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Since there has been some recent discussion of Hyderabad Deccan here, I am sharing this book review from DAWN of Arslan Athar’s debut novel Forty Days of Mourning.
Note: Like everyone else these days, Arslan also has a Substack. He is a Lahore-based writer.
Hyderabad Deccan is not merely a setting in this novel. It is a living, breathing presence that shapes the people who inhabit it and the events that unfold. Once a princely state rich in terms of material wealth and cultural plurality, Hyderabad carried a distinct identity that rarely finds adequate representation in narratives of colonial India. Discussions around the British Raj and Partition often reduce history to binaries, and Hyderabad’s nuanced past is frequently overlooked. Athar’s novel resists this erasure with care and precision.
And:
As pressure from the newly formed Indian state increases, Hyderabad’s fragile independence begins to crack. The story follows this slow unravelling, moving from hope and denial to violence, loss and reckoning, ending with the state’s forced integration and the collective grief of a world that disappears almost overnight.
As the wife of a high-ranking army officer, Saleema moves through the city’s elite circles, aware of every whisper of political tension, every shifting alliance. But as the Nizam’s Hyderabad faces the inevitability of annexation, Saleema realises that neither status nor cunning can fully shield her, and the choices she makes ripple through both her personal life and the crumbling world around her.