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Abstract

This paper studies the challenges of conservation of living urban heritage and the reconstruction of the historic core in the walled ‘Old City’ of Hyderabad, India. The paper begins with an architectural history of the city, arguing that the urban form was central to the claims of autonomy from indirect colonial rule, as universities, palaces, and mosques constituted the newly emerging publics where a performative politics based on oratory took shape, and still continue. Hyderabad city was deemed a symbol of a princely modernity and a cosmopolitan culture. However, the princely state’s ascension to the Indian Union, accompanied by communal violence, led to ghettoization of the city’s Muslim population within the walls of the historic Golkonda Fort. By employing Partha Chatterjee’s concept of ‘political society,’ this paper argues that spatial location mediates the Old City residents’ citizenship. Governmental categories of planning are subverted with moral claims drawing on the old city’s glorious past, but also include recourse to bribery and criminality, for collective mobilization for everyday material needs such as rehabilitation, education and healthcare. The use of digital technology in the government’s tourism and redevelopment projects is seen as constituting a digital public whose symbolic claims conflicts with the Old City’s material politics. As a case study of such politics, the paper studies the stance of the All India Ittehadul Muslimeen, a political party representing the interests of Old City’s Muslims, on heritage conservation issues such as the adaptive reuse of Nizam era buildings by the state, and the Charminar pedestrian project in the speeches of their representatives in the state legislative assembly. Finally, the paper offers some general insights on similar conservation projects, and theoretical reflections on the divide between secular and sacred, and material and symbolic in heritage studies.