Hyderabad in 18 century its achivements
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the Deccan. He did not enjoy the unqualified support of Afżal-al-Dawla, who was profoundly conservative, and it did not help that hewas a Shiʿa at a Sunnite court. The loss of Berar rankled, and it was easy for enemies to blame the minister for his failure to get it back. The divān’s energies were variously focused upon the promotion of railway construction, coal mining, education, and public hygiene, and he paid particular attention to improving the civil service; but his policies, energetically enforced within Hyderabad city, often faltered in the districts. For the most part, he enjoyed the unqualified support of the British Resident and the Government of India. However, his attempt to establish a contingent of “Reformed Troops,” officered by Europeans and intended to replace the Hyderabad Contingent, was looked at with suspicion in Calcutta (Thornton, pp. 275-76).
In 1869, Afżal-al-Dawla died and was succeeded by his three-year-old son, Maḥbub-ʿAli (1869-1911). Sālār Jang’s power naturally increased. From this time on, his policies became more progressive, and he was less pliable towards the British: in 1874, for example, he presented a memorandum to the Government of India demanding the restoration of Berar and the disbandment of the Hyderabad Contingent. Inevitably, the memorandum was rejected at the highest level by the Secretary of State for India (Lord Salisbury). Despite these disputes, Sālār Jang and Hyderabad remained synonymous until his death on 8 February1883. Maḥbub- ʿAli Khan was formally installed as Nizam by Lord Ripon on 5 February 1884. He pursued the same enlightened policies as Sālār Jang but, like the latter, was hamstrung by financial exigencies. In retrospect, however, his reign seemed a kind of “Edwardian Age” before unbridled nationalism and communalism brought down the fragile structure. In his time, prior to World War I, the Hyderabad state comprised 83,000 square miles, a population of over 13,000,000 (87 percent of which was Hindu and 10.3 percent Muslim), and with an annual revenue of approximately three million pounds sterling. It was as large as Turkey, Italy, or Great Britain, was the premier princely state of British India, and, worldwide, was one of the few surviving Muslim monarchies. This was to be the inheritance of the twenty-six-year-old Nizam, ʿOṯmān-ʿAli Khan, in 1911 (Lynton, pp. 267-70).