Hyderabad: It is a very easy thing to say or to write: India won independence from the British and became free on August 15, 1947. But it takes only a scratch of the surface for the heaviness of that year to be felt, and the deeper one goes into the subject, the heavier it gets. Hyderabad was no exception. In fact, it would go on to become one of the biggest headaches for the Indian government for an entire year.
The erstwhile princely state of Hyderabad was ruled by the last Nizam, Osman Ali Khan (1911-48), one of a handful among the 560-odd princes who chose to stay independent. His bid was not necessarily surprising. The Nizams had been appointed subedars of the Deccan by the Mughal empire in 1724, at a time when Mughal authority over the subcontinent was beginning to fray.
The dynasty lasted 224 years, thanks in no small part to shrewdly aligning with the British by signing the Treaty of Subsidiary Alliance in 1798, an arrangement under which they largely continued to run the state on their own. Like most other princely states, Hyderabad came formally under the British Crown after 1857 and became part of the larger empire.
The Hyderabad state
Osman Ali Khan’s bid to stay independent was complicated by the sheer size of what he ruled. Hyderabad was among the largest states in India, covering over 82,000 square miles, spread across what is today Telangana and parts of Maharashtra and Karnataka. It was multi-lingual, with Urdu as its official language, and it functioned entirely on the jagirdari system, under which state-appointed landlords ran the countryside and paid the Nizam’s government a tax in return.
The jagirdars were not, technically, landowners. In practice, they lived as local rulers, forcing the peasantry into what amounted to slave labour. This is something that went entirely missing from our textbooks.
In 1947, as the country shook off the British, the peasants, backed by the Communist Party of India, rose in armed revolt and seized back their land from the jagirdars. Khammam, Warangal and Nalgonda were at the centre of it.
The uprising also brought to the fore some of the most powerful communist leaders Telangana has produced: Ravi Narayan Reddy, Makhdoom Mohiuddin, Jawad Razvi, Ch Rajeshwar Rao and P Sundarayya.
Syed El-Edroos, the last commander of the Hyderabad State Army, wrote in his memoir that the CPI’s intelligence network was stronger than the state’s own.
Matters were complicated further by the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM), formed around 1927, which by then had come under the leadership of Qasim Razvi. Razvi raised the Razakars, a paramilitary force that went about terrorising the local populace. The Razakars, and the threat of a communist takeover, are believed to be the two factors that pushed the Indian government to send in the army in September 1948 to annex the state.
The episode ended in bloodshed. Thousands of Muslims were massacred in the days that followed, according to the Sunderlal Committee report.
What was Osman Ali Khan thinking?
One thing that has always made me curious about the events of 1947-48 is what the last Nizam himself made of it all. Beyond a single speech after the annexation, there is virtually nothing that lets us into his train of thought. The government of India clearly did not consider him a villain. He was made Raj Pramukh, or Governor, and held the position until 1956.
Yet, almost eight decades later, we still do not know what drove the decisions he took. What we have is second-hand: the memoirs and accounts of others. Some say the MIM and Razvi were politically in control by then. Some say the Nizam was left with no real choice. Others ask why he did not simply take the easy route and accede in 1947 itself.
Whatever the case, Osman Ali Khan built much of modern Hyderabad during his reign – Osmania University, the Unani Hospital, Osmania Hospital and the Telangana High Court among them – and yet his decision to hold out in 1947 set off a chain of events that will haunt his legacy forever.
And because successive governments chose to keep the public away from learning about the annexation, the right-wing in India has been able to latch on to it and twist the narrative, recasting the Nizam as an evil Muslim ruler.August is now a routine affair of Independence Day celebrations. September in Telangana and Hyderabad has become something else, a yearly tug of war over narratives.
I can only wonder how things might have turned out had Osman Ali Khan made the wise decision to accede, instead of dragging it out until it ended in bloodshed.
