Akbar Hydari

Akbar Hydari was born on November 8, 1869, in Bombay (present-day Mumbai), into a family belonging to the Sulaymani Bohra community, a small Shia Muslim group with deep roots in the commercial life of western India ^[1]. The household was connected by marriage to the Tyabjis, one of Bombay's most prominent Muslim families, whose members included judges, reformers, and early leaders of the Indian National Congress. Growing up in that circle exposed the young Hydari to a milieu where English education, public service, and religious identity coexisted comfortably ^[2].

He was educated in Bombay, studying at St. Xavier's College, and chose a career in government finance rather than law or commerce ^[1]. For anyone tracing an Akbar Hydari biography, this early grounding in accounts and audit matters. It gave him a command of budgets and balance sheets that few Indian public men of his generation possessed, and it shaped the pragmatic, numbers-first approach he later brought to the politics of a princely state.

Hydari entered the finance and accounts branch of the Government of India as a young man and spent his first professional decades in the disciplined world of imperial bookkeeping, serving in accountant-general roles in British Indian provinces ^[2]. The work was unglamorous but it built a reputation. By the early 1900s he was regarded as one of the ablest Indian officers in the accounts service, at a time when senior financial posts were still dominated by Britons ^[3].

The turning point came in 1905, when he transferred to the service of the Nizam of Hyderabad as accountant-general of the state ^[2]. Hyderabad was then the largest and richest of India's princely states, ruled by a Muslim dynasty over a mostly Hindu population, and its administration mixed Mughal court tradition with modern departments. Hydari thrived in this setting. He moved steadily upward through the financial hierarchy, and in 1921 he was appointed finance member of the Nizam's Executive Council, the cabinet of the state ^[3].

As finance minister he reorganized the state's revenues, put its currency and debt on a sounder footing, and steered investment toward railways, irrigation, and public institutions ^[4]. The Nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan, rewarded him with the Hyderabadi title of Nawab Hyder Nawaz Jung, and the British Crown knighted him, so that he became widely known simply as Sir Akbar Hydari ^[3].

Anyone asking who was Akbar Hydari usually encounters Osmania University first. In 1917 he drafted the memorandum to the Nizam urging the creation of a university that would teach modern subjects, medicine and engineering included, through the medium of Urdu, with English as a compulsory second language ^[5]. The Nizam approved, and Osmania University opened in Hyderabad in 1918 as the first university in India to use an Indian language as its medium of instruction. A translation bureau, the Darul Tarjuma, was established to render scientific and scholarly works into Urdu so that the experiment could work in practice ^[5].

Hydari's cultural interests ran wider than education. As finance member he funded the systematic conservation of the Buddhist cave paintings at Ajanta, which lay within the Nizam's dominions, bringing in specialist conservators and supporting the archaeologist Ghulam Yazdani's department ^[4]. The state also financed a lavish multi-volume photographic publication of the Ajanta frescoes, issued through Oxford University Press, which carried images of the caves to scholars across the world ^[4]. Among Akbar Hydari achievements, this patronage of scholarship, alongside support for the state archives and archaeology department, gave Hyderabad an intellectual prestige out of proportion to its political weight.

On the all-India stage, Hydari served as one of Hyderabad's delegates to the Round Table Conferences held in London between 1930 and 1932, where British officials, Indian politicians, and princely representatives debated a new constitution for India ^[6]. He argued for a federal scheme in which the princely states would join a united India while keeping internal autonomy, a position that made him one of the most visible spokesmen of the states' side. His standing in London was recognized when he was admitted to the Privy Council, an honor then held by only a handful of Indians ^[6].

In March 1937 the Nizam appointed Hydari president of the Executive Council, in effect Prime Minister of Hyderabad, the highest office a non-royal could hold in the state ^[3]. He took charge at a difficult moment. The Government of India Act of 1935 had introduced elected provincial governments in British India, and political movements were pressing the princely states to follow with reforms of their own.

His premiership, which lasted until 1941, mixed cautious constitutional change with firm assertion of the Nizam's authority. He oversaw modest steps toward broader participation in government while resisting demands for full responsible government ^[7]. The late 1930s also brought serious communal and political agitation in the state, including the satyagraha campaigns of 1938 and 1939 led by the Hyderabad State Congress and the Arya Samaj, which his administration met with a combination of bans, arrests, and eventual negotiation ^[7]. Historians have debated whether his gradualism was prudent statecraft or a missed opportunity, but few dispute his administrative skill in holding the machinery of the state together during those years ^[4].

Hydari married Amina, a granddaughter of the Bombay reformer Badruddin Tyabji's circle of kin, and she became a public figure in her own right ^[2]. Lady Amina Hydari devoted herself to social welfare in Hyderabad, working on maternal health, education for girls, and relief efforts, and institutions in the city later carried her name ^[2].

The couple's children continued the family tradition of public service. The best known, Muhammad Saleh Akbar Hydari, joined the Indian Civil Service and served as Governor of Assam in the first years after independence ^[1]. Among the plainer Akbar Hydari facts is this continuity: a Bombay accounts clerk of the 1890s founded what became, within two generations, one of independent India's notable administrative families. Contemporaries described Hydari himself as courteous, immensely industrious, and happiest when working through files, a minister who preferred quiet persuasion to public oratory ^[3].

In 1941, at the age of seventy-one, Hydari left Hyderabad to join the Viceroy's Executive Council in Delhi, part of a wartime expansion that brought more Indians into the central government during the Second World War ^[6]. It was a capstone appointment, placing a man who had spent his career in princely service at the summit of British Indian administration.

He did not hold the post for long. Hydari died in 1941 in Delhi, still in office, and tributes came from the Nizam's court, from British officials, and from the university he had helped create ^[1]. His death closed a career of more than four decades spent almost entirely inside government, first imperial, then princely, then imperial again.

Hydari's most durable monument is Osmania University, which grew after 1948 into one of India's largest universities, its early Urdu-medium experiment remembered as a landmark in the history of Indian education ^[5]. The conserved and published Ajanta paintings, now part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, owe part of their survival and fame to the money and attention his government directed at them in the 1920s ^[4].

His political legacy is more contested. Admirers point to a modernizing financier who gave Hyderabad sound money, good institutions, and a voice in constitutional debates. Critics, especially historians of the state's final decade, note that the order he preserved rested on an unelected government and that the reforms he offered came too slowly to reconcile Hyderabad's population before the upheavals of the 1940s ^[7]. Both readings agree on his ability. In the small group of Indian administrators who moved fluently between British India, the princely states, and London conference rooms, Sir Akbar Hydari was among the most accomplished, and his name still surfaces wherever the history of Hyderabad, Osmania University, or Ajanta is written ^[4].