Melting handi

Understanding Hyderabad through its varied communities ahead of the assembly polls in December

- RAHUL DEVULAPALLI

On the southern edge of the British embassy in Tehran lies the Tehran War Cemetery, with remnants of a time and lives gone by. Row after row of tombstones commemorate the valour of 500 plus soldiers, including Indians, who fought the two World Wars. One of them bears an inscription: ‘And all our calm is in that balm; not lost but gone before.’ The words, borrowed from English writer Caroline Elizabeth Norton’s poem, aptly describe Feroze Bapooji Chenai, a doctor from the erstwhile Hyderabad state. According to the records of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, 30-year-old Chenai died in 1919 while serving in the Indian Medical Service.

Chenai has another tombstone in Isfahan in central Iran, where generations of a family remember him for trying to save a kin from typhoid. It is said that Hyderabad’s design was inspired by Isfahan. During Mohammed Quli Qutb Shah’s reign (15801612), Hyderabad was built as a new city to decongest Golkonda and replace it as the capital. From a mere 7.7 sq km, it grew into a metropolis of 875 sq km, what is today Greater Hyderabad. Between the monumental Charminar in the old city and the futuristic HITEC City in the west, more than 10 million people live here. And, it is through these people, from various ethnicities and nationalities, that you understand the city’s history and diversity—its cosmopolitanism evident in its 24 assembly constituencies, which will go to polls in December.