Stranger than Fiction

“IN FACT, I felt that the fiction writers of my times were closer to the dark reality of the day than historians or journalists. If you want to understand what was happening in an ordinary Muslim’s life in Hyderabad of my generation, you should read fiction. That’s where my generation learned more about all that was happening: the tarikhu katha, ‘historical story.’ That’s where the real history is!”

Vara Lakshmi Sarvadevabhatla, a 92-year-old witness to the 1948 Police Action in Hyderabad, told Afsar Mohammad this when they met in 2014. This opinion was not rare among those that Afsar, a writer and literary scholar, spoke to while researching his book Remaking History: 1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad. While some interviewees remembered granular details of the period, for many, he felt, “most of their knowledge about that history comes from the literary writings of their days.”

The book explores obscured histories of the Police Action, or Operation Polo—five days of violence the princely state of Hyderabad witnessed during its annexation in September 1948, followed by large-scale anti-Muslim attacks. Afsar’s focus is on how these histories surface through witness accounts and fiction. One of his impetuses to write the book was the prevalence of nationalist public memories of the event. For instance, he recalls hearing LK Advani, in 1998, say that 17 September, the concluding day of the Police Action, should be known as “Telangana Liberation Day.” Telugu nationalism, the nation-state and either praise or blame for the nizam tend to dominate narratives about the period, he argues, warranting the excavation of an alternate history.

“Why and how was such a traumatic event ignored by mainstream historiography?” Afsar asks. The question also holds beyond academia—where scholars such as Omar Khalidi and AG Noorani and, more recently, historians like Sunil Purushotham and Taylor C Sherman have challenged this silence. The journalist Yunus Y Lasania has repeatedly called attention to the elision of the Police Action and the Telangana Rebellion in stories about the period. Earlier this year, he wrote of Operation Polo as an event “many Hyderabadis have stopped talking about due to generational trauma.”