Continuing our Deccan Series in collaboration with the Khidki Collective, this set of six articles presents alternative perspectives on the 1948 Police Action in Hyderabad. These perspectives challenge, modify, add nuance to the mainstream narrative of Hyderabad’s integration as ‘liberation’, a narrative currently used to further divisive politics.

The following is an excerpt from Afsar Mohammad’s latest book ‘Remaking History: 1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad,’ published by Cambridge University Press (2023). Here, the author documents almost one hundred witness narratives of the 1948 violence. This chapter narrates the memories of Quddus Saheb, a folk-performer of Muharram and Prophet Mohammed's stories. He was one of the witnesses of Police Action. With most witnesses having now passed away, this book then remains the last document of their life stories. Since the 1948 Police Action has been barely discussed, these witness narratives or testimonies offer fresh insights into the documentation of different aspects of everyday life during 1948 in Hyderabad and Telangana.

Note from Khidki: Oral histories not only offer us different perspectives of the past but also provide insights into how those who have lived through momentous times make sense of the challenges of the present. In this excerpt, Quddus Saheb’s account reveals how much Muslim life was affected in post Police Action Hyderabad, with many being branded Razakars and not being able to carry on with their daily lives. For him, contemporary India and the difficult place of Muslims in it is a persistent and poignant reminder that the after-effects of Police Action, such as the decimation of Muslim political leadership, continue to reverberate even now.

The five-day-long “battle” of the Police Action was certainly still fresh in their memory. But they also stressed that the “main history” or “official history” (pradhāna caritra or adhikāra caritra in Telugu) was centred on the celebration of the formation of the Telugu linguistic state of Andhra Pradesh and the leftist-centred Telangana armed struggle. The celebrations of the formation of a new state of Andhra Pradesh became a form of nationalist rhetoric, while the Telangana armed rebellion turned into a leftist campaign for the general elections of 1952. According to the Deccani Urdu literary historian Samala Sadasiva:

The very usage of the term Andhra was meant to relegate the history of Hyderabad and Telangana into some immemorial past. While growing up in the late 1930s or ’40s we all identified ourselves with the term Telangana as it represents the mixed history of Urdu and Telugu. Along with the new usage of Andhra, the state-sponsored histories gradually erased the centrality of Hyderabad and its Muslims. The khoonrezi (“massacre”) of the Police Action was totally removed from the recorded histories.

Sadasiva’s comments took me back to what the folk singer Abdul Quddus Saheb said in the introduction of this book. In 2006, when I was about to wrap up our conversation, he mentioned the statements made by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 1998. Specifically, Quddus Saheb spoke of the Home Minister LK Advani’s speech in Hyderabad—a mammoth public meeting and, in fact, one I attended. Referring to the Police Action, Advani made a call to “celebrate” September 17 as a “day of the liberation,” later translated as vimōcana dinam in the Telugu public sphere. Advani’s usage of the term “liberation” triggered a new debate about the Police Action in the local print and electronic media, as well as in various political writings after 1998. Responding to Advani’s statement, several historians and social activists also began  to revisit the history of the Police Action. Along with the events that led to the Police Action, what to do with Muslims of Hyderabad was again a question, while Muslims were also in a dilemma about their future. The chronology of this history was repeatedly considered in the public discourse as activists from different social and political groups continued to debate.

Quddus Saheb said:

Advani  and  BJP  had  actually  stirred  the  hornet’s  nest  for  their  own political benefits! Not that we have all forgotten about it, but the way Advani fueled this issue was quite disturbing! We should talk about the Police Action, but the way Advani and his followers entered into this debate was all hate speech that caused a new antagonism between Muslims and Hindus. He and his party were just using this entire history—tārīkhu—of the Police Action to take advantage of Hindu vote.

Either Islamic or Hyderabad-related, the events from history—tārīkh— had always been a source of passion for Quddus Saheb. Growing up in the critical era of the late 1930s and 1940s, he had developed a keen interest in reading history materials both in Urdu and Telugu. Being a well-known folk performer and a public figure during the late 1940s, Quddus Saheb had also witnessed many historical events during his lifetime—from the powerful public speeches of Nawab Bahadur Yar Jung (1905–1944) to the beginnings of the Telangana  separatist movement in 2004. Quddus Saheb recalled for me that:

Bahadur Yar Jung’s party Itteh ād, later known as Majlis-e-Itteh ād’ul Muslimīn (MIM) became extremely powerful and led many political and social movements. He was such an inspiration—josh—to the young Muslims of Hyderabad that we [knew] all his words by heart. He actually provided a language for our emotions and thoughts. Most importantly, he made us realise that young Muslims need to speak out about contemporary politics and understand how Islam could contribute to improve them.

Many times, during our conversations, Quddus Saheb tried to compare the late 1990s to the late 1940s. Of particular and significant concern for him was the lack of “proper” leadership—in his eyes—in the Muslim community. Even now I remember how Quddus Saheb’s eyes glowed when he spoke about Bahadur Yar Jung’s accomplishments. In the midst of his enthusiastic recollections of the speeches of Bahadur Yar Jung, he concluded, “These days we need such an orator and activist who can inspire with words and actions. More than that we need a force that unifies the entire Muslim community from the city to the remotest village in Telangana.” When Quddus Saheb said these words, he was not so much being nostalgic, but he was speaking from a pragmatic viewpoint. Bahadur Yar Jung, according to Quddus Saheb, was a combination of many dimensions—including leadership qualities, oratory, and political awareness—that the Muslim community should emulate in any period, and he emphasised, “particularly after the saffron wave of Hindutva.” 

In speaking about the Police Action, Quddus Saheb repeatedly referred to the Battle of Karbala (680 CE), which he described as “the historical event that demanded many sacrifices from the Muslim community.” It took me a while to understand that he was making an important connection between the life story of Bahadur Yar Jung and the martyrdom of Imam Hussein in Karbala. “Just like the Imam Hussain, Bahadur Saheb was also a martyr in the  battlefield.” While Quddus Saheb’s own life was filled with many tragic events, such as the loss of family members and close friends in the violence of 1948, he had also witnessed many persons who had gone incognito, been displaced, or had had their lives uprooted, and had seen a new generation of Muslims face the stigma of “being Muslim.” Explaining further about this stigmatisation, he said:

You know how hard it was when you were being labelled as a criminal and antisocial in the name of the Razakars. All Muslims, particularly, the younger generation between the age group 18 and 30 were stigmatised as the Razakars and hunted down. They had a hard time finding work, food, and shelter in their own hometown.

I included several such testimonies from my field research in Chapter 2; some of those testimonies also stressed that “not all Muslims are extremists or Razakars.” Conflating the identity of ordinary Muslims with the Razakars was one of the narrative strategies in many nationalist writings too. According to Quddus Saheb, such demonization was due to a lack of “proper” leadership. He said:

As the times had changed, Muslims had also lost that support and empathy. Now the very word Muslim arouses some fear for many people. Things have gotten even worse now and I feel so bad about the current generation of Muslims. Where have we come?!

Quddus Saheb stressed the Urdu term hamdardi (empathy) and noted a lack of empathy towards Muslims and Muslim issues. Despite all the hardships and tragedies in his personal life, Quddus Saheb had also contributed much to the making of this new generation of Muslims. A devoted performer, he successfully inspired at least a few young men, both Muslims and Hindus, and trained them in the folk performances of Muharram (known as pīrla pand. aga or “the festival of pīrs”) that memorialises the martyrdom of Imam Hussain and the Prophet’s family in the Battle of Karbala. As a performer of Muharram songs, Quddus Saheb had travelled extensively in various regions of the Hyderabad state and the current state of Telangana. Since he feared having to abandon such public performance, he was also passionate about training at least ten or twelve young men to continue the tradition. That way, he was always in communication with the new generation Muslims and Hindus wherever he traveled. He said:

Of course, I can say I was really successful in training more than twenty young men and then it arrived—the saffron wave of the Bharatiya Janata Party. At this moment, even young Muslims were not ready even to participate in any public rituals related to Muslims. I then started witnessing another phase of hatred. For Muslims now in India, it is like every day is a Karbala. Muslims are being killed for no reason and just for a few political motives.

Quddus Saheb was not alone in comparing the fate of Muslims under Hindutva to Karbala. Many interlocutors and contemporary political activists use similar metaphoric language, particularly to speak about their condition in the times of what the political scientists like Angana Chatterji call “a normalised majoritarianism and hostility to Muslims.” During our many conversations, Quddus Saheb often referred to the Babri mosque demolition on December 6, 1992. According to him:

It was nothing but another mode of Police Action, as both religion and governmental politics had joined hands once again to destroy the entire Muslim community in India. In fact, this demolition was more than destroying a mosque and a direct attack on the Muslims. As a person who witnessed the Police Action, I felt like this one is another testing moment, not only for Muslims, but also for Hindus. Here we are at the end of the twentieth century, and I just also heard about what is happening in Gujarat—the killings of Muslims.

As a response to Advani, several Muslim activists returned to the Muslim question discussed during the Police Action. They were concerned about how the “hasty” decision of the “military invasion” by the Union government of India had led to its tragedies. Some now describe those five days between September 13 and 17 as a “battle” and as the earliest phase of Hindutva. 

Excerpted with permission from Cambridge University Press. Afsar Mohammad is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning South Asian scholar working on Hindu-Muslim interactions in India. He also focuses on Muslim writing and Telugu studies. Afsar teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

The Khidki Collective is a network of scholars committed to building public dialogue on history, politics, and culture. This series has been curated by Yamini Krishna, Swathi Shivanand, and Pramod Mandade of the collective.