Indo-Muslim Culture in Hyderabad: Old City Neighborhoods in the 19th Century
Hyderabad city’s culture was Indo-Muslim or Mughlai, terms that need definition here. I use Indo-Muslim in preference to Islamic, Indo-Persian, Persianate, or Islamicate. I prefer Indo-Muslim to the other four commonly-used alternatives because, first, Muslim rather than Islamic emphasizes a civilizational and not a religious culture (Islamicate has the same meaning but probably not to the general reader). Certainly Hyderabad was not an Islamic state: the Nizams never tried to impose Islamic law or to convert people.Second, IndoMuslim puts the emphasis on the Indian location, although undeniably the Bahmani sultanate in the Deccan from the mid-fourteenth century, its five successor Deccani sultanates (Bijapuri, Golconda, Bidar, Berar, and Ahmednagar) from the early sixteenth century, and the Nizams, starting as Mughal governors after the conquests of Bijapuri and Golconda by the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb in 1686 and 1687, modeled their court culture on that of Persia. I use the term Mug...