A city that I visited during my annual vacation, a city that I still visit, a city with which I have several ties, Hyderabad and a part of its history is the subject of Afsar Mohammed’s book, Remaking History.

Afsar Mohammad notes in the preface to the book how L. K. Advani’s declaration of 17th September as Telangana Liberation Day in the year 1998 made him begin to question and ponder questions about Muslims in Hyderabad. While that day marked the integration of Hyderabad into the Indian Union in 1948, it was also a day of violence and bloodshed, of Operation Polo – “Many writings and oral accounts from Hyderabad and Telangana emphasise that the 1948 Police Action was nothing but an extension of the Partition.” His earlier work, The Festival of Pirs, dealt with the nature of Muslim rituals and festivals in South Asia. It was while working on that book that Afsar Mohammad came into contact with several people who were at the receiving end of Operation Polo. Remaking History takes up issues of the police action, religion and politics in Hyderabad. The year of India’s independence is also the year of the partition, and as the two new countries begin to negotiate power and authority, the princely state of Hyderabad and its people are drawn into it too.

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Remaking History is based on the oral accounts of those who witnessed the Police Action, it also draws on written accounts and historical documents to reveal the history of Hyderabad, the Telangana armed struggle, and most importantly, the cultural and political discourses that characterise Hyderabad. The book seeks to clear up myths surrounding the history of the princely state of Hyderabad. There have been works by several historians who have written about the integration of the princely state of Hyderabad into India and the violence that people faced. Remaking History, while it adds to the work on the subject, is different in that Afsar uses literature, oral narratives, and interviews as well. “The oral accounts in this book document the deeply expressed concerns of many Hyderabadis, concerns that their story even now remains silenced by the overemphasis on the Telangana rebellion, Telugu nationalism of the same period, and the politics of the nation-state.”

Afsar’s focus in the book is the common person: “In Karim Nagar, I met 78-year-old Abdul Quddus Saheb, who began our conversation by talking about the songs of his youth during Muharram. . . . After a while, he surprisingly took a detour just to talk about the Police Action of 1948.” Parts of the interview figure in the book, along with the songs and his narratives. The book begins by questioning the narratives of nationalism, the Telangana armed rebellion that took place between 1946 and 1951, and the formation of Andhra Pradesh, the first state to be formed on the basis of language. These traditional works, he notes, ignore the violence of the Police Action and the fate of the common people. He also goes on to argue how the histories of Hyderabad and Telangana reveal the way in which Hindus and Muslims reacted and worked their way out of the crisis to bring in debates of urbanisation, reform and belonging. A model that becomes even more pertinent in the present time.

Afsar is also a poet and author, and it is his expertise in these genres that makes it possible for him to bring in several languages and literary and oral traditions into the work, apart from the history. The last chapter, “For the Love of Urdu”, discusses progressive Urdu and Telugu literature. Urdu was not associated with just Muslims, and the example of the 90-year-old Jaini Mallaya Gupta, whom Afsar met and spoke, is a case in point. Gupta had been a regular reader of the Urdu daily newspaper, Siāsat— for about seventy years. There were several Muslim writers who were writing in Telugu too: “The publication of Urdu materials by various Telugu presses and the Telugu poetry gatherings modelled on the Urdu paradigm reflect a continuum of the Urdu literary culture in Telangana, thus providing us with a transition to the discussion of the role of Urdu and the Muslim question in 1940s Telangana.” Afsar also chronicles the works of less discussed authors like Jeelani Bano, whose novel, Aiwan-e-Ghazal, narrates the story of four women belonging to an upper-class family and speaks of the ideas of liberalism and revolution as well.

Remaking India is a fascinating work that draws out several strands of the history of Hyderabad and the people whose narratives form an important aspect of its history. Working with a plethora of materials and resources, the personal and the political come together in the remaking of this history.

The reviewer is associate professor, department of English, Brahmananda Keshab Chandra College

Remaking History: 1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad

By Afsar Mohammad

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2023

320 pages, Rs 1,295/-