Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: 1948 Police Action—A Silenced History of Hyderabad
- 1 No Longer a Nawab: The Making of a New Hyderabadi Muslim
- 2 “All Muslims Are Not the Razakars”: The Political Idiom of an Independent Hyderabad
- 3 “I Am Going to Fight …”: Muslim Women’s Politics and Gender Activism
- 4 For the Love of Urdu: Relocating Urdu in Postcolonial Hyderabad
- Conclusion: The Afterlife of the Police Action and Contemporary Muslim Debate
- Select Bibliography
- Index
4 - For the Love of Urdu: Relocating Urdu in Postcolonial Hyderabad
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 2023
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: 1948 Police Action—A Silenced History of Hyderabad
- 1 No Longer a Nawab: The Making of a New Hyderabadi Muslim
- 2 “All Muslims Are Not the Razakars”: The Political Idiom of an Independent Hyderabad
- 3 “I Am Going to Fight …”: Muslim Women’s Politics and Gender Activism
- 4 For the Love of Urdu: Relocating Urdu in Postcolonial Hyderabad
- Conclusion: The Afterlife of the Police Action and Contemporary Muslim Debate
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
When I met 90-year-old Jaini Mallaya Gupta on January 23, 2019, at his Hyderabad apartment, he had just finished reading the Urdu daily newspaper, Siāsat—his morning ritual of almost seventy years. Not surprisingly, our conversations found a relevant beginning with his long journey with the Siāsat, a paper launched in the aftermath of the Police Action. For Mallayya Gupta, reading Siāsat was a major source of his passionate engagements with the progressive literature in Urdu and the rise of Muslim discourse against the background of the Police Action. He said:
At that moment of excessive violence, Urdu was more than a language for us. In an endless tirade of hate speech and religious hatred, the very utterance of any Urdu word was indeed a political statement. On the one hand, it had the seal of authoritarianism as the Nizam's administrative language of the Hyderabad state and then it also became the language of progressivism and resistance.
“Look,” he insisted, “we used the same weapon to fight against the Nizam and all that gruesome violence of the Police Action.” Elaborating further, he continued:
Despite all the violence, we had two great sources of inspiration. First, contemporary Urdu writings including the short fiction from Urdu and their translations into Telugu, and secondly, the Siāsat daily Urdu newspaper. Both have taught me religious tolerance and love for humanity. They both played a great role in the times of extreme violence and, no doubt, my entire understanding about Marxism and progressivism comes from reading those Urdu writings and the Siāsat.
For many young political activists of 1940s Telangana, the progressive literature (Gupta used the Urdu equivalent throughout our conversations, taraqqī-pasand), particularly in Urdu, was a major source of inspiration and political resistance. Gupta was barely eighteen when he started a reading group in his hometown of Nalgonda in the late 1940s (Figure 4.1). It was a humble beginning that attracted a significant number of the new-generation writers and readers who had just started engaging with a vibrant political and cultural climate in the princely state of Hyderabad.
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- Remaking History1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad, pp. 189 - 243Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024