British, and the City of Lucknow (Delhi : Oxford
University Press, 1985) on Lucknow is an example of the transition.
29
Contemporary mosques in the Arab heartland provide models for rehabbing historic mosques in Hyderabad
city. As Gulf workers return to their home city, their public patronage focuses on the addition of two story
concrete structures to cover mosque courtyards and extend the interior prayer space. These bring Hyderabad in
line with the tastes of the Gulf, the Islamic heartland.
30
Veena Oldenberg, The Making of Colonial Lucknow (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Thomas R.
Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989);
Evenson, The Indian Metropolis: A View Toward the West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
31
Metcalf, An Imperial Vision.
32
For a variety of studies displaying this approach see Metcalf, An Imperial Vision; Llewelyn-Jones, A Fatal
Friendship: The Nawabs, the British, and the City of Lucknow, and Nicholas B. Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of
an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

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resistance to change, historians claim the Princes’ architectural patronage was evidence
either of a desire to emulate their British overlords, or a rejection of the imposition of
the “modern” British system. For the most part, Hyderabad’s Princes — the Nizams —
did not build anything in Hyderabad.33 The Nizams were not the force behind urban
change; even in the twentieth-century, a time when the 7th Nizam is credited as “the
architect of modern Hyderabad,” most of the changes were led from committees of
noble and notable groups in the city in honor of the Nizam.
As Hyderabad has come to be included in the field of colonial era architectural
studies, its complex urban development has been cut down to sites that link it to other
Princely States, primarily in Rajasthan. Thus, despite the fact that lavish, European
style palaces comprise only one small aspect of Asaf Jahi Hyderabad’s architectural
heritage, Hyderabad is represented almost exclusively by these elaborate palaces.34
That Hyderabadi architecture was designed not just by British Raj engineers but by
Italians, Belgians as well as architects and planners in England, and local engineers
trained in the European manner of building is glossed over. And the fact that this
diverse set of architects were responsible for a wide variety of architecture that were
couched in local needs, not propelled by the interests of the local British population is
subsumed by the presentation of glossy photographs of the Victoriana of late
nineteenth-century Hyderabad drawing rooms.
Europeanate building is always described as being brought to South Asia by the
British colonists, promoted in one form or another by the British, or chosen to please or
impress the British.35 Yet Hyderabad’s case shows that European building practices
increased only when the local elites traveled to Europe. Architectural historians mirror
British officials when talking about palaces in Princely States, using arguments that
haven’t really changed in a hundred years. They highlight bad taste—how could the
patrons have put those pieces together in that fashion?36 The earliest European
architectural forms used by Hyderabadis are two styles of European arches found in a
Sufi shrine complex — a carefully constructed site in which European architectural
forms are used to demarcate the sacredness of space. The composite of the different

33
The Nizam’s construction of Hyderabad House in New Delhi, however, plays a part in representing the
princely mirror of the Imperial Vision.
34
See George Michell, The Royal Palaces of India, with photographs by Antonio Martinelli (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1994); Sylvie Raulet, Maharajas' Palaces: European style in imperial India, with photographs by Anne Garde
(New York: Vendome Press, 1997); Mark Bence-Jones, Palaces of The Raj: Magnificence and Misery of the Lord
Sahibs, (London: Allen and Unwin 1974); Prabhakar Bedge Forts and Palaces of India (New Delhi: Sagar
Publications, 1982); Deen Dayal, Princely India: photographs from 1884-1910 (New York: Knopf, 1980); and articles
such as Elizabeth Dickson, “Falaknuma, The Timeless Past at Hyderabad” Architectural Digest vol. 34, 1977, pp.
146-64; S. Sethi, “Palaces of Hyderabad, Monumental Splendour,” Itihas (d) 30 June, 1982, pp. 90-99; as well as
articles on the late 19th century Hyderabad state photographer, Lala Deen Dayal.
35
Anthony King, Colonial Urban Development: culture, social power and environment, (London: Routledge & Paul,
1976), Sten Nilsson, European Architecture in India, 1750-1850 (New York: Taplinger Pub. Co., c1968); Metcalf,
An Imperial Vision; Llewelyn Jones, A fatal friendship: the Nawabs, the British, and the city of Lucknow; Oldenberg, The
Making of Colonial Lucknow; Duncan, James “The Power of Place in Kandy, Sri Lanka 1780-1980,” in John
Agnew and James Duncan, eds., The Power of Place: bringing together geographical and sociological imaginations
(Winchester, Mass.: Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 185-202.
36
G.H.R. Tillotson, The Tradition of Indian Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), describes
Lucknow much as the British officers at the Nawab’s court did. See Llewellyn-Jones, A Fatal Friendship: The
Nawabs, the British, and the City of Lucknow, for examples of British critiques.

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styles had local meaning, and clearly this was a site for which the British were not to be
an audience.
If not focusing on bad taste, authors dwell on the exotic: the palaces represent
Victorian wonders of quaint, traditional, turbaned cultures.37 These pose a very
imperial image against an Indian backdrop, and indeed the Princes of Rajasthan were
faced with a fairly clear distinction between local tradition and foreign import. In
Hyderabad, however, Islamic identity provided a metropolitan alternative for
Hyderabad’s patrons, which they could use to counter British Raj and European
imperial identity. And a mosque designed as a replica of the great mosque of Cordoba
hints at how European identity was imagined as a participatory role for Hyderabad
Muslims, rather than just a derivative one.
Monumental architecture has an urban context that makes it meaningful socially,
politically, and culturally. Yet, the development of the Indian colonial urban form
remains a separate field from the politics of colonial Indian architecture, because the
arguments in favor of sanitation, safety, and access that drove the changes in colonial
urban development were—with the obvious exception of the Imperial capital of New
Delhi — not related to discussions of imperial symbol making.38 India’s colonial cities
are framed by larger context of two typologies of colonial urban form. The colonial
port-fort cities of the subcontinent are linked to a network of other port cities along the
littorals of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea.39 The interior cantonment cities in
India replicate the layout of British colonial cities in east Africa and the construction of
French colonial cities with cordons sanitaires in Southeast Asia and North Africa.40
These city forms express the relations of colonizer and colonized in the way they
managed economic movement between city and hinterland and the ways they organized
urban space. From a bird’s eye view, a snapshot of late nineteenth-century Hyderabad
— with its walled city with “native” urban fabric and its railway access to a grid
ordered cantonment town a few miles to the north — resembles other cantonment cities
in India.41 This construction of a macro-view of the urban form subordinates the
details of a local history; the layers of decisions that altered the urban form to negotiate
local politics are sacrificed in the layout of a system of replicable types.42

37
See again, Fatesinghrao Gaekwad, Maharaja of Baroda, Palaces of India (London: Collins, 1980) Mark Bence-
Jones, Palaces of The Raj: Magnificence and Misery of the Lord Sahibs; Prabhakar Bedge Forts and Palaces of India; Deen
Dayal, Princely India: Photographs from 1884-1910.
38
Robert Irving, Indian Summer: Lutyens, Baker and Imperial Delhi, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). I
am not suggesting that they didn’t become symbols of empire, but in the historical discourse the link was not
made.
39
Frank Broeze, Brides of the Sea: Port Cities of Asia from the 16th to the 20th Century. (Hawaii: University of Hawaii
Press, 1989).
40
Showing the similar issues behind planning and/or similar results in form, see P. Curtin “Medical Knowledge
and Urban Planning in Tropical Africa,” American Historical Review vol. 90, no. 3, 1985; I. Klein, “Urban
Development and Death: Bombay City 1870-1914, Modern Asian Studies 20, no. 3, 1986. pp. 725-54; N. Gupta,
“Military Security and Urban Development: A Case Study of Delhi 1852-1912.” Modern Asian Studies 5, no. 1,
1971, pp. 61-77; Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1991).
41
Shah Manzoor Alam, Hyderabad and Secunderabad: A Study in Urban Geography. (Hyderabad: Osmania University
Press, 1965) provides clear, schematic reconstruction of phases of the city’s growth.
42
Studies that make cities conform to urban studies foci are constructed not only through typologies but also
through methodologies.

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Within these typologies, studies of colonial urban development look at

transformations that co-exist with massive documentation on urban form and planning,
and let representations, primarily written discourse, lead.43 Studies highlight the
repetition of Europeanized planning practices because of the extensive and thematic
written data on the subject. Urban form was at the forefront of nineteenth-century
European consciousness.44 Massive growth of cities in Europe in the 1820s and 1830s
and changes in urban-rural population that took place there made fear of health issues
and political control lead actions of urban planning. London and Paris, with the wide
access streets and open green spaces provided the models for ways of managing the
unruly growth of the nineteenth-century urban form. Governments in many places in
Europe and the Islamic world developed strategies of urban design based on ideas first
tested in London and Paris, but also soon thereafter in Istanbul in the 1860s, and in
Tehran in the later nineteenth-century as well.45 From the perspective of planning,
government officials in Paris, colonial Lucknow, and Istanbul can be seen to have
participated in a similar culture of urban consciousness. Still, while these studies of
cities outside the colonized world like Istanbul serve to incorporate wider geographic
regions of the world into Europeanate consciousness they reinforce the ways Europeans
were constructing separate categories of modern, traditional, Islamic and European.
Because the time-span of urban planning maps a succinct transformation from
traditional, historic fabric to modern, government planned intervention, nineteenth-
century progress appears as a linear trajectory from a totally Islamic experience to a
European-derived imposition. And as the interventions and planning practices in the
colonies are linked to urban changes and urbanisme in Europe, comparisons to
European urban form keep the agency and goals firmly rooted in a European
consciousness.46
Though Hyderabad was not colonized by the British, it came into contact in a
number of ways with European ideas about urban life and the role of the urban form in
producing that life: British Residents offered opinions to the Minister on matters such as
sanitation and Hyderabadi nobles visited the capitals of Europe on grand tours. Despite
the attempts of the British Raj to control categories of tradition and modernity and to
direct the usage of urban space and development, there were a multitude of possibilities
for Hyderabadis to draw on to express their own vision of their modernity, their Islamic
identity, their Europeanate sophistication, and their Indian, British Raj, Islamic, and
Deccani heritage. Looking at the history of architecture in Hyderabad makes it clear
that these separate categories are not as worthwhile as the British might have liked to

43
See Zeyneb Celik, The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1986); Gupta, “Military Security and Urban Development: A Case Study of Delhi 1852-1912”.
44
Paul Hohenberg and Lynn Lees, The Making of Urban Europe 1000-1994 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1995); Andrew Lees and Lynn Lees, eds. The Urbanization of European Society in the 19th Century,
(Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Co., 1976).
45
Celik, Zeynep, The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the 19th Century; J. Scarce, “The Role of
Architecture in the Creation of Teheran,” in Teheran: Capital Bicentenaire, edited by Chahryar Adle and Bernard
Hourcade, (Paris-Teheran: Institut Francais de Recherche en Iran, 1992), pp. 73-94.
46
Wright, Gwendolyn. The Politics of design in French Colonial Urbanism, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1991).

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believe. The ways that patrons combined heritage with innovations and the ways they
managed change show the dynamics of this Deccani city’s life.
As a modern capital of a Muslim dynasty, Hyderabad then provides a site to bring
Islamic architecture into a new set of culture and power circumstances. In so doing, this
thesis engages the discourse that defines modern South Asian architecture as the
province of the colonizer.47 Working outside the dichotomy of colonizer and
colonized, I search for causes of receptivity for new and imported designs. As those
who contributed to the urban form in Hyderabad were Hindu and Muslim, Deccani and
Pathan, British, French, and even American, Hyderabad’s development problematizes
the ethno-religious lines on which creative agency has been catalogued, and therefore,
provides a model for questioning the derivative nature of architectural construction and
urban development here and perhaps more broadly in India’s native states. Hyderabad
also provides a site to examine the invention of tradition and to examine the traditional
as something more complicated than that which is non-European and (therefore) non-
modern. In a local study that looks at interaction of two cultures at a local and
metropolitan level, the pan-Islamic movement of the late nineteenth-century is as
relevant to the Hyderabad experience as the cultural life of Secunderabad, the separately
administered cantonment town, which was nonetheless a part of the city and urban
experience. The two hundred year development of Asaf Jahi Hyderabad, in the hands of
its patricians — economically and politically dependent, but not colonized, and
culturally cosmopolitan but not colonizer--offers an alternative narrative to the
historical discourse on colonial urban development.

Reconstructing Hyderabad: The Politics of Hyderabad’s Heritage and the Question

of Sources

Cities are experienced by inhabitants and explored by visitors as countless visual

details, by habitual routes of daily life and exceptional routes of ritual procession, by
both mundane and special destinations, practical experiences, by landmarks, by
personal spaces and dwellings. The urban form is composed of intermingling layers of
past and present needs and experiences, with historical conflicts and changes expressed
in the fractures and undulations in the built environment. While urban developments
take place at ever increasing speed, large scale, monumental architecture, tends to
weather the tests of time and claims to stand guard over the memory of past
generations.48
The buildings, as heritage, provide communities with the depth of memory; and they
can be made to tell many stories, as changing communities call upon different aspects
of their history.49 But they can also be analyzed as historical data, in form and
ornament, function and ritual, and in accretions or abandonment. Monumental
architecture holds the evidence of complex social, economic, and political processes

47
Nilssen, Sten. European Architecture in India; King Colonial Urban Development: culture, social power and environment;
Metcalf, An Imperial Vision.
48
Monuments can also be the sites of intense conflict, and as in the case of the Babri Masjid, be torn down in
acts of altering the cultural memory and the historical landscape.
49
David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), especially pp.
238-262, and pp. 263-363.

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ranging from the allocation of capital and property, the gathering of craftsmen and a
building workforce, and the collection of long-lasting building materials to the symbolic
frameworks through which patrons defined and materially fashioned their own images.
The architectural record of Hyderabad city’s evolution exists today primarily in its
monuments, and even these are quickly disappearing. As the city transforms from the
early twentieth-century garden capital of a leisured, feudal elite with a population of
150, 000 to the Gulf money rich, high-tech capital that the city is today of 5 million and
counting, old houses are torn down and replaced by modern “RCC” (reinforced cement
concrete) blocks, and slap-dash encroachments take over unprotected monuments.
Land ownership is contended in endless court cases, and the threats of thugs to takeover
monuments--both public and private Nizam period buildings, has left a number of
caretakers psychologically uneasy if not physically scarred.
Hyderabad’s history under the Asaf Jah’s or Nizams is problematic today, and is a
focus of state sponsored, collective amnesia. The Nizam’s state was a repressive feudal
government that came to a bloody and bitter end in 1948, with communal violence and
peasant uprisings against the government: it is a vivid event in the memories of most
Hyderabadis, as partition is in the minds of most Panjabis. The absorption of Hyderabad
into India, and its subsequent status as capital of the state of Andhra Pradesh—defined
by linguistic identity but in fact by ethnic (Andhra) and religious (Hindu) identity as
well—has given power over the past to a generation of Hindu, Andhra politicians who
are generally opposed to commemorating anything to do with the Muslim Nizams and
their Urdu/Persian speaking elite culture. Instead they prefer to focus on the glorious,
medieval Andhra past while ignoring the early modern and modern history of the
city/state under the Asaf Jahs.50
The government presses, for example, have not published materials within the Asaf
Jah collections since about 1953, when there were still some scholars in government
employ who were interested in Nizami history and able to read shikastah Persian, a
“broken” script written without diacritical marks to identify letters. And as no records
were published before 1848 when it was the Nizam’s state, this has left only a small
window for archival data to be published. The government officials who oversee the
archives continue to staff them intentionally with people who cannot speak or read Urdu
or Persian, the languages of Nizam period records, and the problem is getting worse as
archives and libraries decay.
The state government also discourages scholars from using the archives by making
research exceedingly challenging.51 Currently, the archives in Hyderabad are
catalogued by when the documents arrived in the new building, not by subject/record
type or date of record. The lists themselves are in Urdu scrawl, handwritten in pencil by
none too tidy a scribe: they are, in fact, totally illegible to the uninitiated. In addition,

50
On the shelves in the University of Pennsylvania library, Telugu and Urdu books represent the struggles over
Hyderabad’s past and the mutually exclusive audiences they serve. Books published by institutes such as
Bharati Itihasa Sanklana Samiti on history of Hyderabad District, are dated according to Sanskrit Yugabda, such
as 4981-5052 (1879-1950 CE). Such books are in Telugu, while Urdu language books use Hijri dates.
Hyderabad history is written not only in separate languages and scripts but is positioned in separate time-space
axes.
51
Vasant K. Bawa, historian and the founder of the AP State archives makes note of this sad state of affairs in
“Administrative and Political Modernization in The Asaf Jahi State: Hyderabad Under Salar Jung I During
1853-1883, and the Seventh Nizam During 1911-1945”, Islamic Culture, vol. 76, no. 2, 2000, pp. 47-114.

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many of the register lists have been lost, and there is not enough (committed, trained,
well-paid) staff to go through the documents and re-catalogue them. Archive
supervisors cannot afford to replace light bulbs in the stacks so that records cannot be
found, never mind maintained. The city’s libraries, often an historian’s alternative to
the government archives, do not have enough funding to maintain their collections and
ants and mice are a major problem, as is theft and sale of old books. The frustration of
working in this environment has encouraged many scholars to change their topics or to
leave Hyderabad altogether, and this passive aggression will eventually obliterate the
written record of the Nizam past from Hyderabad.52
In the face of this lack of government support and political tension, there are many,
primarily Muslim, Hyderabadis who preserve nostalgic memories of the Nizam past. A
volume such as Hyderabad 400 years (1591-1991) is one such nostalgic endeavor. The
book begins with the city's foundation in 1591 under the Qutb Shahs but notably ends
with the conclusion of Asaf Jahi Hyderabad in 1948: the subsequent decades reaching
to 1991 are unapologetically not part of the 400 year history.53
This and other texts such as Nayeem's Splendour of Hyderabad, and The Power of
Glory —- both of which also terminate with the end of the Asaf Jahi era—render the
historical terrain of Asaf Jahi culture a stable ‘period’, in which the images of the later
Nizams may stand in for the whole of Asaf Jahi urban life.54 The authors present
artifacts and photographs in no particular historical sequence, while biographies of great
political figures are presented in multiple generations of one Asaf Jahi community.55 In
these books, monumental architecture features prominently as a cultural symbol of the
Asaf Jahs, but here it serves as a reflection of period heritage rather than of historical
process.
Given the state of the archives and the effort it takes to reconstruct history from the
architectural data, it is not surprising a few published descriptions of the city of
Hyderabad from the late 19th and early twentieth-century have become the veritable
archives of the city’s past. Dating from the period of the sixth Nizam, Mahbub Ali
Khan’s rule, the two volumes of A Historical and Descriptive Sketch of His Highness
the Nizam's Dominions (1884), and the enormous 14” by 12” Glimpses of the Nizam’s
Dominions (1898) with its more than 600 photographs, is supplemented by the two
volumes of Pictorial Hyderabad (1929/1934) from the era of Osman Ali Khan, the last
Nizam.56 They are accessible, they are published in English and in typeset Urdu, and
they provide concise chapters often with photographs on the city’s prominent

52
Benichou, From Autocracy to Integration : political developments in Hyderabad State, for example of research done on
Hyderabad done only in Delhi.
53
Raza Alikhan, Hyderabad 400 Years 1591-1991, (Hyderabad: Zenith Services 1991.)
54
M.A. Nayeem, The Splendour of Hyderabad: the Last Phase of an Oriental Culture, 1591-1948 A.D. (Hyderabad:
Hyderabad Publishers, 2002); Mallika Akbar, ed., The Power of Glory (Hyderabad: Deccan Books, 1998); Harriet
Ronken Lynton and Mohini Rajan, Days of Beloved (Berekely: University of California Press, 1974), a collection
of folklore on the sixth Nizam, could be categorized as part of this field as well.
55
Shabaz Safrani, ed., Golcondah and Hyderabad (Bombay: Marg, 1992), all and the Siyasat Urdu daily’s ongoing
series on Hyderabad history also conclude with the end of the Asaf Jahi regime.
56
Syed Bilgrami, Historical and Descriptive Sketch of His Highness the Nizam’s Dominions (Bombay, 1883-84); A.
Claude Campbell, Glimpses of the Nizam’s Dominions: being an exhaustive photographic history of the Hyderabad State,
Deccan, India. With nearly 600 superbly reproduced views, with descriptive text prepared from material personally collected by A.
Claude Campbell (Bombay, 1898); Krishnaswamy Mudiraj, Pictorial Hyderabad, vol. I & II (Hyderabad, 1929, 1934)

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architecture.57 These three studies provide enough historical, period “authenticity” for
many casual historians and journalists.
These books, with their images of suburban palaces and public buildings, provided a
guide for my initial exploration of city’s monumental heritage. But what I found, as I
traveled by moped from neighborhood to neighborhood surveying the city, was a far
richer and complex history of architectural heritage. In the old city, and at Muslim sites
like shrines, tombs, and mosques throughout the city, memory of patrons and places
which never appeared in the photographs of published books is cultivated, and
inscriptions and stylistic development provide clues to the changing social importance
of sites. I photographed a great number of monuments, and had an architect work with
me to reconstruct buildings that had been substantially altered — like mosques, which
were covered with concrete facades in the current Gulf architectural style, and to draw
the last remnants of multi-phased palaces, which expressed the changing cultural
affiliations of Hyderabadi patricians in the period of Nizam rule.
In researching a history of a provincial city, there are also reminders that the
provincial, the remote, the extra-imperial, through their unique historical records, often
offer histories that correct the image of conformity so important to empires. I found
that there were issues common in other urban studies that I could not address directly
because of the styles of record keeping in Hyderabad. Economic questions in particular,
often the foundation data for urban studies, are for the most part, generalized inferences
of changing trends of patronage groups since I found little to no data on money spent on
building. Either Hyderabadis did not record in official offices the monies spent on non-
income bearing properties (i.e. non-jāgīr lands), or these records have fallen prey to the
vicissitudes of South Asian archival storage, including mice, red ants, moisture, and
loss.
Many urban studies of Islamic world cities use waqf (Islamic charitable trust)
records very successfully to reconstruct social and political history in cities through
building patronage.58 Waqf records often have detailed information about the founder of
the trust, the building and the boundaries of the property he or she donated, the rental
buildings that supported the upkeep of the trust. Similarly, one may find records of
actions against the waqf managers for failure to upkeep buildings, etc. In 1963, the
government of India requested that all Hyderabadis register their waqfs. Apparently,
many new (so called “false”) waqfs were registered, people claiming that their ancestors
had been holding buildings in trust for generations. Both these and “bone fide” waqfs
are now the sites for intense litigation as control over the limited land in the city is
contested by those who have been living, renting, or squatting on lands associated with
shrines and mosques. Because the litigation is charged with possibility of communal
violence, the documents are kept under the strictest privacy. The staff repeatedly told
me they had no historical records at the waqf office, and my research assistant who is a
lawyer (and muftī) was unable to gain access to them either.

57
Hyderabad Urban Development Authority (1984) also relied heavily on these three texts.
58
Blair, Sheila. “Ilkhanid Architecture and Society: an analysis of the Endowment Deed of the Rab’-i Rashidi,
Iran 22 (1984), pp. 67-90.; Robert McChesney, Waqf in Central Asia: four hundred years in the history of a Muslim
shrine, 1480-1889 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991); Blair, S. The Ilkhanid shrine complex at
Natanz, Iran (Cambridge, Mass.: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, 1986).

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Working with a uniquely Hyderabadi set of materials, then, my intention is to place

the architecture in relation to a range of sources from inscriptions to maps, archival
records, publications, and folklore. There is no site discussed in this thesis that has not
been documented to some degree in print — as the bibliographies for the sites in the
Catalogue of Buildings attached to this thesis (Appendix 1) show. In part, this is the
heritage of the three late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century publications,
discussed above, that catalogued the city. And in part it is because of the dramatic
political and cultural rupture that took place at the end of the Asaf Jahi era which
promotes documentation of architecture as a tool for cultural survival.59
Placing architectural patronage into a diachronic narrative of cultural change
counters both the nostalgia and the amnesia in contemporary Hyderabad by constructing
a tale about how Asaf Jahi rule was inscribed in Hyderabad’s urban form. My task has
been not only to bring the sites of Asaf Jahi patronage together into an analysis that
explains their role as social and political centers, but also to retrieve new sorts of data
with which to conduct the analyses. I returned to the buildings themselves and use
visual analysis as well as historical documentation from non-architectural sources such
as chronicles and archival materials that explain how the buildings were used. In order
to document the histories of the sites, correct mistaken interpretations of the individual
buildings, and to show the relations between patrons and buildings across the city and
over time, each site discussed in the thesis is presented in the Catalogue of Buildings.
There has been no comprehensive study of Asaf Jahi building that presents its
development. Volume II of this dissertation, the Catalogue of Buildings, provides both a
framework for understanding patronage under the Asaf Jahs and serves as the
foundation for the arguments about broader patterns of architectural patronage
presented in the thesis.
With its layers of European style palaces, intricately carved pavilion tombs of noble
families; domed Sufi shrines with sand floors and European crystal chandeliers; grand,
two story, elaborately carved stucco mosques; and Indo-Saracenic public institutions
like hospitals and museums, the distinctness of this urban form is derived from
Hyderabadis interaction with the establishment, growth, and decline of British power in
South Asia. By concentrating on the urban-ness of the sites, I bring the sites together in
a new way, and it is in the inter-relation of the sites that my study locates much of the
meaning of architectural patronage.

Organization of the Thesis

Using architecture as the ordering for the thesis defines a new agenda for beginning
and end points. The history of architectural patronage holds the key to showing cultural
interaction in a more nuanced world than the binary world of colonialism and studies of
colonial architecture would suppose. Each chapter is organized around one trend of
building patronage. The rituals and activities that the particular kinds of buildings were
designed to shelter establish the interests of the patrons in activating collective identities
through specific kinds of focuses. The middle section of each chapter examines how
certain kinds of interventions into patronage served struggles for political power.
Contenders for power played upon particular attributes of the buildings, which
59
Renata Holod, Conservation as Cultural Survival (Geneva: Aga Khan Award for Architecture, 1980).

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reoriented the social group to tie it directly to Asaf Jahi power. I conclude each chapter
with the legacies of patronage at the sites after patrons shifted their finances and tastes
to other kinds of projects. The legacies for many building trends were long, since as the
Asaf Jahi heritage of the city grew, new leaders often remained involved in popular
sites, making subtle shifts to the rituals and patronage of their predecessors. Here we
can see the local history played out behind the scenes, as it were, of larger imperial
concerns.
In chapter 1, I examine the foundation of the Asaf Jahi capital in Hyderabad. I pose
texts that describe architectural patronage in the city with documentation on the new
immigrant society’s focus on military rituals. Posing these two issues of capital and
campaign together, shows how the city was activated as an Asaf Jahi political center
through the focus on long distance campaigns, which set up the contours of the Asaf
Jahi capital. The conclusion of the Subsidiary Alliance at the end of the eighteenth-
century between the Nizam and the British East India Company was a major turning
point as it took the power of the military away from the Nizam and gave it to the East
India Company. It was a blow to very the way that the immigrant Asaf Jahi society had
defined itself, and the previously integrated system of political authority that had
unified domestic and diplomatic power through military culture was bifurcated. This
political alliance required the city be tuned to a new set of culture-power circumstances.
Chapter 2 looks at how a completely new concept of shared political power was
negotiated diplomatically through audiences at the palaces of the Nizam, his Minister,
and the British Resident. In this tense era in which the Asaf Jahi dynasty was perceived
as likely to be subsumed into an expanding East India Company, patronage acts of
neglect and abandonment of palaces were as strategic as acts of construction. The
Asafia chronicles track both audiences and processions, and I suggest that together
these provided the Asaf Jahs with potent rituals to recalibrate the symbolism of local
political sites by framing the sites within different political geographies.
In chapter 3, I examine a focus on religious institutions, including mosques,
Hindu temples, and Shia ‘ashurkhanas, constructed and rehabilitated by a diverse set of
patrons between 1803-1840. Through these institutions, the patrons highlighted their
identities in religious imagined communities. Religious commemorations existed quite
comfortably apart from the royal center, and the Asaf Jahs ruled through courtiers and
over subjects who were members of the Sunni, Shia, and Hindu communities. Again
balancing patronage against royal chronicle, I consider the rise in attention to religious
sites and rituals in relation to the chronicles of darbārs and descriptions of royal parades
to show how the calendars of prayer and festival were joined to rituals of political
authority.
Between 1840-1880, seven new Sufi shrines were built in Hyderabad. In chapter 4, I
link these shrines to the patronage of personal tombs to explore how tombs linked
political and spiritual charismatic individuals to Hyderabad’s urban identity. In an era
when the court was under significant strains from a new bureaucratized administration I
analyze patrons’ focus on specific buildings within shrine complexes to suggest that
saints’ charisma provided potent spaces for claims for the charisma of the Asaf Jahi
courtiers in the midst of their political decline.
The focus of patrons’ finances between 1875-1905 was on the construction of grand
palaces on the suburban hilltops outside the walled city. Chapter 5 looks at palaces as

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material confirmations of new mobility and suggests that they served Hyderabad’s elite
as claims to membership in an internationalized aristocratic community. In an era in
which the British Raj depended on aristocratic title and honor to define hierarchical
relationships of subordination, the aristocratic symbols of heritage and the rituals of
hospitality that took place in Hyderabad’s palaces provided ways of negotiating
sovereignty and subordination by harnessing the mobility of Hyderabadi hosts and their
aristocratic guests.
The final chapter, Chapter 6, explores the patronage of government and
educational institutions in the twentieth-century. The construction of landmarks to
house existing, anonymous ministries shaped urban development under the last Nizam.
As symbols of progressive government in the eyes of British India and the people of
Hyderabad, I analyze how the seventh Nizam and his government attempted to use
architecture’s capacity to embody collective groups to maintain a traditional patrimonial
center amidst the rise of representational politics.
Narrating a history of a modern city’s urban development over two hundred years
may seem an unwieldy project. However, unlike many of its contemporaries, Asaf Jahi
Hyderabad, in its predominance of data such as monumental buildings, non-schematic
maps, Sufi tazkirahs, and Persian and Arabic inscriptions, resembles in its historical
record more a medieval or early modern site than a conventional modern city with its
bureaucratic infinity of records and measured city surveys. Though it lacks many of the
standard nineteenth-century urban history sources, documents like records, published
books, diaries, and photographs provide welcome support to other more fragmentary
data.
This study of the construction of an Indo-Islamic capital in the age of colonialism is
a gathering of a rich and unique archive of provincial urban history. It includes written
source materials in five languages: English, Urdu, Persian, French, and Arabic. It uses
maps, both the pictographic mural and the cadastral survey. It depends heavily on
archeological data based on my own surveys of the heritage left in the contemporary
city, as well as on architecture long ago demolished, which was documented in
historical photographs and drawings. It requires the analytical deconstruction of
historic buildings into sections, elevations, and plans, and the reconstruction of
successive phases in building developments through series of drawings. And it has
been shaped by the memories and folklore, as well as suggestions that came from
interviews with caretakers of historic buildings at government, religious, and family
owned sites.

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Alison Mackenzie Shah, copyright 2005

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