This week’s travel dream: The enigmatic city of Hyderabad

The city of Hyderabad could be “India’s Oz,” said Marie Brenner in Travel + Leisure. Once the seat of one of the peninsula’s most lavish kingdoms, it remains a place of near-mythic colonial-era glamour even as it emerges as an international “high-tech boomtown.” Located near the heart of the country along the Musi River, Hyderabad served for generations as “the Islamic center of India, the center of Deccan art and culture.” Not even a century ago, its ruler, the seventh nizam, was considered the wealthiest man in the world, having inherited a fortune built on minerals and diamonds. Today, the city is “part Brigadoon and part Epcot,” characterized as much by fabulous “long-lost” wealth as by a very 21st-century airport.

Hyderabad pulls me first into its “hallucinatory past.” Weaving through bazaars and past whizzing auto rickshaws, our car approaches the Charminar, the “grand arch and mosque” on the city’s central artery. We screech to a halt: Thousands of goats flood the streets, some walking, some carried on children’s backs, others riding in rickshaws. It is the night before Eid al-Adha, a Muslim holy day, and it appears that ritual slaughter is as much a part of local culture as when the seventh nizam “still hid jewels in the engines of his rusty Rolls-Royces.” As traffic begins to pick up, I hear the “astonishing cascade of goat brays, horns, and the call to prayer.” The city’s “peculiar magic” is in full effect.

I catch sight of Chowmahalla Palace, “once the finest royal residence in the country.” The elegant Falaknuma Palace, another of the nizams’ homes, lies ahead. Painstakingly restored with the help of the first wife of the powerless current nizam, the palace today is a Taj Hotel that includes a library housing the nizam’s nearly 6,000 rare books and manuscripts. Just west of these ancient landmarks is “Cyberabad,” the city’s gleaming high-tech center. Google, Microsoft, Dell, and Facebook have set up shop in Hyderabad, which is also home to a booming film industry specializing in Tollywood, or Teluga language, films. No longer a city lost in time, Hyderabad is a “place where history continues to be made.”

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Contact: hyderabad.org.uk