Telegraph – UK | Hyderabad, India: on the trail of the White Mughals

Hyderabad in southern India is home to resorted monuments and palace hotels. Ahead of his new BBC documentary, William Dalrymple tells of his love affair with the city.

William Dalrymple’s documentary ‘Love and Betrayal in India: The White Mughal’ will be broadcast on Thursday September 3 on BBC4 at 9pm.

… Meanwhile, the magnificent Golconda Tombs have been whitewashed and restored by the Aga Khan Foundation.

They are wonderfully ebullient and foppish monuments dating from the 15th and 16th centuries, with domes swelling out of all proportion to the base, each like a watermelon attempting to balance on a fig.

Above the domes rises the craggy citadel of Golconda, where were stored the ceaseless stream of Golconda diamonds that ensured that Hyderabad’s rulers would never ever be poor. Inside the walls you pass a succession of harems and bathing pools, pavilions and pleasure gardens.

When the French jeweller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier visited Golconda 1642 he found a society every bit as decadent as this architecture might suggest and he wrote that the town possessed more than 20,000 registered courtesans, who had to take it in turns to dance for the king every Friday.

Today the Fort is the magnificent venue for one of India’s leading literary festivals.

There has recently been a flood of new publications on the art and architecture of the region culminating in a major show of Deccani culture at the Metropolitan Museum in New York earlier this summer; while in Hyderabad itself there is a slow realisation that development and prosperity need not come at the expense of conserving heritage.

There is good news even for Kirkpatrick’s magnificent Palladian Residency, which I thought was about to collapse when I last saw it 20 years ago: an anonymous British donor has given $1 million to the World Monument Fund for its restoration.

Much has been lost, but the future of Hyderabad’s past now seems brighter than it has been for many decades, and there is every reason to hope that more travellers will soon begin to discover this most fascinating and still largely forgotten part of India.

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