Telugu Nationalism and Police Action against Hyderabad: Notes on History, Historiography and Memory

The Department of Cultural Studies

Invites you all to a Public Lecture by

 

DR. A. SUNEETHA

 

Telugu Nationalism and Police Action against Hyderabad:Notes on History, Historiography and Memory

 

 

At 3 pm on February 11^th, 2015 (Wednesday) 

In EMMRC Conference Hall, First Floor, EMMRC Building, EFLU

 

This talk discusses the politics of the memory and history of the event known as the Police Action against Hyderabad through which the princely state of Hyderabad Deccan was incorporated into the newly independent Indian state in September 1948. It aims to understand the reasons for the subsequent erasure of the massive destruction of the lives and livelihoods of Deccani Muslims during this period from public memory, official records and progressive political discourse in the region, a region which is extremely rich in leftist and other progressive politics and human rights practice. Even as the individual survivors remember it as an irrational, inexplicable, one-sided attack, the possibility of voicing it as such never arose in the last 65 years. It suggests that the reasons for this perhaps lay in the historical emergence and the continuing hold of the 'Telugu linguistic nationalism' from the 1950s wherein a particular combination of republicanism, linguistic nationalism and anti-colonialism has worked towards the marginalization of the Muslim  voice as well as the region's Muslim history. Two key oppositional figures in this formation are the 'autocratic' Muslim king of the Hyderabad state – Nizam Osman Ali Khan and the 'dreaded' private army that rose to support the regime in 1947 known as razakars. The hyper visibility of these figures in the existing histories and public memory of the region has helped maintain silence about police action's effects on Muslims in the region. While challenges to Telugu nationalism have created some space for a discussion of this issue the last decade, the weight of the sedimented politics and practice of this formation is, as yet, too heavy to encourage a re-opening of the issue. 

 

Dr. A. Suneetha is a political theorist who is invested in the questions of gender and minority.  She is currently working on different cross-cutting aspects of gender and minority in relation to women's madarsas, lives of Muslim women and Muslim personal law.  She is also working on an ICSSR funded project along with M.A. Moid on minority politics and the MIM in Hyderabad.  Suneetha was member of the Twelfth Plan Steering Committee on Minorities.  She was part of the Law and Critical Legal Theory Initiative and has worked on the project 'Feminist Politics, Rights Discourse, the Family and Sexuality: Rethinking Women's Suffering and Agency.' She completed her PhD from the Central University of Hyderabad. Her thesis, "Family, Gender and Power: A Study of Women and Violence in Families in Andhra Pradesh", looked at women's negotiations with domestic violence, harassment and deprivation in the absence of a public discourse on women's rights. Suneetha is currently the Coordinator of Anveshi Research Centre for Women's Studies, Hyderabad.