Indo-Muslim Culture in Hyderabad: Karen Leonard

indo-muslim culture in hyderabad 165 INDO-MUSlim CulTurE IN HydErabad: Old CITY NEighbOrhOODS IN THE 19TH CENTury Karen Leonard Hyderabad city’s culture was Indo-Muslim or Mughlai, terms that need definition here I use Indo-Muslim in preference to Islamic, Indo-Persian, Persianate, or Islamicate I prefer Indo-Muslim to the other four commonly-used alternatives because, first, Muslim rather than Islamic emphasizes a civilizational and not a religious culture (Islamicate has the same meaning but probably not to the general reader) Certainly Hyderabad was not an Islamic state: the Nizams never tried to impose Islamic law or to convert people Second, Indo- Muslim puts the emphasis on the Indian location, although undeni- ably the Bahmani sultanate in the Deccan from the mid-fourteenth century, its five successor Deccani sultanates (Bijapuri, Golconda, Bidar, Berar, and Ahmednagar) from the early sixteenth century, and the Nizams, starting as Mughal governors after the conquests of Bijapuri and Golconda by the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb in 1686 and 1687, modeled their court culture on that of Persia I use the term Mughlai because, in Hyderabad, it designates the administration developed from the time of the first Nizam, Mughal governor of the Deccan in the early eighteenth century, and distinguishes it from the modernizing or Diwani administration initiated by the Diwan Salar Jung (1853-83) and based in the new city of Hyderabad north of the Musi River 1 Only in the 1880s did the state’s official language switch from Persian to Urdu (not to English, as in British India from the 1830s) I argue here that not only the court and administrative culture but the urban culture as well was Indo-Muslim or Mughlai, at the neigh- borhood and even the household level All who lived in the city, espe- cially in the neighborhoods of the old walled city, participated in that 1 See Karen Leonard, “Hyderabad: The Mulki—non-Mulki Conflict,” in ed Robin Jeffrey, People, Princes and Paramount Power (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978), 65-106 166 karen leonard dominant public culture, regardless of their religious affiliations and private religious observances I do not take these Indo-Muslim practices as evidence of a “cultural synthesis” 2 or “syncretism” or “hybridity ”3 Rather, they are evidence of a successful plural society with an elite or ruling culture that powerfully shaped the lives of people throughout the city One can go further and suggest that Indo- Muslim cultural practices in Hyderabad offer instances of translation, as proposed by work on linguistic but also, arguably, on societal changes Anthropologists have seen “translation” as part of their dis- ciplinary enterprise as they try to explain contemporary cultures to each other;4 here I am discussing translations across time I would argue that many contemporary citizens of India have lost the ability to read the cultural worlds of the past, the Indo-Muslim cultural worlds that were powerful in South Asia in previous centuries Work by Gayatri Spivak, Tony Stewart, and Finbarr Flood effectively challenges current notions of bounded and incompatible “Hindu” and “Muslim” worlds in South Asia 5 The Hyderabad Kayasths, for example, members of a high Hindu “writing” or administrative caste originally from northern and west- ern India, continued their allegiance to Indo-Muslim culture well into the twentieth century, though Kayasths in North India under British imperial rule were changing their allegiance to British Indian English- 2 I argued before against the idea of a “Deccani synthesis:” “The Deccani Synthe- sis in Old Hyderabad: An Historiographic Essay,” Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society (October, 1973, Karachi), 205-218 Here I recognize how powerfully the ruling culture actually pervaded the lives of ordinary urban residents 3 Tony K Stewart, “In Search of Equivalence: Conceiving Muslim-Hindu Encounter Through Translation Theory,”History of Religions 40:3 (Feb , 2001), 260- 87 argues powerfully against applying academic models of hybridity and syncretism to encounters between “Hindus” and “Muslims,” models assuming the production of things new and different from either “original part,” things usually thought unstable and inferior to the highly idealized and bounded “originals ” 4 Gisli Palsson, ed , Beyond Boundaries: Understanding, Translation and Anthro- pological Discourse (Berg: Oxford, 1993 Palsson suggests that “cultural dyslexia” describes the inability to read the alien, cultural worlds of other people” when ethno- graphic and transnational political “translations” are attempted in the contemporary world: Palsson, Beyond Boundaries, 23-24 Ulf Hannerz discusses mediation across cultures, likening cultures to languages: “Mediations in the Global Ecumene,” in the same volume 5 Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, “Translating into English,” in Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, edited by Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood (Princ- eton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), 93-110; Stewart, “In Search of Equivalence;” Finbarr B Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medi- eval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009) .

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