Reimagining ‘Hyderabadi Tehzeeb’ as civic duty: Transnational Muslim welfare and its ambivalent post COVID entanglements with the city administration

Abstract

Over the last two hundred years, the erstwhile Hyderabad state’s Hindu and Muslim elites forged a syncretic culture termed as Hyderabadi Tehzeeb. The antecedents of this culture of communal co-existence amidst religious differences lay in its ‘secular’ Muslim past. While conflicts in the princely state’s 400 years of existence gradually devolved along the lines of caste (between Brahmins and non-Brahmins), language (between Telugus and Marathis) and the mulki and ghair mulki (native – non-native) division, religious fault lines can only be traced to the churnings of the early twentieth century in the sub-continent, posing a challenge to the syncretic ethos espoused by the princely state and its elites. Although the term Hyderabadi Tehzeeb has some cultural currency till date, it has been marred by recurrent religious violence. When COVID struck during the first wave, the city administration struggled with the scale of welfare needs and law and order maintenance that a centrally imposed yet unplanned lockdown presented to them, magnified by the city’s haphazard growth and labyrinthine interiors. Moreover, the floods that year and the deadly second wave of the pandemic in 2021 made the provisions of government aid and welfare insufficient and inaccessible. Yet as these calamities unfolded in quick succession, many groups sprang into action to provide relief and welfare to the poor and the needy, often seeking support from the city’s globally dispersed diaspora. The city administration, realizing its limits either cautiously watched or tried to coopt community led welfare efforts under the government welfare umbrella. This paper will focus on transnational Muslim groups and organizations that responded to people’s distress calls, ‘irrespective of their religion’ as their ‘duty’ in line with the ethos of Hyderabadi tehzeeb. The protracted crisis provided an opportunity for these minority led groups to reimagine Hyderabadi Tehzeeb as not just a syncretic code of the elite but an everyday culture of the ordinary law-abiding Muslim citizens, either in opposition to or in intense negotiations with the state.