3 hours Ago By Mallik Thatipalli
A city with a Nizami hangover, a burgeoning tech and pharma hub, and the go-to place for India’s best biryani—Hyderabad is all this and more. Dinesh C Sharma’s Beyond Biryani: The Making of a Globalised Hyderabad chronicles the city’s modern history, and its journey towards becoming a global industrial powerhouse. The author notes that this book is an “attempt to capture the remarkable story of the rapid transformation of Hyderabad from what was, at best, a proto-colonial city in a quasi-Mughal princely state until the 1940s, to a modern and vibrant metropolis”, and he mostly succeeds in creating a timeline of how the city survived floods, infrastructural challenges, and state bifurcations to remain a shining jewel of the south.
With a clear chronology and excellent analysis of how the city’s many institutions helped the country to forge new paths in many sectors—from science to defence and manufacturing. That the author himself is a Hyderabadi helps. The home-grown setting Sharma is exposed to, helps him place local stories in a global context.
No mention of the city is complete without a mention of its erstwhile rulers, the Nizams, whose contribution to Hyderabad still looms large. And Sharma is cognisant of that. The narrative starts with the story of the Asaf Jahs and their role in shaping the infrastructure of the city, many of which remain in use even today.
The tale of modern Hyderabad beings with the 1908 flooding of the River Musi, following which the then Nizam asked the legendary Vishvesvaraya to envision a new city. From then, new areas were laid out with planned construction of civic amenities, and the city we now know finds its roots in the decades after the floods. Few outside the city know of the stupendous breadth of the many organisations that the city is home to: from the Regional Research Laboratory (RRL) to the pioneering Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) and the Electronics Corporation of India Limited (ECIL).
In a concise way, Sharma traces the history of these hallowed places, giving their stories a fresh lease of life among younger audiences. Sharma acknowledges the figurative divide between the trifecta that make up Hyderabad—the old city, the cosmopolitan Secunderabad (home to the British before Independence), and the snazzy Hi-tech city. The book is a reminder that a city is continuously made and unmade by its inhabitants.
From the Nizams, the Chief Ministers, the billionaires, and the software professionals to the dreamers, poets, lakes, and rocks, it has been everybody’s city and needs to remain so..
