TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY MALEEHA FATIMA
Hyderabad, Telangana, India
There is a ruqqa, a wedding card tucked into the final folds of a fading family album. Its edges are curled with time, its calligraphy simple and deliberate. The card announces the union of my maternal grandparents – Ahmed Uddin and Rafi Unissa Begum, better known in our family as Pasha and Nafees. To outsiders, it may seem like a relic from another era – a formal artifact from 1960s Hyderabad. But for us, it is a window. A quiet archive into a love that outlived struggle, and a marriage that carried a layered history.
The card dates back to February 12, 1961. It was preserved by my maternal uncle, who collected photographs and documents from various relatives across Hyderabad to create a small family archive. He was the first and only member of the family to do that, which also means that many tangible aspects of my grandparent’s life and history, outside of my mamu’s archives, are now lost. After my mamu passed away in 2011, his siblings – my mother and her sisters – became custodians of these archives. This is around when I found this invitation card in one of the photo albums. Since I’d never really heard about my grandparent’s wedding, and there were no photographs that remained of the event, the discovery of this card was both surprising and exciting. Immediately curious to learn more, I took my many questions to many relatives.
The card is printed on thick paper, now yellowed with time, with neat black lettering in English. It is slightly damaged at the edges but remains readable and intact. What makes it particularly significant is that the invitation is issued not by the parents of the groom – which was the common practice in Hyderabad at the time – but by his older brother, Mr. Wali (Artist), and his wife. This choice reflects the family structure: my nanajaan was one of many siblings, and his older brothers helped raise him. The brother stepping into the formal role of host is both a reflection of that bond and of shared responsibility within a large joint family. The card also mentions Wali’s profession as an artist, an admired and respectable profession within Hyderabad’s social norms at the time. He had painted alongside M.F. Husain in his early years and knew him personally.
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My grandmother was lovingly called Nafees not just because she was beautiful, though that was certainly true, but she also carried herself with a grace that could not be taught. She grew up in Lal Tekri, the heart of Hyderabad, in a home marked by grandeur but shadowed by grief. Her father passed away when she was still a child. She was raised by her mother and mamujaan, her mother’s brother, who was a circle inspector of the neighbourhood police service. Her upbringing was full of contradictions – elegant sarees folded into wardrobes she used but never inherited, rooh afza served in cut-glass in a household where she was raised with love and acceptance, yet carried an acknowledgement of her status of being fatherless.
Across the Musi river, in the neighbourhood of Mangalhat, my grandfather Ahmed Uddin was coming of age. His father worked in the Nizam’s government – an official in the machinery of a fading empire. One among many siblings, my grandfather did not inherit much wealth. What he did inherit, though, was discipline and quiet ambition. He built his life slowly and steadily, shaping a future with his hands long before he had a family to hold.
Their alliance was arranged through a mushata, the Hyderabadi matchmaker, as was common in those days. The wedding took place at the residence of Deoddi Nawab Samsam-ul-Mulk Bahadur in Panja-Shah. By the 1960s, many Muslim deodis, once the grand ancestral homes of Hyderabad’s aristocracy, began to serve as rented venues for weddings and public functions. This shift reflected the changing fortunes of their owners, who, after Operation Polo and the integration of Hyderabad into the Indian Union in 1948, faced a sharp decline in status, income, and political influence. Stripped of the state patronage and privileges they once relied on, many aristocratic families struggled to maintain their large properties. Renting out parts of their deodis for events became a practical way to generate income and adapt to the socioeconomic realities of life.
The fall of the princely state had also left Muslims adrift in their own city. This period can be described as one of economic and cultural decline, where ordinary Muslims faced dislocation and uncertainty. Stripped of the informal protections and networks that had sustained them under the Nizam, many grappled with sudden economic hardship, social marginalization, and the slow erasure of a once-familiar cultural order. It was during this uncertain time that Ahmed Uddin and Rafi Unissa married.
They struggled in the first decade of their married life in Hyderabad, scraping together a living while raising five children. My grandfather’s work as an assistant foreman on the Nagarjuna Sagar dam project was physically demanding, but it offered something rare in those days – stability. Moreover, at the end of this project in 1967, he was offered another – one that would require him to migrate with his entire family. When this job offer came from Coromandel Fertilizers in Visakhapatnam, they made a quiet but radical decision. Instead of joining the Gulf migration, like many Hyderabadi Muslims of their generation, they moved east to a port city on the Bay of Bengal.
The American historian, Karen Leonard writes of India’s Hyderabadis abroad[1] and the pattern of Hyderabadi Muslim migration post 1948, primarily to the Arabian gulf, Pakistan, United States and other Western nations. However, my grandparents created a different kind of diaspora. They didn’t leave the country, but they did leave behind everything familiar – the Urdu-speaking lanes of purana sheher, the scent of ittar in the bazaars, the call of the muazzin echoing off mosque walls.
Visakhapatnam or Vizag was unfamiliar. The language was primarily Telugu, the climate humid and briny, the ocean too close and too vast. But they adapted, in more ways than one. For instance, my nanima began adding seafood to her Hyderabadi curries, adjusting old recipes to a new geography. The Hyderabadi khatti dal was still sour, but sometimes it shimmered with the oil of fried fish. Their children, my mother among them, went to an Anglo-Indian school and grew up speaking a mix of Urdu, English and Telugu. They moved through the layers of identity that come from growing up between languages and coastlines.
Yet despite the distance, their home in Vizag remained a sanctuary of Hyderabadi culture. The Urdu spoken there kept its elegance. Festivals were still marked with sheer khurma. My grandfather’s bookshelf held dusty volumes of Urdu literature. When we visited during school holidays, we often joked that our Nani’s house in Vizag felt more Hyderabadi than Hyderabad itself. The city we returned to had changed, its culture thinned out by globalization and gentrification. But in that modest Vizag flat, Deccani manners survived. So did its anxieties, its poetics, and its quiet insistence on grace.
Nanima and nanajaan made sure of it. She sought out dill leaves – sua bhaji – from back-alley markets and railway-side vendors, determined to recreate the flavours of home. No ingredient was too obscure if it brought a dish closer to what it once tasted like in Hyderabad. Their kitchen became a kind of archive, not of recipes alone but of memory, where the past simmered gently in copper-bottomed vessels. The house revered anything that carried the scent of a Dakhni identity. There were packs of Osmania biscuits stacked in tins, bottles of Zinda Tilismath tucked into corners of the medicine cabinet, rolled-up copies of Siyasat newspaper saved long after they had been read. On the shelf near the dressing table sat Dakhni surmedaanis, paan-daans and ugal-daans, not always in use but always displayed, as if to say “we remember.”
That little house in Annama Colony of Vizag also became a kind of holiday retreat for the extended clan. Cousins, uncles, friends of friends – they all found their way there. Some wrote letters in advance, others arrived without warning, hopping off the Godavari Express train with suitcases in hand and sea-breeze in their hair. No one was ever turned away. The house was always ready, always expectant, like it had a pulse of its own. Everyone called it Pashajaan’s house, a name of affection they used for my grandfather. And though they had modest means, my grandparents hosted as if they had plenty. The fridge might have been small, but it always had enough; the mattresses were thin, but the warmth never was. That house became a kind of free Airbnb before the term ever existed – a place where hospitality was practiced as a philosophy.
My nanima passed away in 2009, and my nanajaan followed three years later. In the quiet final moments of their lives, each of them, without knowing the other would do the same, left behind words that have stayed with us more than any heirloom. On her deathbed, nanima held her children’s hands and said she had lived a good life; that her husband was the best man she could have asked for, that she was grateful for every moment they had shared. When nanajaan’s time came, he too, with breath thinning and voice so soft, said he had no regrets. He had loved and been loved. He had built something meaningful. And that Nafees had made his life full. Their words were not dramatic declarations but gentle affirmations. In a world that had shifted under their feet, they had found steadiness in each other, and that was enough.
Now, I see that their married life was more than a personal bond. It was a political act, a diasporic negotiation. Benedict Anderson wrote about diasporic nationalism, about how nations are imagined from afar. In my grandparents’ home, that imagination happened over chai. It was expressed in the ordinary daily rituals that kept a culture alive. Operation Polo may have ended Hyderabad’s sovereignty, but in their living room in Vizag, the cultural sovereignty of the Deccan endured. Quietly. Stubbornly. Lovingly.
This invitation card from 1961, now a sepia slip of paper, has transformed into a portal. Not just to their wedding day, but to the conscious continuity of a culture in the wake of migration. In the union of Lal Tekri and Mangalhaat, in the move from the river Musi to the Bay of Bengal, a world was made. A world I was lucky to be born into.
[1] Karen Isaksen Leonard. Locating Home: India’s Hyderabadis abroad. Stanford University Press, 2007.