The Hyderabadis: From 1947 to the Present Day

by Daneesh Majid

From the annexation of the princely state of Hyderabad in September 1948 to the formation of Andhra Pradesh in 1956 and the eventual creation of Telangana in 2014--these broad brushstrokes of Hyderabad's history are well-documented. What has long been missing, however, is the perspective of the people, the different communities who lived through these upheavals--the communal violence of Independence and Partition, the push for a linguistic re-imagination of the state and its bifurcation, the long-drawn-out struggle for statehood--and those who were forced to adapt to a rapidly changing India.

For the first time, Daneesh Majid brings their stories to light. Drawing from generational interviews, oral histories, literature in Urdu and English and his own personal experiences, he drafts a modern history of Hyderabad. A work of this scale and size has never been attempted before and The Hyderabadis promises to open new doors to the former kingdom's past and future.

321 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 16, 2025

Reviews

[Rajesh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Daneesh Majid's "The Hyderabadis" is a masterful tapestry that weaves together seven decades of Hyderabadi life with the delicate precision of a Bidri craftsman. This is not merely a book about a city I find that it is an intimate portrait of its soul, captured through the lives, language, and little moments that define what it truly means to be Hyderabadi.
What sets this work apart is Majid's remarkable ability to trace the evolution of Hyderabad from the tumultuous days of 1948—when the Nizam's state merged with the Indian Union—to the present-day tech hub, without losing sight of the human stories that animate this transformation. The author doesn't just document history; he captures the feeling of each era through meticulously observed details that only someone deeply embedded in Hyderabadi culture could notice. Majid's depiction of his grandfather's capture by the Indian army and how he survived.
Majid's genius lies in the nuances. He notices how the sound of the azaan has remained constant even as the neighbourhoods around mosques have transformed. He captures the subtle shift in how families gather—from sprawling joint family gatherings in Purani Haveli-style homes to nuclear families meeting over biryani at Paradise.
The book beautifully chronicles the small cultural touchstones: the unspoken rules of chai etiquette at Irani cafés, and the peculiar pride in claiming one's neighbourhood in Hyderabad.
Majid masterfully depicts the delicate dance between tradition and modernity—old families sending their daughters to engineering colleges while ensuring they know how to make the perfect khatti dal; young professionals code-switching effortlessly between Dakhini, Urdu, Telugu, and English within a single conversation; the grandmother's insistence on biryani from Pista House while the grandchildren order from Swiggy.
The prose itself is a character in this book. Majid writes with a linguistic richness that mirrors the city's own multilingual soul. His sentences flow with the unhurried grace of Hyderabadi conversation—never rushing, always savouring each word. He seamlessly incorporates Dakhini phrases and Urdu expressions without alienating non-native speakers, instead making the language accessible and inviting.
There's a particular beauty in how Majid captures Dakhni dialogue—not as a caricature or comedy (as is so often done), but with respect and authenticity. The characters from both the muslim and Kayasts speak in rhythms that are immediately recognizable to anyone who has lived in Hyderabad, yet the context makes meaning clear for all readers. What makes The Hyderabadis truly special is Majid's eye for the telling detail while describing his subjects.
For Hyderabadis, this book is a mirror that reflects back our own experiences with startling clarity—we see ourselves, our parents, our grandparents in these pages. For others, it serves as a window into a city that is often misunderstood or reduced to biryani jokes and "nawabi" stereotypes. Majid shows Hyderabad in its full complexity: cosmopolitan yet traditional, ambitious yet unhurried, proud yet welcoming.
A Minor Observation
If there's any criticism to offer, it's that one wishes the book were longer. Certain eras and communities feel like they could have been explored more deeply. But perhaps this restraint is itself very Hyderabadi—saying much with economy, leaving the reader wanting more. And this was the sentiment echoed by quite a few people who wants their story heard as well.
The Hyderabadis is essential reading not just for those interested in Hyderabad, but for anyone who appreciates thoughtful cultural documentation and beautiful prose. Daneesh Majid has given us a gift—a book that honours a city's past while capturing its present, written in language that does justice to both.
This is the kind of book I find myself quoting, recommending, and returning to after having read it as I identify myself in some of the subjects in the book. It deserves a place on the shelf next to the great works of subcontinental literature that capture the essence of place and people. Whether you're a Hyderabadi longing for home, a newcomer trying to understand the city's soul, or simply a lover of well-crafted prose, this book will enchant you.

[Rahat · Rating 5 out of 5]

In The Hyderabadis, Daneesh Majid accomplishes what few historians attempt: he transforms political upheaval into intimate, lived experience. It is a sophisticated collective story derived from the lives of ten distinctive family narratives spanning nearly eight decades.
What distinguishes Majid's storytelling craft is his structural sophistication. Rather than presenting a linear historical account, he constructs a distinctive narrative that allows multiple voices to speak across time. Drawing from generational interviews, oral histories, literature in Urdu and English, and his own personal experiences, Majid creates a layered historical consciousness where the 1948 Police Action reverberates through the 1956 formation of Andhra Pradesh, echoes in the linguistic tensions of the 1960s and 70s, and finds new expression in the 2014 creation of Telangana.
The craft here is in the orchestration. Each family's story functions as both particular and universal—a grandfather who survived a massacre by feigning death becomes not just one man's trauma but a portal into understanding how violence reshapes identity across generations. Majid understands that sophisticated storytelling about historical trauma requires this double vision: the granular detail that makes a moment unforgettable and the structural awareness that connects it to larger patterns of displacement, adaptation, and resilience.
The ten lives chronicled are not casual selections but aggressive assertions about the authentic Hyderabad experience, deliberately challenging stereotypical hedonistic depictions of Deccani Muslims. This curatorial decision reveals Majid's narrative sophistication. By choosing subjects who embody complexity—communists, professionals, displaced persons, those who stayed and those who returned—he constructs a counter-archive to the reductive narratives that dominate popular imagination.
The storytelling technique mirrors partition literature's thematic concerns: broken geographies, reconstructed belonging, and constantly evolving notions of identity. Yet Majid brings fresh craft to these familiar themes. Where partition narratives often focus on the singular rupture of 1947, Majid traces multiple fractures—each political reorganization a new displacement, each linguistic battle a renegotiation of belonging. His families don't just survive one cataclysm; they navigate a continuous series of reconfigurations, and in this ongoing adaptation, Majid finds his most powerful narrative arc.
Majid describes his approach simply: "History has to be more than dates. It has to feel like your dadi telling you a story after dinner. That's when it sticks." This deceptively simple philosophy masks sophisticated narrative technique. By grounding historical analysis in the rhythms of oral storytelling—the after-dinner tale, the overheard conversation, the family secret finally revealed—Majid creates what might be called "documentary intimacy."
The reader experiences history not as spectacle but as inheritance. When Majid includes his own family's story—his grandfather playing dead among corpses, and thrown into a truck, surviving through stillness—he's not simply adding personal testimony. He's demonstrating how historical trauma becomes family mythology, how the unspeakable gets spoken across kitchen tables, how children inherit their parents' silences as much as their words.
Perhaps Majid's most sophisticated narrative choice is his refusal of closure. The book concludes with calls for greater integration, noting that with migration options to the Gulf and North America narrowing, Hyderabad's Muslims must anchor themselves more firmly in soil that belongs as much to them as to anyone else. This isn't a triumphant ending or a tragic one—it's an opening. The families' stories don't resolve; they continue, adapting, persisting, evolving.
This structural openness reflects the reality of generational storytelling: each generation rewrites the meaning of what came before. The 1948 survivor's grandson in 2025 lives the same history differently. Majid's craft captures this temporal complexity, showing how family narratives are never finished, only inherited and reimagined. I know this for a fact as I have heard it from Daneesh’s mother
The Hyderabadis represents mature storytelling craft—work that trusts readers to hold complexity, that refuses easy categorization, that understands families as both products and producers of history. Majid has given voice to the perspective of the people, the different communities who lived through these upheavals, and in doing so, he's created something rare: a history that reads like literature, a family saga that functions as scholarship, and a love letter to a city that acknowledges all its scars.
This is storytelling that transforms documents into inheritance, witnesses into narrators, and history into something that feels, finally, unforgettably human.

[Adesh Pandey · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don’t know where to start of how “The Hyderabadis” is a terrible read that you should avoid.
- Overreliance on Anecdotes Without Enough Analytical Depth
Majid’s book leans heavily on oral histories and interviews, which are vivid and often moving—but too often these stories lack the rigorous contextualisation needed to make them more than emotional snapshots. There are moments when one asks: how typical is this experience? We rarely get comparative data or concrete social-scientific evidence, so many of the narratives feel like isolated threads rather than pieces of a broader tapestry.
- Imbalance in Voices and Perspectives
While the author claims to bring forward “forgotten” or “less-heard” voices, the selection seems disproportionately male, elite, or otherwise privileged. Women, rural communities, and non-Urdu speaking groups often feel marginalised—more as background ornaments than as full agents. Hence, the picture of Hyderabad’s post-1947 history is skewed toward certain literate, urban, male-dominated experience, with many others barely visible.
- Gaps in Cultural Representation
There are striking absences in what should well be part of any serious account of Hyderabad: popular culture (films, music, cinema), local business and entrepreneurship beyond the usual power-elite stories, folk traditions, the everyday arts. For a city that is famous for its syncretic culture, charm, bazaars, food, linguistic hybridity, etc., much of that richness remains underexplored. The text flirts with nostalgia, but rarely digs into how culture evolves—and sometimes disappears—in painful or mundane ways.
- Selective Treatment of Identity, Conflict, and Power
The book aims to cover communal tensions, “Police Action,” linguistic and regional politics, etc., but in many cases these are presented in ways that feel cautious or circumscribed. There’s not enough critique of power structures—political, social, gendered—that have shaped who gets to speak, whose history is legitimised, and whose is sidelined. Sometimes the author seems more interested in preserving a certain ideal of Hyderabadi tolerance and pluralism than in interrogating its failures or contradictions deeply.
- Stylistic Weaknesses and Repetitions
From a literary standpoint, the narrative occasionally stumbles: repeated references, digressions, or stories that feel insufficiently edited. Some chapters could have done with tighter structure; the pacing is uneven. There are moments where the rich detail becomes a burden—detail piled upon detail without always making clear what the larger claim is, or why the reader should care beyond sentiment.
- Missed Opportunities for Broader Theorisation
Given the scope (from 1947 to the present), there’s space here for theoretical reflection—on urbanization, migration, memory, identity, postcolonial state-making—but those opportunities are only partially taken. The book often stays within description rather than pushing further into “why” things turned out as they did, or what lessons might carry beyond Hyderabad itself. For readers interested in comparative history or theory, this is disappointing.

[Nihaan · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolute joy.

It is not often that you come across an easy to read and engaging book on our Hyderabad, as experienced by her people. And written with great nuance!

It was refreshing, to say the very least.