Hyderabad:
The Hyderabadi diaspora is either forced to shed its Hyderabadi tag due to powerful geopolitical forces or for others, it remains deeply rooted in their culture.
Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Karen Leonard observes that Hyderabadis who moved to Pakistan at the time of the Partition still carry with them the ‘mohajir’ label, struggling to find acceptance. They have now started moving to western countries in search of a better future.
With the creation of Urdu societies in North America, Europe and the Middle East, Hyderabadis are making efforts to go back to their roots. While some are making efforts to cling to their culture, others are intermarrying and mixing with people of different races. Visiting the city after three years to attend a conference, Leonard describes the Deccani synthesis as a model for tolerant society.
Speaking to TOI on Friday Leonard, however, notes that she has seen a decline in communal harmony in the city. She is also worried about the Telangana movement. “While young Hyderabadis are busy creating a new mixed culture_ creating their own kind of plural society_ the people from Andhra have not recognised the legitimacy of the Nizam’s state and culture and are not proud of its Indo-Muslim architecture,” she observes.
She says that the populace still thinks that the previous rulers were Islamic when they were actually tolerant. The term Indo-Muslim, she explains, does not emphasize on a religious culture, but on a civilization instead.
Leonard’s association with India goes back to 1961 when the she was a student in Miranda House in Delhi. Little did she know that she would be enamoured by the composite Indo-Muslim art, culture and architecture of India. It was her contact with this multilayered, multifaceted pluralistic society which urged her to understand it better by deciding to become a historian of the Mughal era.
However, there was one hurdle: the hundreds of documents chronicling the Mughal era were either in Farsi or Urdu so she started learning the languages. Her first encounter with the city of the Nizams was when she had stopped for the night at a sarai in Nampally on her way from Delhi to Chennai. She returned five years later to complete her dissertation on the Kayasths of Hyderabad. “The number of documents in the Nizam State Archives was more than that in Delhi,” she says. “They were more recent and interesting. That’s why I chose to study the Deccan.”
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / Home> City> Hyderabad / TNN / January 07th, 2012