It is hardly surprising that the erstwhile state of Hyderabad eventually acceded to the Indian dominion. Landlocked on all sides, its majority Hindu population was already sympathetic to the Indian cause. Nor is it shocking that the Nizam held out to keep his vast realm – one endowed with roughly the size of Great Britain and a capital as populous as Istanbul – independent. After all, his princely state had its own bureaucracy and postal system, and a degree of autonomy under British paramountcy. With prestigious global standing and a network of allies, the Nizam could not imagine the state vulnerable.

Yet the swiftness and violence of Operation Polo, the military invasion to annex Hyderabad in September 1948, remain striking. Why did negotiations with the Indian dominion falter? Why did the Nizam’s army, despite international exposure and wealth behind it, offer only a pitiful resistance? How could a ruler, so materially and diplomatically fortified, be swept aside abruptly?

Zeenath Khan’s debut, The Sirens of September, offers compelling answers to some of these questions while raising others. Drawing on memoirs, army journals and newspaper clippings, Khan animates the city’s story between 1946 and 1948 through the unlikely eyes of 15-year-old Farishteh Ali Khan, and the state’s commander-in-chief, General Syed Ahmed El Edroos.

A tragic quest for weapons

The plot centres on Farishteh, a studious girl from a noble family, as she is drawn into political and familial upheaval, with her orderly world slowly collapsing. She unwittingly assists her grandfather, a former legal counsel to the Nizam, in procuring weapons for the army’s depleted reserves. Her typewriter becomes a conduit through which Edroos’s trails in Europe are guided and documented.

Some of the book’s strongest sections emerge here, likely inspired from General Edroos’s biography, Hyderabad of the Seven Loaves. His war-room exchanges with Hyderabad’s last prime minister, Mir Laiq Ali, are tense and amusing. We witness paralysed men quarrelling over foregone conclusions, while the Indian army camps 40 kilometres away at Sadashivpet.

Despite ample evidence that no external support will arrive, Edroos maintains a facade of control to please the Nizam. He is acutely aware of the army’s deficiencies. Deeply distressing is the ineptitude and lack of initiative among his troops, contrasted with the relatively effective, though illegal and immoral, actions of the razakars.

The urgency of the situation is sometimes muted, but Khan excels at conveying Edroos’s spiralling dejection by tying in private anxieties. His son, who is meant to wed Farishteh, has joined the Royal Pakistan Air Force. Friends and able bureaucrats flee as central government blockades strangle even basic essentials like penicillin and milk powder. What haunts him most, however, is the realisation that he has failed ordinary people. The author deftly channels these intimate struggles through Farishteh’s world, grounding political collapse in everyday hardships.

Hyderabad’s opulence 

Fictional storytelling of this sort isn’t new to the Deccan. Celebrated Urdu writer Jeelani Bano’s novel Aiwan-e-Ghazal traces the lives of four women navigating the same turbulent times, moving from ashrafi royal households to extreme left-leaning dalams in forests. Khan, by contrast, largely sidesteps such politics. Her characters display occasional benevolence, but these fleeting gestures barely mask the pervasive ignorance and classism in her world.

Nevertheless, she uses the ashrafi milieu to full effect, presenting lavish households and a cross-section of city life that is both cosmopolitan and modern. Her characters listen to Glenn Miller, wear Chanel No. 5, and maintain Anglo-Indian social circles. Yet, the portrayal is not entirely westernised. Local traditions – such as mirasanis (folk singers) performing at weddings, or a bismillah ceremony later featuring Bade Ghulam Ali Khan – anchor the story in Deccan culture.

The pleasure of reading Sirens of September lies in this rich cultural tapestry. Religion, for instance, offers subtle nourishment, be it in a partition-afflicted village in Punjab, a makeshift prison or the Bangalore Club where Edroos spent his final days. The imam-e-zamin coin tied to Farishteh’s brother’s arm before he departs for London is another small but resonant moment. These details give texture to a history that might otherwise feel dry to readers uninterested in politics.

Adding to this picture is Darius Farouhar, a wealthy Parsi businessman whose intermittent appearances pivot the story from the guardianship of the state to that of a child. Meanwhile, Farishteh’s personal arc – the novel’s emotional core – loses momentum. Her suffering is palpable, but she remains largely static, accepting circumstances beyond her control unopposed. She does not summon agency. Perhaps survival alone is significant in her context, yet the narrative offers little emotional catharsis. A generous reading might suggest a maturity beyond her years, but the result is ultimately disheartening.

The novel’s emotional power materialises most vividly in an episode where Farishteh, driven by spite, writes a letter to Jawaharlal Nehru, deploring the casual mistreatment of her fellow citizens and the trauma it engenders. Though the letter is never sent, it provides a rare glimpse of her assertive voice. This episode also depicts what historical fiction uniquely permits: an unsent letter to Nehru becomes an act of genuine resistance.

Smithereens on the fringes

Having said that, the genre remains susceptible to wishful interpretation. A few weeks before Operation Polo, Farishteh hears a speech by Nehru on All India Radio, where he allegedly declares at a rally in Bombay: “If Hyderabad doesn’t accede to India, we will blow it to smithereens.”

The line startled me. How could a statesman of Nehru’s temperament and presumed civility make such a statement in public? I looked for evidence but found none – except in Mir Laiq Ali’s Tragedy of Hyderabad, written after he fled to Pakistan, where Nehru is said to have used these exact words in private. Whether that was recollection or revision is impossible to tell. Still, to place it in a public rally changes its resonance. The author notes having found references to a threatening speech in the Maharashtra State Archives and the Asiatic Library, though the wording is ambiguous – a reminder that fiction engaging with contested histories inhabits such gaps.

To single out one instance in an otherwise historically authentic narrative would be unfair. It may be plausible that Nehru’s frustration, and his eventual sanction of military force, carried that sentiment in spirit if not in speech. Parts of Hyderabad State’s borderlands – particularly Marathwada and Kalyana Karnataka – did end up in smithereens, first through the violence of the invasion, then through the long quiet that followed.

Even without police action, those regions were already treated as expendable fragments by Hyderabad’s own ruling class. As the book reveals, Edroos and the Nizam scarcely knew what lay beyond the city; they assumed the terrain too rough for any movement. That same neglect persists today. We turn towards Marathwada only in times of flood, drought or elections.

Future writing must attend to the fringes, building on what The Sirens of September and other works like Manreet Sodhi-Somehwar’s Hyderabad as well as Daneesh Majid’s The Hyderabadis: From 1947 to the Present-Day achieve for the city.

Surya Bulusu is a Researcher and Software Engineer at Avanti Fellows, a non-profit developing open-source tech for public schools.

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