Cities are magnets of humanity. They draw people to them with an invisible pull, charm and an unidentifiable allure. The names of great cities of the world like Paris, Bombay, New York or London conjure up magical images. These cities have had their storytellers like Henry Miller, Jim Masselos, Gay Talese, or Charles Dickens. Now, stories about newer cities like Hyderabad (433 years old) are in vogue. Filling this gap of the modern story of Hyderabad is journalist Dinesh C. Sharma’s Beyond Biryani.
Hyderabad, early 20th century. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
The title is a play on India’s favourite food item (in terms of orders on online platforms) and a dissertation of looking beyond the food item. The result is a delightful romp through India’s post-Independence evolution as self-reliant industrial powerhouse and the role of Hyderabad in this story.
Manufacturing spirit
Hindustan Aeronautics Limited’s indigenously developed Light Combat Helicopter deployed for operations in Leh. | Photo Credit: ANI
Written in a matter-of-fact tone without indulgent flourish, Sharma chronicles the rise of Hyderabad as a hub of technology and globalisation with a parallel narrative of Indian scientists making-do and reaching out beyond the limited means of a poor country. Can you imagine scientists roaming around the streets of Chor Bazaar in Mumbai to buy war surplus supplies and use the different pieces to build India’s first analogue computer? Sharma tells us how. The same spirit appears to pervade when he explains how scientists at Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL)’s Hyderabad unit manufactured brake pads for MiG planes. “The powder metallurgy group of DMRL developed the pads indigenously within a few weeks and their efficacy was tested at HAL, Nashik. The pads were commercially manufactured at the Hyderabad unit of HAL,” writes Sharma.
People relax around the Charminar in Hyderabad. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
Split into 15 chapters with a certain degree of overlap in terms of information, the book charts a period between 1908 and 2022 in Hyderabad and India’s history. Spanning nearly two centuries, the book is an intense and deep lesson in history down to the minutiae of bureaucracy and politics laced with evolution of biology, chemistry, nuclear physics and genomics with biochemistry with the lead players of Indian science involved in it.
Faluknuma Palace, Hyderabad, in 1895. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/istock
In the process, we learn about how a princely kingdom at the edge of empire, that had one of the poorest literacy rates jumped into the big league, starting with a university which trusted Urdu, an Indian language, for pedagogy.
Pioneering moves
One of the pioneering moves in science in Hyderabad was the establishment of the Chloroform Commission that tested the efficacy of the chemical in the 1890s. The author seamlessly blends the evolving education scenario in a medieval kingdom with its rise as a knowledge hub. He marks the testing and detailing the safe dosage of anaesthesia as one of the steps in Hyderabad’s evolution as a hub for medicine. Hyderabad was lucky to have enlightened rulers who wanted to push the city into a bigger league and they ranged from Salar Jung, Nizam Osman Ali Khan, Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, N. Chandrababu Naidu and K. Chandrasekhar Rao, among others.
Yellow cake, made from natural uranium, is made into fuel bundles at the Nuclear Fuel Complex, Hyderabad, to power pressurised heavy-water reactors in the country. | Photo Credit: Sushanta Patronobish
Defence centre
Hyderabad has had an interesting role to play as a defence hub. While many defence establishments located in the city are well known, it is the ones that were ancillary to India’s nuclear quest which are documented for the first time in this book. Hyderabad lost the Institute of Nuclear Physics due to the politicking by Andhra Pradesh politicians in the aftermath of the creation of united AP in 1956. But it came into its own as a bunch of young scientists set up the Hyderabad Science Society and managed to create buzz about the subject. It reveals how the Atomic Minerals Division came to Hyderabad as did the Nuclear Fuel Complex as well as how the Electronics Corporation of India Limited was created for the express purpose of nuclear electronics production by Prof. A.S. Rao. The book sprawls over these decades and narrates an institution-building history, albeit focussing on institutions rather than dwelling on individuals. This brings an intensity to the subject where the distractions of individuals, their choices, food, dress sense are pulled out of the equation.
HITEC City, known as Hyderabad Information Technology Engineering Consultancy City, in Hyderabad. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/istock
It is when he is chronicling the rise of the pharmaceutical industry in Hyderabad that the author comes into his own. It is like he is describing meiosis of cells as he writes about scientists working at the pioneering Indian Drugs and Pharmaceuticals Limited unit in Hyderabad and other companies. These scientists and tinkerers would hit a lab to create molecules cracking the patent laws. They would then collaborate and sometimes disagree to create a spiderweb of concerns that have turned Hyderabad into a pharmaceutical manufacturing hub for the country.
Scientists at a Research and Development Centre in Hyderabad. | Photo Credit: AP
Here, Sharma also reveals how most of the technological development, breakthroughs and institution building were state-supported between 1960 and 1980s before entrepreneurs built on these institutions to expand and conjure bigger dreams and factories.
This one is for people who love the India story and want to learn how it happened.
Beyond Biryani; Dinesh C. Sharma, Westland Books, ₹799.
serish.n@thehindu.co.in
Published - September 27, 2024 09:00 am IST
