Hyderabad

Charminar is always on the top of the mind of any tourist visiting Hyderabad. To say that Charminar is a major landmark in the city is to state the obvious, to repeat a cliché. The great monument is a synonym for Hyderabad and the pivot around which the glory and history of the city have developed. To imagine this 400-year-old city without Charminar is to imagine New York without the Statue of Liberty or Moscow without the Kremlin. Built by Mohammed Quli Qutub Shah in 1591, shortly after he had shifted his capital from Golkonda to what now is known as Hyderabad, this beautiful colossus in granite, lime, mortar and, some say, pulverised marble, was at one time the heart of the city. This great tribute to aesthetics looks sturdy and solid from a distance but as one moves closer, it emerges as an elegant and romantic edifice proclaiming its architectural eminence in all its detail and dignity. Apart from being the core of the city’s cultural milieu, it has become a brand name.

Charminar is a squarish structure with four towers in the four corners of the square, each of whose sides is 20 metres in length. Every side opens into a plaza through giant arches, which overlook four major thoroughfares and dwarf other features of the building except the minarets. Each arch is 11 metres wide and rises 20 metres to the pinnacle from the plinth. The minarets soar skywards by 24 metres from the roof of Charminar. Each minaret has four storeys, each looking like a delicately carved ring around the minaret. Some Anglophiles call Charminar the Arc de Triomphe of the East. From the ground to the apex, the minarets cover a length of 48.7 metres.

Makkah masjid is one of the oldest masjids in the city and easily the biggest. Muhammed Quli Qutub Shah began building it in 1617 under the supervision of Mir Faizullah Baig and Rangiah Choudhary. Mughal emperor Aurangzeb completed the construction in 1694. It took 77 years to come up as the magnificent edifice we see today. Like many other ancient buildings in the city, the mosque is a granite giant with awe-inspiring innards. The main hall of the mosque is 75 feet high, 220 feet wide and 180 feet long, big enough to accommodate ten thousand worshippers at a time.

Mecca masjid is just a hundred yards southwest of the historic Charminar. Between Muhammed Quli Qutub Shah and Aurangzeb, Abul Hasan Tana Shah of Golconda also continued the task launched by the Qutub Shahi kings. It is believed that Muhammed Quli commissioned bricks to be made from earth brought from Mecca and inducted them into the construction of the central arch of the mosque, which explains the name of the mosque.

Fifteen graceful arches support the roof of the main hall, five on each of the three sides. A sheer wall rises on the fourth side to provide mehrab. The three arched facades have been carved from a single piece of granite, which took five years to quarry. More than 8,000 masons and workers were employed to build this grand mosque. Mohammed Quli Qutub Shah himself laid the foundation stone of the mosque, when he failed to find one person who had never missed his prayers. The king seemed to be the only person who never missed on his prayers ever since he was 12 years of age.

“It is about 50 years since they began to build a splendid pagoda in the town which will be the grandest in all India when it is completed. The size of the stone is the subject of special accomplishment, and that of a niche, which is its place for prayer, is an entire rock of such enormous size that they spent five years in quarrying it, and 500 to 600 men were employed continually on its work. It required still more time to roll it up on to conveyance by which they brought it to the pagoda; and they took 1400 oxen to draw it,” says Tavernier in his travelogue.

Industrialists Birlas have built a number of temples of architectural magnificence all over the country which, strangely, are referred to as Birla temples and not Lakshminarayan temple or Venkateswara temple. A quarter century ago, they built a temple in Hyderabad entirely in marble brought from Rajasthan and dedicated it to Lord Venkateswara, known as Balaji in the north. The temple, built on a hillock called Kala Pahad, one of the Naubat Pahad twins, lords over its equally celebrated surroundings comprising the imposing Secretariat buildings, the azure-blue waters of Hussain Sagar, the serene and halcyon Lumbini Park, the luxurious Public Gardens dominated by the Asafjahi-style Legislative Assembly complex and the Reserve Bank of India. From the highest level of the temple, the spectacle around is breath-taking, providing a view of the verdure of the city, the incessant flow of traffic on the Tank Bund, crowds thronging the administrative complexes of the government, the newly-built flyovers and the cultural hub of the city Ravindra Bharathi and the NTR Memorial.

The business like ambience of the HITECH city is in juxtaposition to its equally famous and graceful neighbour Shilparamam, an arts and crafts village, manifesting the simultaneity of two disparate periods in history, and contributing to the variety and contradictions in Indian life and tradition. Both the HITECH city and Silparamam are an evidence of chief minister Chandrababu Naidu's skills in reconciling his respect for the old with his desire to inscribe Andhra Pradesh firmly on the roll of achievers and performers.

The axis of the HITECH city is an artistically and yet functionally built 10-storeyed cylindrical building surrounded by a galaxy of imposing structures raised to house IT companies, foreign and Indian. It is a city planned as an integrated township with all infrastructural facilities like office space, production areas housing colonies, showrooms, cafeteria, health club, banks, shopping complexes and auditoriums. One look at the township will explain why 25% of computer personnel in the United States are from Hyderabad.

The HITECH city has already attracted multinational software giants like Microsoft, IBM, Metamor, GE Capital, Toshiba, and Oracle and Indian companies like Satyam Computers and Wipro. An earth station has come up in the township which links Hyderabad to the five continents of the world. It is planned to permit further growth and expansion with the 160 acres of land allotted by the government. The cylindrical showpiece known as Cyber Towers offers five lakh square feet of executive space.