In my childhood days, I used to listen
two things about Hyderabad; one is Mohammad Azaharuddin (former cricketer of
India), unlike others of those days, my father was also a fan of him and used
to watch his performances in DD National. The second one is ‘Nizam’s Biriyani’
which was very common in popular conversations and even used to come in
newspapers. I don’t know whether those newspapers used to refer that it was a
cuisine in the kitchens of the Nizam, rulers of Hyderabad state and later
evolved as popular biriyani or ‘Hyderabadi
Biriyani’, thus they are calling it as ‘Nizam’s Biriyani’.
As a child I had no idea of
Hyderabad and I thought that biriyani
may be some kind of special food like our polao
but why is associated with the word Nizam? So, I came into my conclusion that Nizam is
some shop owner who makes delicious biriyani
and thus he became famous and got lots of money.
The second thing, I thought, that as
the word Nizam is related with some monarchy and something like king, ruler so
Nizam may not be some general person (Surprisingly in Bengal, especially in our
area, frequently you will get names like Nizam, Nawab, Akbar, Azhar, Saddam
even Laden too!). No, that does not mean that my name came from Abu Salem! It
has a different story. May try to wright that in some other day.
Later, when little ‘history’ got into
my imaginations, I fixed that Nizam once the monarch of Hyderabad
has been dethroned by coloniser and then he got into hotel and restaurant business
and sells biriyani (like our Bengal kinds which sell rice, dal
and so on). When his business developed, he might have opened several branches of
his hotel (like today's food retail chains).
After few years, when I came to Hyderabad, then I realised how silly my thoughts were and how popular conversations and newspapers
can lead our imaginations into a different world altogether. Yeah, google was
not there, otherwise I would have googled it out...
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