The inventory in 1909, before any of the famous institutions existed
The most efficient test of the absolute claim is to open a book printed by the Government of India nine years before Osmania University was founded, twenty-two years before Nizam Sagar was finished, and thirty-nine years before the Police Action. The Imperial Gazetteer of India, Provincial Series volume on Hyderabad State (Calcutta, 1909) is not a Hyderabadi self-portrait; it is a colonial reference work, produced by an administration with no interest in flattering the Nizam. Almost everything the claim denies is already in it. Quotations below reproduce the printed text, including its own spellings and diacritics; where typography could not be reproduced exactly, the linked facsimile is authoritative.
Railways. 'From Wadi on the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, the Nizam's Guaranteed State Railway runs east to Warangal and then south-east towards Bezwada… The State thus contains 467 miles on the broad gauge, all built before 1891, and 391 miles on the narrow gauge, opened between 1899 and 1901.' The financing is described too: the line 'is owned and worked by a company under a guarantee from the Hyderabad State', capital for the metre-gauge line having been 'raised by the issue of redeemable mortgage debentures', with total capital expenditure to the end of 1904 of 4·3 crores and net earnings of nearly 28 lakhs, 'or about 6½ per cent. on the outlay' 1. That is 858 route miles of railway in the State, of which 721 ran under the Hyderabad guarantee: the same page assigns 137 of the broad-gauge miles to the Great Indian Peninsula and Madras Railways crossing the state's south-western corner, leaving the Nizam's Guaranteed State Railway with 310 miles of main line and 20 miles of branches, plus the 391-mile metre-gauge Hyderabad-Godavari Valley line 1. A state raising capital on a bond market and turning a return on it, in 1904.
Money. 'The current coin of the State is known as the Hāli sikka, and the quantity in circulation has been reckoned at about 10 crores. The issue of the Hāli sikka began in 1854, when the first Sir Sālār Jang was Minister, and has continued with occasional interruptions. Free coinage was allowed in the mint up to 1893…' In 1904 'an improved coin of a new design was minted, known as the Mahbubia rupee, representing on one side the famous Char Minar building, which stands in the centre of Hyderabad city' 2. A separate exchange rate against the British rupee is quoted, between 115 and 116 to 100.
Courts and legislature. The Gazetteer lists the departments: 'the judicial, under the High Court, consisting of a Chief Justice and five Puisne Judges; the District police and jails, under an Inspector-General; the city police, under a Kotwal; customs, under a Commissioner; education, under a Director; stamps and mint, under a Superintendent; forests, under a Conservator; postal, under a Postmaster-General; and medical, under a Director' 3. A Legislative Council was ordered in 1893: it 'consists of 19 members', of whom six were non-official, and 'Of the 6 non-official members, 2 are elected by the jagirdars and landowners, 2 by the pleaders of the High Court, and the remaining 2 are nominated by the Minister' 4. Election by jagirdars and pleaders is a low bar for modernity, and the elected members were a minority of a minority; but it is a bar the absolute claim says the state never cleared.
Medicine. 'The first medical institution opened in the State was the Hyderabad Medical School, founded in 1846… At first instruction was imparted in Urdu, but since 1884 English has been the medium.' The medical department by 1901 had '74 surgeons, 12 lady doctors, 31 hospital assistants, 104 compounders, and 116 vaccinators'; dispensaries in the districts rose from 48 in 1884-5 to 84 in 1901, and out-patients treated across all institutions from 292,515 to 636,044 over the same period 8.
Schools. The Gazetteer is equally frank about the ceiling: 'In 1883 there were 148 primary schools… The total number of pupils attending these schools was 7,757, representing 0·5 per cent. of the population of school-going age. In 1891 the percentage rose to 2·5. In 1901 the number of primary schools increased to 753, and the number of pupils to 41,876, giving a percentage under instruction of 2·4' 5. Read carefully, that is the whole argument in one paragraph: the number of schools multiplied fivefold while the proportion of children reached actually slipped. The institutions were real; the coverage was not.
Osmania University, and what the word 'modern' is doing in the claim
The sharpest case is Osmania University, because it is simultaneously the state's most ambitious institution and the one most often read as evidence of provincialism. The Nizam's order establishing it 'was issued in Urdu on 26 April 1917. It states clearly that the medium of instruction will be "our language Urdu" (hamārī zubān Urdū) but English will retain its educational importance'; a second order of 14 August 1917 established the university's translation bureau, 'charged with translating important works from other languages into Urdu' 23. The dating is not entirely settled — other dates circulate in popular accounts, and accounts commonly distinguish the firman from the university's later opening — but none of the circulating variants has been traced here to a source that reproduces the firman itself, and the question is left open below rather than adjudicated.
What the university actually taught is not a matter of inference. The state's own Education Code sets it out: 'In a College affiliated to the Osmania University instruction is imparted through the medium of Urdu in the University courses in Arts, Science, Medicine, Engineering, Education, Theology and in the Higher Branches of Oriental Learning, the study of English as a Language being compulsory in the courses of study in Arts, Science, and Theology' 16. Medicine and engineering, taught in an Indian vernacular, in 1935. The claim that the state produced no modern institutions has to explain that sentence away.
It also has to explain the Code's preceding article, which is routinely forgotten: 'Colleges are of two types:— a. Those affiliated to the Madras University. b. Those affiliated to the Osmania University' 16. Hyderabad ran an English-medium college stream affiliated to Madras and an Urdu-medium stream of its own, in parallel. The Gazetteer confirms the older half of that arrangement: the Nizam College and the Aurangabad College were 'both affiliated to the Madras University', alongside the Dar-ul-ulum or Oriental College 5. Osmania was an addition to an existing university system, not a substitute for one.
The translation apparatus was the expensive part, and the figures are unromantic: the Bureau of Translation (Dāruíl-Tarjuma) 'produced 382 books and provided employment for 129 translators. It burned down in 1955' 24. Kavita Datla's reading of the project is that Hyderabad's Urdu educators were arguing with English, not with modernity: her article 'details how early-twentieth-century Hyderabad's Urdu educators engaged with questions of native education, language, and Western science', as those educators attempted 'to make the Urdu language a worldly vernacular, useful for more than the subcontinent's Muslim population' 25.
The cost of the policy is documented in the same literature and should not be softened. Rahman records that 'from 1944 onwards all secondary schools used Urdu as the medium of instruction—until 1941, 363 out of 444 secondary schools used the mother tongue as the medium of instruction'; the Hindus 'protested but to no avail and the local languages were marginalized' 23. Against that, the Education Code shows the vernaculars were not expelled from the system: teachers' certificate examinations at the elementary and primary levels 'will be conducted through the medium of the following languages:— Urdu, Marathi, Telugu and Kanarese' 19. Both facts are true. Urdu sat at the apex; Marathi, Telugu and Kannada survived at the base; the squeeze came in the middle, and it came late.
Money, coal and engineers: the state as an economic actor
Hyderabad's paper currency is the datum most often garbled, so it is worth taking from the Reserve Bank of India's own museum record: 'The exigency of the First World War, the Indian and Hyderabad contributions to British war effort, and an acute shortage of silver on the subcontinent led the Dominion to get its way in 1918 and paper currency was issued under the Hyderabad Currency Act.' Notes came 'in denominations of Rupees 100 and Rs 10', with 'Rupee One and Rupees Five notes… issued subsequently in 1919 and Rupees One Thousand notes… issued in 1926'. 'The currency was designated the Osmania Sicca and the notes were printed by Messrs Waterlow and Sons' 32. The RBI page also notes that earlier attempts by Indian states 'proved abortive, in the wake of British resistance to Indian States issuing paper currency' — which is the point. Hyderabad obtained something the paramount power had refused to others. The widely repeated line that Hyderabad was one of only two princely states with paper currency does not appear on the RBI page consulted here and is not asserted, although it would strengthen this section if true.
The mining sector has a longer and less flattering-to-anyone history. By the Singareni Collieries Company's own account, 'In the year 1871, Dr. King of the Geological Survey of India discovered coal near the village of Yellandu'; 'The Hyderabad (Deccan) Company Limited incorporated in England acquired mining rights in 1886'; 'The present Company was incorporated on 23rd December 1920 under the Hyderabad Companies Act as a public limited company with the name "The Singareni Collieries Company Limited"'; and 'The State of Hyderabad purchased majority shares of the Company in 1945' 33. Note the sequence: an English company held the concession for thirty-four years and the Hyderabad state bought control of it late. Both the industrial base and its foreign ownership are part of the record.
For the state's technical capacity in its last decade, the Administration Report of the Public Works Department for 1351 Fasli (printed at the Government Central Press, Hyderabad, 1944) is the plainest evidence. Its chief engineers are listed with their qualifications — King's College London, Manchester, Durham, Edinburgh, Madras — and the department carried a Chief Architect, an Irrigation branch, a Hydro-Electric Survey party, a Tungabhadra Project Division, the District Power Schemes administered under the Chief Engineer with an Electricity Department, and a temporary 'Osmania University Buildings Project Circle' under its own superintending engineer 22. The limits of that capacity are in the same document and should be stated: the calyx-drill foundation work on the Tungabhadra project 'was done by Engineers of the Madras Government', with the cost shared equally — a joint undertaking with a British Indian province, not a wholly indigenous one 22. On Nizam Sagar the report is administrative rather than triumphal: annual maintenance of Rs 3,43,750, distributary networks opening 'an area of 31,050 acres in the Armoor Taluq', and a research programme of crop and current-meter experiments across the commanded area 22. This is an unglamorous document, which is exactly why it is useful: it is a working bureaucracy describing its year.
The Musi flood of September 1908 is the origin of the capital's reconstruction, and it is also this page's clearest example of a contested number. The Imperial Gazetteer, printed within months, records in a footnote that 'a terrible disaster occurred at Hyderabad. As the result of some days' continuous rain, the Musi river suddenly rose in flood, carrying away several arches of three bridges — the Purana Pul, Afzal, and Chadarghat — inundating many quarters of the city on both sides of the river, and causing widespread destruction of life and property' 9. It gives no death toll. Figures of 15,000 and 50,000 both circulate in the modern press and in reference works; neither has been traced here to a contemporaneous enumeration, and the earliest official notice conspicuously declines to count. The same standard is applied in both directions on this page. A casualty figure is used only where a source prints it, which is why no death toll appears here — and a figure that flatters the state is treated identically: the railway mileage, the currency in circulation, the budget totals and the dispensary counts are quoted from the pages that print them, with the page named, and none is rounded upward in the state's favour.
The Archaeological Department, and what it chose to conserve
Ghulam Yazdani's Archaeological Department of H.E.H. the Nizam's Dominions is the institution that most cleanly falsifies both the 'no modern institutions' claim and the assumption that a Muslim dynasty's state apparatus attended only to Muslim monuments. Its annual reports are printed, indexed and public.
For 1339 Fasli (1929-30) the Department reported on the Ajanta caves: 'At Ajanta the most important work relates to the conservation of the frescoes which is progressing very steadily, and during the year the paintings of the verandah and the left and right-side galleries of the main hall of cave No. 2 have been conserved. In this cave now, only the frescoes of the ante-chamber and the shrine remain to be treated… It will be of interest to lovers of Indian art to know that the frescoes which were in danger of complete decay a few years ago have been treated so scientifically now that they are likely to survive for another couple of centuries, if not more' 20.
The same year's programme, as summarised in the Government's own review of the report, covered 'the Gardens of Bani Begam and Khan Jahan situated at Roza, the tomb of Amir Barid at Bidar, the Mahadeva Temple at Mankesar (Osmanabad District) and the Dargah of Hazrat Shamsuddin at Osmanabad and the Vaishnava Temple at Ter'; clearance work continued in the Bidar fort; and twenty-nine inscriptions were recovered at Raichur, of which 'eight belong to the Baihmani kings, fifteen to the "Adil Shahis' 21. The main report, not the Review, is the source for the Hindu epigraphy and the sculpture acquisitions: 'In the domain of Hindu inscriptions some Telugu records of the Kakatiya dynasty have been found at Patancheru… As these pillars and slab were lying in a neglected condition at Patancheru, they have been removed to Hyderabad and preserved at the Museum', and forty pieces of sculpture representing 'deities belonging to the Jaina, Saivite and Vishnuite professions of faith' were acquired for the museum in the same year 20.
The department's accounts were audited and criticised in public: expenditure on conservation of Rs 28,129 against Rs 46,902 the previous year, with the Government noting drily that 'The reason for this decrease should have been given in the report' 21. A department whose superiors complain in print about its budget notes is a department, not a gesture — though the complaint also records a conservation budget that had fallen by nearly forty per cent in a single year.
What the state's own Royal Commission said it had not done
The most damaging evidence against Hyderabad's developmental record is not nationalist polemic and does not need to be. It is the Nizam's government's own paperwork, and it is more precise than the polemic.
The Report of the Royal Commission on Jagir Administration and Reforms, submitted at Bangalore on 25 May 1947 under the chairmanship of Albion Rajkumar Banerji, quotes a note by a retired Director of Public Instruction: 'It is not a desirable state of affairs that, while the Diwani Ilakas are educationally advanced, the Samasthans, Jagirs and Paigahs should remain backward, thus hindering the all-round progress of the State.' The note adds that 'the late Nawab Jmadul Mulk Bahadur, during his tenure of office as Director of Public Instruction drew the attention of Government to the fact that the absence of education in Jagirs had adversely affected the educational statistics of the State. What he said forty-six years ago holds good even to-day' — dating the internal complaint to roughly the turn of the century 11.
It also reproduces A. Mayhew, the government's own Educational Adviser, writing in 1911: 'In the course of my tours I have passed through Jagirs in which there is no provision of any kind for education. . . . I am inclined to believe that the present state of education in Jagirs is such as to demand the earnest attention of the Government. All areas in which education is very noticeably below the average of the State as a whole are a source of danger to the State' 11. Thirty-six years later the Commission was still quoting him because nothing had changed: 'out of a total of over 5,000 schools in the Diwani villages, the Jagir and Samasthan areas have not more than 189' 10.
Two qualifiers from the Commission itself belong in the same paragraph, because the standard applied to evidence that damages the Nizam's government is the standard applied to evidence that helps it. On extent: 'although the Paigah, Samasthans and Jagir areas on the whole make a total of 30·9%, the compact areas under these tracts is only 9·7% of the total dominion area of 82,698 sq. miles' — the unadministered third was dispersed rather than a contiguous third of the map 10. On schooling: 'we are not unaware of the fact that some Jagirs and Samasthans provide good facilities for education. But these are very rare' 14. Neither qualifier rescues the record; both are in the document, and a page that quotes the Commission's indictments has no licence to omit its concessions.
The fiscal architecture explains the failure without needing malice. Jagir revenue was estimated 'at about 2½ crores and including Maqtas and Agrahars… at about 4½ crores', while 'The contributions now paid to Government in the form of Pan and Peshkash have been estimated at about Rs. 9,42,244 or about 2% of the total Jagir income, a very negligible percentage' 13. A third of the state's area generated revenue that almost entirely bypassed the treasury and funded almost none of the services the treasury was expected to supply.
That said, the same paragraph is the best short answer to the claim that there was no development budget at all: 'At the present moment the Government of His Exalted Highness is spending 3,40,00,000 or over Rs. 2 per head of the population on Public Health and Education alone. Taking Judicial, Police, Jails, Supply, Famine relief, Water-supply, Veterinary, Agriculture and Co-operation, the total expenditure as seen from the Budget for 56 F. amounts to nearly 6·5 crores' 13. Elsewhere the Commission notes that Government 'have provided more than 2½ crores a year for education purposes' under a 'big scheme for mass literacy' 14. A real budget, and a thin one for 16.3 million people — and one arriving in the state's final full year of existence.
Where the claim comes from, and what it is now used to settle
The proposition that Hyderabad was undeveloped has three distinct sources, and separating them is most of the work.
The first is internal and administrative: the Directors of Public Instruction from around 1900, Mayhew in 1911, the Royal Commission in 1947 11. Their claim is comparative and targeted — the jagir areas are unreached, and their absence drags the state's averages down. It is not a claim that the state built nothing; the same officials were employed by the departments that built things. This is the sourced core that the circulating absolute has been built on top of, and it is why the verdict here is oversimplified rather than unsupported.
The second is political and pre-1948: the peasant movement in Telangana from 1946, whose grievance Taylor Sherman describes as 'great resentment against the jagirdari system of landholding which governed 43 per cent of land in the state', a system 'infamous for the high rate of forced labour extracted from peasants who held little land, were given paltry access to water and manure, and were subjected to high rates by (often absentee) landlords' 26. Sherman's 43 per cent is a share of land, not of area, and sits above the Royal Commission's 30·9 per cent of dominion area for paigahs, samasthans and jagirs — 40·79 per cent counting the sarf-e-khas, 9·7 per cent counting only the compact tracts 1210. The two are not directly commensurable, one being tenurial and the other territorial, and no reconciliation has been traced here; the larger figure is not preferred because it is the more damaging one, and the smaller is not preferred because it is the less. The discrepancy is logged among the open questions. Either way, this is a claim about land and unfree labour, not about railways and dams, and nothing in the institutional inventory answers it.
The third is post-integration and governmental, and Sherman is explicit that it was deliberate. 'Socialists in the new nation detested the feudal conditions extant in the state, and believed that the system could only be abolished by dismembering every element of the Nizam's regime' 27. After 1948 the postcolonial state 'quickly learned that development programmes could be more effective than coercion in certain circumstances'; 'in Hyderabad development was an important element in their fight against communists' 28. Sherman's subject in that passage is the new Indian state generally, of which Hyderabad is the case; the contrast between a backward Nizam's state and a developmental Indian one was, in part, a produced contrast — which does not make it false, but does explain why it hardened into an absolute.
A fourth register emerged after 1956, when Telangana was merged into Andhra Pradesh and regional backwardness became a constitutional and fiscal argument about safeguards. Motkuri's paper sits openly in that tradition, tracing present-day educational deprivation in Telangana to pre-1948 structures 29.
The claim's live circulation is now bound to the commemoration of 17 September, and the argument is conducted through the name of the day. As of September 2024, 'The Union government, led by the BJP, declared the day officially as Telangana Liberation Day', while the Bharat Rashtra Samithi observed it as Telangana Integration Day and the Congress state government adopted 'Praja Palana' day 35. The developmental record of the Nizam's state is now argued about primarily as an argument about that date — which is why lists of Nizam-era institutions and lists of Nizam-era deprivations are deployed against each other, when the documents support both lists at once.
