A new book brings perspectives of various communities that survived Hyderabad’s historic upheavals

“Humaare ghar mein Angrezaan ghuss gaye the. Razakaaron ku gher re the aur jeepaan mein daal ko leko jaa re the (Englishmen stormed into our house. They were rounding up Razakars and shoving them into jeeps),” narrated Halima Bi. Her slender frame and moderately frail voice complemented the stoic tone.

Like Punjabi, the Dakhani dialects of Urdu add the “aan” to turn any singular noun into a plural one. The “daal ko” instead of “daal ke (put in, insert)” intrigued me as that sounded closer to a more old-fashioned style of speaking Dakhani. I was baffled by Halima Bi’s use of the word “Angrezaan”, which, if taken literally, would mean the English. But Umar clarified that she was not referring to English troops, who were long gone by the time the Indian military had started rounding up the Razakars. As an old-school denizen of Hyderabad, she referred to anyone who was not native to the princely state as the foreigner, the “Angrez”.

This pride in her origins was also reflected in her use of the word “watan”, which ordinarily refers to the nation in Urdu. But Halima Bi used it to refer to Bamini, her hometown in Latur district, which was then a part of the Marathi-speaking parts of...

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