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Beyond colonial urbanism: state power, global connections and fragmented land regimes in twentieth-century Hyderabad city
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 December 2022
Abstract
Urban histories of modern South Asia have centred on British Indian cities and the reign of colonial urbanism, with dependence on metropolitan imperatives and models regarded as givens. Focusing on Hyderabad, one of the subcontinent's five largest cities and capital of an autonomous princely state throughout the colonial era, this article establishes the analytical utility of princely urbanism as a framework for writing the history of South Asian cities. Characterized by state-directed planning, transnational urbanist networks and multiple overlapping property regimes, this mode of city development and its resonance points to hidden genealogies of modern urbanism.
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- © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
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11 ‘Draft report: “Osmania University site and layout” by Patrick Geddes’, 1922–23, PGP, GB 249 T-GED/12/1/207. The below discussion of Geddes’ plans for Osmania, unless otherwise noted, is drawn from this source.
12 For a critique of Geddes emphasizing the coloniality of his planning practice and the limited scope for local input his style permitted, see Rubin, N.H., ‘Geography, colonialism and town planning: Patrick Geddes’ plan for Mandatory Jerusalem’, Cultural Geographies, 18 (2011), 231–48Google Scholar.
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17 O. Khalidi, ‘Indian Muslims and Palestinian Awqaf’, Jerusalem Quarterly, 10 (2009), 52–8.
18 ‘Security of land tenures in the town area of the Secunderabad Cantonment after rendition’, National Archives of India (NAI), Hyderabad Residency Records, Judicial Branch, Residency Office, S. no. 33, A326, 1941.
19 Letter from Major Chapman, Military Estates Officer, Secunderabad of 28 Apr. 1941, in ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid. On the ambivalent status of private property in British Bombay, see N. Rao, ‘Space in motion: an uneven narrative of urban private property in Bombay’, in A. Gandhi, B. Harriss-White, D.E. Haynes and S. Schwecke (eds.), Rethinking Markets in Modern India: Embedded Exchange and Contested Jurisdiction (Cambridge, 2020), 54–84.
23 Secretary to the Resident to Military Estates Officer, undated, in ‘Security of land tenures in the town area of the Secunderabad Cantonment after rendition’, NAI, Hyderabad Residency Records, Judicial Branch, Residency Office, S. no. 33, A326, 1941.
24 Hyderabad to Military Estates Officer, 9 Apr. 1941, in ‘Security of land tenures in the town area of the Secunderabad Cantonment after rendition’, NAI, Hyderabad Residency Records, Judicial Branch, Residency Office, S. no. 33, A326, 1941.
25 Ibid.
26 ‘Payment of compensation for the patta land near the Tower of Silence acquired for the purposes of the construction of houses for the poor in cantonment, Secunderabad Cantonment Town Improvement Trust’, NAI, Hyderabad Residency Records, Judicial Branch, Residency Office, J349, 1941.
27 The way British Secunderabad housing schemes were modelled on CIB housing schemes illustrates that Hyderabad's princely urbanism in some cases could shape colonial urbanism.
28 For an early twentieth-century legal case over the legality of Tower of Silence construction in Bhoiguda heard in Bombay, see Pestonji Jivanji vs Edulji Chinoy (1908) 10 BOMLR 287, https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1392593/.
29 On princely states and decolonization, see Y.K. Bangash, A Princely Affair: The Accession and Integration of the Princely States of Pakistan, 1947–1955 (Karachi, 2015); I. Copland, The Princes of India in the Endgame of Empire, 1917–1947 (Cambridge, 1997); S. Purushotham, ‘Internal violence: the “police action” in Hyderabad’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 57 (2015), 435–66; B.N. Ramusack, The Princes of India in the Twilight of Empire: Dissolution of a Patron–Client System, 1914–1939 (Columbus, 1978)
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31 Letter dated 26 March, stamped 28 March 1947, received by the Hyderabad Resident 29 March 1947, addressed to The President, Municipal Board, Secunderabad (Cantonment), in ‘Representation regarding inadequate municipal amenities in Bowenpalli village’, NAI, Hyderabad Residency Records, Accounts Branch, Residency Office, A13/A/47, 1947.
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