Hyderabad
Qutb Shahi kings built it in 1591 when the fort at Golconda ran out of water; the Nizams kept it a separate state until 1948.
1518
Golconda
A diamond-trading sultanate rises.
1591
Charminar
A new city laid out on the Musi.
1724
The Nizams
Asaf Jahi rule begins, lasting 224 years.
1948
Accession
The princely state joins India.
est. 1591 — the long account
Hyderabad's wealth came out of the ground. Golconda, a granite fort west of the present city, rose under the Qutb Shahi sultans after 1518 as the capital of a Deccan sultanate whose mines were then the world's main source of diamonds — the Koh-i-Noor and the Hope both passed through its market. Persian poets, merchants and soldiers migrated to its court, giving the city its enduring accent of Deccani Urdu and Persianate culture.
When Golconda's cramped citadel could no longer hold the capital, Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah founded a new city on the Musi in 1591, centered on the Charminar — part triumphal arch, part commemoration of a plague's end — with a grid of bazaars and a great mosque laid out around it. The Mughals swallowed the sultanate in 1687, but in 1724 their viceroy Asaf Jah declared himself effectively independent, founding the Nizam's dynasty that would rule Hyderabad State for 224 years as the largest and richest of the princely states.
The Nizams survived by subsidizing whoever was strongest — the French, then the British — and by spending: Chowmahalla Palace, the Falaknuma, Osmania University, a railway, and one of the subcontinent's great collections, now the Salar Jung. The last Nizam tried to stay independent in 1947; the Indian army ended that in five days in September 1948. The old city around the Charminar keeps the Qutb Shahi scale — bangle bazaars, haleem kitchens, Irani cafés — inside what is now one of India's technology capitals.
Hyderabad · Musi