Rachna Singh, Editor, The Wise Owl talks to Daneesh Majid about his book 'The Hyderabadis', shortlisted for The Wise Owl Literary Awards 2026.

Rachna Singh, Editor, The Wise Owl talks to Daneesh Majid, a Hyderabad-based writer who concentrates on South Asian culture, security and Urdu literature. He has worked for Siasat.com, the online English edition of the prominent Urdu daily. His writing has been featured in numerous South Asian media outlets, such as Mint Lounge, The Hindu Business Line, Express Tribune, The New Indian Express, The Wire, The News Minute, ThePrint, Madras Courier, DailyO, The Nation (Pakistan) and Dhaka Tribune. He is an alumnus of Franklin and Marshall College, Pennsylvania, and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Majid’s book, The Hyderabadis, has been shortlisted for The Wise owl Literary awards 2026 in the non-Fiction category.

Congratulations for being shortlisted for The Wise Owl Literary awards 2026. Thank you for taking time out to talk with The Wise Owl.

RS: Much has been written about Hyderabad through dates, decrees, and political milestones. In The Hyderabadis, you deliberately shift the lens to lived experience—memories, voices, and inheritances of loss and resilience. Was there a particular moment or story that convinced you that this people’s history urgently needed to be told?
 

DM: I realized that urgent necessity of telling this people’s history when doing a video interview for Siasat.com of a former Gulf expatriate, Arshad Pirzada. His son, Syed Mohammed, is known journalist in the city for The Hindu. The then Chief Editor, Mir Ayoob Ali Khan, whom I wrote about in Chapter 5, couldn’t have been more unhappy with the interview’s first cut. Because Pirzada’s lineage was one of privilege in that he came from a priestly Sufi lineage from his maternal side while his father’s side had been embedded in the Asaf Jahi bureaucratic establishment. Come 1948, due to Police Action (also referred to as “Operation Polo”), the royal and political patronage that had sustained them disappeared overnight. As a result, for Muslims, government jobs and landed income no longer came easy. Hence, they had to adjust to a new reality as a numerical minority as opposed to a ruling one. Politically and economically, they were sidelined. But then came an opportunity for an economic revival with the 70s Gulf oil boom. That is when a lot of Hyderabadi Muslims set sail for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In Pirzada’s case, he started out as an employee doing menial work for an auto parts company in Riyadh and went on to become a high level manager there. Gulf money enabled him to build a house in what is today one of the city’s upscale localities, put his kids through school, and also become a benefactor to his community after returning to Hyderabad from the Kingdom. Khan expressed disappointment as to why Pirzada only stressed his accomplishments but not the struggles both in Hyderabad and Saudi Arabia. I was also pulled up for not extracting that trajectory out of him, especially since my family had a similar post-1948 journey. The following words uttered by Khan then crystallised something I had been thinking about for some time. “After all Police Action massacres that rendered us, we were left to fend for ourselves. And now the powers that be today want to inflict something similar on us again and undo all the progress we made in becoming whole again. Hence, we need to tell these fall and rise stories.”

I understood then that not only are oral histories of Police Action almost non-existent. But the comeback stories of Hyderabadi Muslims alongside the more micro-histories of the Telangana statehood have been criminally under chronicled. Plus, the happenings of 1948-1951 reverberated heavily in future landmark events of the city: the linguistic division of Hyderabad state that lead to the formation of Andhra Pradesh, the first push for statehood in Telangana in 1969, the subsequent phases of the Telangana movement during the 2000s, the formation of the state in 2014, and the emergence of a more majoritarian political order at the national level.

RS: Your narrative spans seismic transitions—from annexation and linguistic reorganisation to the long struggle for Telangana. How did you negotiate the tension between continuity and rupture in Hyderabad’s identity, especially when different communities remember the same events in profoundly different ways?

DM: The continuities and ruptures were due to the many linguistic, religious and class-based divides that existed—both before and after 1948. For example, the 1952 Mulki agitation, through which Telanganites protested the overrepresentation of Telugus from Madras Presidency in government jobs, is seen as the earliest prelude to the Telangana-Andhra schism.

One story an acquaintance told me about his father, a participant in the anti-Nizam and eventually anti-Indian government armed rebellion within the Telangana Telugu cadre, states otherwise. When hiding out the among the Andhra Telugu cadres in Bapatla, Madras Presidency, during the late 40s, some Andhraites were surprised at his ability to communicate in Telugu while others just mocked the Telangana dialect outright. Interestingly enough, the Andhra Jana Sangham, which helped foment the uprising brought Telugu populations from Madras Presidency and Telangana together on the basis of language.

The fact that he also spoke of how Andhraites had a dominating streak when it came to decision-making could be considered an early harbinger of the statehood struggle. So instead of viewing those fault lines via post-colonial contemporary lenses, getting a hold of and citing primary secondary sources that spoke of those ruptures pre-independence helped navigate those present-day discords.  

 

RS: Oral histories, Urdu and English literature, and personal memory form the spine of this book. In a region where history has often been politicised or silenced, what ethical responsibilities did you feel while curating these voices—and were there stories that resisted easy telling?

DM: The biggest ethical responsibility I had was to not solely look at the 1948 Police Action, the Telangana Armed Rebellion, and all that followed through the eyes of the strata of those who felt that Asaf Jahi Hyderabad resembled a utopian paradise. Usually, those who belong to the Muslim as well as Hindu aristocracy and those who were in some way associated with the feudal order tend to see the princely era as such. Hyderabad’s accession has either been seen as an “invasion by a hostile Indian government” or a “liberation of the ruled Hindu from the ruler Muslim” rather than a tragically violent, but necessary integration into the Indian union. The latter narrative has gain traction in the past 7-8 years. This has been possible due to cinema, social media reels, and WhatsApp forwards backed by a robust ecosystem. With history always having been written by those mostly in power, many political entities are continuing that practice of (re)writing history. Besides WhatsApp groups and social media, state/municipal/national election campaign rhetoric has only amplified the this us-versus- them prism, especially with the Nizam and the Razakars being casted as the sole aggressors of Hindus. The Nizam had his flaws and there are some gristly realities (such the feudal system that oppressed Hindus as well as Muslims in the princely state’s Telangana districts and the child labour in Hyderabad city’s button factories) that some Hyderabadis refuse to acknowledge.

However, at the same time, I came across many second-hand stories form Kayasthas, the learned Hindu caste who had a sizeable presence within the academic, bureaucratic, and literary landscape of the Asaf Jahi dominions, and Telangana Hindus about Osman Ali Khan’s personal generosity and patronage of temples. Any chronicler, especially one who looks at the past through people’s histories, will find that if they fulfil this ethical responsibility of nuance, there is no easy way to (re)tell accounts of bygone times. And by easy, I mean through the binaries of ruled Hindu vs. ruler Muslim, or Andhra vs. Telangana. This is why people-centric retellings histories help address gaps that more state or“mainstream” narratives leave out.

RS: Hyderabad has frequently been imagined either through nostalgia for a lost princely past or through the language of modern development. How does The Hyderabadis complicate these binaries, and what does it reveal about adaptation, belonging, and survival in a rapidly changing India?

DM: You are correct in pointing out another binary along with the ones I mentioned. And that is a misplaced, prolonged nostalgia vs. excessively looking to the future, sometimes to a point where the past is vulnerable to malicious revisionism. In bringing to light those voices of memories of ordinary Hyderabadis of various ages who either directly experienced and/or were touched by episodes penned by powerful statesmen, I hope that I have done my part in complicating this dichotomous thinking. Because cities are more than just dates or forgotten events. They are also the lived experiences of those who have shaped them. As for what all this reveals that stories about adaptation, belonging and survival in a rapidly changing India, it shows that such stories about what transpired around independence-cum- partition aren’t limited to Punjab, Bengal, Sindh, and North India. A lot of evocative stories, movies, and TV shows beautifully portray the Punjabi “Partition Refugee Family” that had lost everything and experienced upheaval due to the violence in what became a part of Pakistan. Like those refugees, Hyderabad’s Muslims too lost a lot and through their hard work—albeit more so from their work in the Gulf than in India—did they also become whole again.

However, as was evident in UPenn academic Afsar Mohammad’s book Remaking History: 1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad, of there are plenty of stories of Deccani Muslims reimagining their place in a post-independent India as a numerical minority—both in Urdu and Telugu! The late Urdu short-story writer and Professor Baig Ehsas’ stories showed how money from the Gulf not only helped certain Hyderabadi Muslims find their feet economically, but also gave way to social problems that Saudi Riyals/Qatari Riyals/Emirati Dinars brought about. That too, after no longer having government jobs that and landed income that came to them easily.

RS: This is an ambitious, almost unprecedented work in scale for a modern history of Hyderabad. After immersing yourself so deeply in its collective memory, how has the city changed for you personally—and what conversations do you hope this book will now make possible, both within Hyderabad and beyond it?

DM: This city is even more of a palimpsest to me now than it was before. From the Qutub Shahi founders to present-day Chief Minister Revanth Reddy and every person in between who has been at the helm of power, has left their imprint on the city, over the one from the previous regime. Yet vestiges—both good and bad—of various eras have always remained in some form or the other. And this wasn’t solely due to certain powerful statesmen, that those fragments from bygone times remained. For instance, I mentioned the Gulf money and the socio-economic issues that arose as a result of the remittances. While some of that had been invested into ensuring Muslims would have a presence in the city’s, state’s, and country’s educational institutions and real estate landscape, it also eventually brought back some of the more extravagant excesses of the erstwhile aristocratic strata seen during Nizam-rule. These include over-consumption of rich yet also not always healthy Deccani cuisine, spending on gaudy traditional outfits like shervanis that will only worn be once, etc. And most of this happens at weddings that start at 11 pm and go on well into the 3 or 4 am. The feudal attitude of believing that time is static is very much alive and it isn’t going to disappear anytime soon.
 

Regarding the conversations that will be possible, the past seven to eight years, has seen the Police Action and Telangana Rebellion finding its place in discourse about independence- cum-partition. Although not to the extent of the Bengal/Punjab/Sindh/North India partition violence, there has been an emergence of filmmakers, heritage enthusiasts, historians, academics, and even authors like Zeenath Khan (who wrote the excellent novel The Sirens of September) that have shed light upon Operation Polo and the Telangana Armed Struggle. And from these works emerge lesser known facts pertaining to the tumultuous period of the Deccan that was 1948-1951. Some of them are about how Hindus of Princely Hyderabad played a role in oppressing their religious co-brethren and how even many Muslims took to the onset of leftism against a feudal dispensation spearheaded by their “own.” By bringing these realities out into the open, only then can chroniclers stem this this tide of viewing history through a communally tinged lens. While not specifically centered around the merger of Hyderabad, Dinesh C. Sharma’s Beyond Biryani: The Making of a Globalised Hyderabad , showed how the Nizams nurtured a scientific temperament that in some ways laid the groundwork for the city’s present-day identity as a technology hub.

 

RS: Beyond its historical ambition, The Hyderabadis is also a carefully shaped narrative. How did you approach questions of craft—deciding structure, voice, and pacing—when weaving archival research, oral testimony, and personal memory into a story that reads not just as history, but as lived, breathing experience?

DM: When it came to blending research into a smooth-flowing narrative, my editor Vikram Shah’s inputs were helpful. Having been an editor at Mint—Lounge and Fifty-Two, the now unfortunately defunct online long-form website that published fantastic long-form essays, he helped shape the narrative. But the most important ingredient here was world-building because outlining trajectories through oral histories are simply not enough. It is imperative that any people’s history also recreate the worlds in which these trajectories played out. This is a process that doesn’t always yield quick, substantial results with just one draft of the manuscript or having written some features that fed into the book.

Literature, both academic or the more accessible narrative style prose, helped me recreate the eras my subjects lived through. Sometimes, the emotional truths of people via oral histories are viewed as anathema to more “mainstream” literature. This more mainstream literature can consist of school textbook histories or even non-fiction literature available at bookstores. The ability to find and cite such material that not only pulls readers into the worlds of my subjects, but also corroborates their experiences, is central to preserving that truth.

RS: What Next?

DM: I am back to more historical/cultural reportage about Hyderabad. A long-form piece about Hyderabad’s Chaoosh community which is of Yemeni ancestry will soon be published. But with respect to book length projects, I’ve been working on an Urdu to English translation of forgotten yet very pivotal figure of Jammu and Kashmir. Though not from my side, that project has hit a bit of a snag. But I’m sure that whatever happens, will happen for the best.

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Thank you so much Daneesh, for taking time out to speak with The Wise Owl. We wish you the best in all your literary and creative endeavours.