Remaking History

The story this book follows begins on August 15, 1947. As the new nation-states of India and Pakistan prepared to negotiate land and power, the citizens of the princely state of Hyderabad experienced the unravelling of an intense political conflict between the Union government of India and the local ruler, the Nizam of Hyderabad. The author explores how the state of Hyderabad was struggling to produce its own tools of cultural renaissance and modernity in the background of the Union Government of India's deployment of the central army, the Nizam's idea of an 'Muslim state' and the Telangana Armed struggle fostered by leftist parties. With evidence from the oral histories of various sections - both Muslims and non-Muslims - and a wide variety of written sources and historical documents, this book captures such an intense moment of new politics and cultural discourses.

'Afsar Mohammad's literary and social history paints a beautiful and nuanced new picture of Hyderabad in the 1940s and 1950s. Piecing together a decade of oral history work with long-lost sources in Telugu and Urdu, the book introduces readers to previously unheard voices from Hyderabad State. In listening attentively to these voices, Afsar Mohammad reveals the dilemmas faced and the possibilities that opened up for Muslim belonging and for Hyderabad's unique shared culture in the tumultuous years surrounding the Police Action in 1948. It is a carefully crafted, poignant history that deserves to be widely read.' Taylor Sherman, Author of Nehru's India: A History in Seven Myths
'A brave and methodologically rich work that opens up 1948 to re-think not only the Partition of 1947, the Police Action of 1948, but also, the everyday violences against Muslims in contemporary India. Afsar Mohammad shows how ordinary Muslims preserved and asserted their history against religious, linguistic and nationalist projects of re-writing history. Remaking History: 1948 Police Action and Muslims of Hyderabad is an important intervention in modern South Asian historiography.' Manan Asif Ahmed, Author of The Loss of Hindustan

Afsar Mohammad is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning South Asian scholar working on Hindu-Muslim interactions in India. He also focuses on Muslim writing and Telugu studies. Afsar teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. His previous work 'The Festival of Pirs: Popular Islam and Shared Devotion in South India,' published by the Oxford University Press, USA in 2013 has received high praise for its contributions to the studies on vernacular Islam.

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