Andhra Under the Nizams and the Colonial Madras Presidency
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Chapter 7: Andhra Under the Nizams and the Colonial Madras Presidency
The two centuries between the fall of Golconda in 1687 and the consolidation of British rule by the mid-nineteenth century produced the political map that would shape the Andhra region right up to 1956: a Telugu-speaking population split between a princely state ruled by the Nizams of Hyderabad and a directly administered British province, the Madras Presidency. Understanding this split — which districts fell on which side, how each side was governed, and why the split later mattered so much for the linguistic-state movements of the twentieth century — is essential for AP GK, because virtually every later chapter in this book, from the Andhra Movement to the 1956 reorganisation to the 2014 bifurcation, is really the long, slow working-out of this eighteenth-century administrative division. This chapter also carries a heavy load of exam-tested detail: the founding of the Asaf Jahi dynasty, the Carnatic Wars and the rise of British power on the Coromandel coast, the Doctrine of Lapse and the Permanent Settlement, the Zamindari and Ryotwari revenue systems, the Circar districts, and the socio-economic transformation of Andhra under colonial rule.
The Rise of the Asaf Jahi Dynasty
After Aurangzeb's conquest of Golconda in 1687, the former Qutb Shahi kingdom was absorbed into the Mughal Empire as the suba (province) of Hyderabad-Deccan. Mughal control over this distant southern province, however, was never as firm as in the imperial heartland, and it weakened rapidly after Aurangzeb's death in 1707 triggered a long war of succession and a steep decline in central Mughal authority. Into this vacuum stepped Mir Qamar-ud-din Khan, a Mughal noble who had served as viceroy of the Deccan. In 1724, after defeating a rival Mughal-appointed governor, Mubariz Khan, at the Battle of Shakar Kheda, he assumed effective independent control of the Deccan while maintaining nominal allegiance to the Mughal emperor in Delhi, taking the title Asaf Jah — hence the dynastic name Asaf Jahi — and later becoming widely known by his honorific Nizam-ul-Mulk, from which the popular title "Nizam" derives.
Asaf Jah I ruled from 1724 until his death in 1748, establishing Hyderabad as the capital of a large princely state covering most of present-day Telangana, substantial parts of coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema, and areas of present-day Karnataka and Maharashtra. His successors bore the same title, Nizam, followed by a regnal number, through to the seventh and last Nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan, whose state was integrated into the Indian Union in 1948 through the police action known as Operation Polo (covered in Chapter 9). For nearly two and a quarter centuries, then, the Nizams of Hyderabad were the largest and, by most accounts, the wealthiest princely rulers in British India, and their domain — commonly called Hyderabad State — included substantial Telugu-speaking Telangana territory that would only be joined to the rest of Telugu-speaking Andhra in 1956.
The Northern Circars and the Ceded Districts: How Coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema Came Under British Rule
While the Nizams consolidated control over the interior Deccan, the coastal Andhra region followed a different trajectory into British hands, occurring in two distinct waves that map directly onto the historic subdivisions still referenced in AP GK: the Northern Circars and the Ceded Districts.
The Northern Circars comprised five coastal districts — Srikakulam, Vizagapatam (Visakhapatnam), Rajahmundry (East and West Godavari), Machilipatnam (Krishna) and Guntur — originally held under Qutb Shahi and then Mughal suzerainty, later administered on behalf of the Nizam by French and then British interests through the mid-eighteenth century as the Carnatic Wars unfolded between the French East India Company and the British East India Company for dominance on the Coromandel coast. The French, under Joseph François Dupleix, obtained a grant of the Northern Circars from the Mughal-appointed Nizam Salabat Jung in 1753 in exchange for military support, but British victories in the Carnatic Wars, particularly following Robert Clive's decisive successes and the broader collapse of French power in India after the Seven Years' War, allowed the British East India Company to wrest control. In 1765, the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II granted the British a formal firman (imperial decree) confirming Company control of the Northern Circars, and by 1766 a treaty with the Nizam of Hyderabad, Nizam Ali Khan, formally ceded these five districts to Company administration in exchange for an annual tribute (peshkash) paid by the Company to the Nizam — a tribute obligation that, notably, persisted on paper for a very long time and became a recurring source of later diplomatic friction. The Northern Circars thus became the first substantial coastal Andhra territory to pass under direct British administration, integrated into the Madras Presidency.
The Ceded Districts — comprising the Rayalaseema region (Cuddapah, Kurnool, Anantapur/Ananthapuram and Bellary) plus a portion later reorganised — came under British control considerably later and by an entirely different route. These districts had been part of the Nizam's dominions in the interior. In 1800, under the terms of a subsidiary alliance arrangement negotiated by Governor-General Lord Wellesley, the Nizam ceded this territory to the East India Company in lieu of maintaining a British-subsidised military force (the Hyderabad Contingent) for his own defence — hence the enduring name "Ceded Districts." This 1800 cession is a frequently tested date in AP GK because it explains precisely why Rayalaseema, though historically and linguistically integrated with the rest of Telugu-speaking Andhra, came under British Madras Presidency administration a full generation after the coastal Circars, and a century and a half before it would be joined administratively with Telangana.
The Carnatic Wars and the Coromandel Coast
The broader contest for control of the Andhra and Tamil coastline in the mid-eighteenth century is usually taught under the umbrella of the three Carnatic Wars (roughly 1746–1763), fought primarily between the French and British East India Companies with shifting alliances among local Indian powers including the Nizam of Hyderabad and the Nawab of the Carnatic (Arcot). Although the main battles of the Carnatic Wars were concentrated further south around Madras (Chennai), Pondicherry and Arcot, their outcome directly determined which European power would dominate trade and, eventually, territorial control along the Andhra coast, since the winner of the Carnatic Wars effectively inherited the ability to negotiate directly with the Nizam for control of the Northern Circars. The decisive British advantage secured through these wars — cemented by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, which curtailed French territorial ambitions in India even as the French retained trading posts like Pondicherry and Yanam (the latter within present-day Andhra Pradesh territory, remaining a French enclave until its merger with India in 1954) — is the essential backdrop to the 1765–66 acquisition of the Northern Circars described above.
Yanam's status as a French colonial enclave on the Andhra coast, distinct from both British Madras Presidency territory and the Nizam's dominions, deserves specific note for exam purposes: it remained under French administration from the early eighteenth century until 1954, when it was transferred to India along with Pondicherry, Karaikal and Mahe, eventually forming part of the Union Territory of Puducherry rather than being merged into Andhra Pradesh despite its geographic location within Andhra's coastal belt — a small but genuinely distinctive anomaly in the region's political geography that recruitment exams occasionally test.
The Madras Presidency and Its Andhra Districts
Once the Northern Circars and later the Ceded Districts came under Company control, they were administratively folded into the Madras Presidency (originally called the Presidency of Fort St. George), one of the three original British Presidencies in India alongside Bengal and Bombay. By the mid-nineteenth century the Madras Presidency's Telugu-speaking districts comprised the full extent of what would later be called "Andhra": Ganjam and Vizagapatam in the north (Ganjam is now largely in Odisha, a detail relevant to the linguistic boundary disputes discussed in Chapter 8), Godavari, Krishna, Guntur and Nellore along the coast, and Kurnool, Anantapur, Cuddapah and Bellary in Rayalaseema — together with the Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Odia-speaking districts that made up the rest of this vast multilingual presidency, which stretched from Ganjam in the north to Kanyakumari in the south.
This multilingual character of the Madras Presidency is the single most important fact for understanding why the Andhra Movement (Chapter 8) took the specific shape it did: Telugu speakers were a large linguistic community — numerically the largest single group in the presidency for much of this period — governed from Madras city (Chennai) in a presidency administration whose official language of higher education, the High Court, and much of public life was English overlaid on a strongly Tamil-influenced administrative culture. Telugu-speaking leaders increasingly felt that their region's distinct linguistic and cultural identity, and its specific economic interests (particularly around irrigation and agrarian development in the delta districts), received insufficient attention from a Madras-centred administration, a grievance that hardened over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into an organised demand for a separate Telugu-speaking province.
Revenue Systems: Permanent Settlement, Zamindari and Ryotwari
Colonial administration in the Andhra districts is remembered above all for the revenue systems it imposed, since these systems shaped landholding patterns that persisted for well over a century and remain relevant to agrarian history questions in AP GK. Two principal systems operated side by side across different parts of the Madras Presidency's Andhra territory.
The Zamindari (or Permanent Settlement) system, extended to parts of the Northern Circars including areas of the Godavari and Vizagapatam districts, followed the model first devised by Lord Cornwallis in Bengal in 1793: large landholders (zamindars) were recognised as proprietors of the land and made responsible for collecting revenue from cultivators and remitting a fixed, permanently settled sum to the Company government. This created a powerful class of hereditary zamindars in parts of Andhra — the Zamindari estates of the Northern Circars, such as those of Vizianagaram, Bobbili, Pithapuram and others, became significant regional power centres whose heads often played prominent roles in later social and political life, including in early Congress politics and philanthropic activity in education.
The Ryotwari system, by contrast, and far more extensively applied across most of the Madras Presidency including large parts of coastal Andhra and virtually all of the Ceded Districts of Rayalaseema, was pioneered by Sir Thomas Munro (who served as Governor of Madras from 1820 to 1827 and is one of the most frequently named British administrators in AP GK) and his colleague Alexander Read. Under Ryotwari, the Company assessed and collected revenue directly from each individual cultivator (ryot) rather than through an intermediary zamindar, with periodic reassessment of the revenue demand. Munro's Ryotwari system is generally regarded by historians as having offered individual cultivators somewhat greater security of tenure than the Bengal-style Zamindari system, though the revenue demand itself was frequently set at levels that caused significant hardship, particularly during famine years. Thomas Munro is also remembered in Andhra for his generally more sympathetic and paternalistic approach to local administration compared to many contemporaries, and statues and memorials to him remain in parts of the erstwhile Madras Presidency.
Irrigation, the Delta Systems and Sir Arthur Cotton
No colonial-era development transformed the Andhra coastal economy more thoroughly than the great irrigation projects built across the Godavari and Krishna deltas in the mid-nineteenth century under the engineering leadership of Sir Arthur Cotton, a British engineer whose name remains one of the most revered in Andhra public memory to this day — statues, roads, a university (Sir Arthur Cotton University planned in Rajahmundry) and popular festivals still commemorate him. Cotton designed and oversaw construction of the Dowleswaram Anicut (barrage) across the Godavari river, completed in 1852, and a corresponding barrage across the Krishna river at Vijayawada (the Prakasam Barrage's predecessor structure), completed in 1855. These anicuts converted the deltas from famine-prone, unpredictable dry tracts into some of the most fertile and reliably irrigated paddy-growing regions in India, earning the Godavari and Krishna deltas the enduring popular titles "rice bowl of Andhra Pradesh" (and, in the case of the Godavari and Krishna delta belt more broadly, sometimes referenced as feeding well beyond the state). This irrigation-driven transformation created the specific agrarian prosperity of coastal Andhra's Godavari-Krishna belt that underpinned much of the region's later economic and political weight, including its central role in the Andhra Movement, since prosperous, educated landholding communities in these delta districts produced a disproportionate share of the region's early nationalist and linguistic-movement leadership.
Famines, Social Reform and the Growth of Modern Education
The nineteenth century in colonial Andhra was also marked by recurring famine, most severely the Great Famine of 1876–78 (part of the broader Madras Presidency and South Indian famine of that period), which caused enormous mortality across the Ceded Districts and parts of the Circars and prompted, eventually, greater British attention to irrigation and famine-relief administration, including the Famine Commission reports that followed. Against this backdrop of agrarian hardship, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also saw a significant flowering of social reform and modern education among Telugu-speaking communities, led by figures who are core AP GK personalities: Kandukuri Veeresalingam Pantulu (1848–1919), widely honoured as the father of the Telugu renaissance and a pioneering social reformer who campaigned against child marriage, promoted widow remarriage (organising the first Telugu widow remarriage in 1881), and established schools for girls; Gurajada Appa Rao, the writer whose 1897 play Kanyasulkam remains a landmark of modern Telugu literature and social criticism, attacking the dowry-like "bride price" system and other social evils; and a broader generation of Telugu intellectuals who built the institutional and literary foundations — newspapers, libraries, literary associations (the Andhra Sahitya Parishad and similar bodies) — that later fed directly into the political organisation of the Andhra Movement.
Inside Hyderabad State: The Nizam's Administration
While coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema developed under direct British administration, Telangana developed under a very different system within the Nizam's princely state, the largest princely state in British India by both area and population, covering roughly 82,000 square miles at its fullest extent. The Nizams governed through a mixed administrative apparatus that blended feudal jagirdari land grants (where jagirdars, often but not always drawn from the Muslim nobility, held revenue rights over large tracts) with a more modernised, salaried bureaucracy introduced particularly from the late nineteenth century onward under reforming prime ministers such as Salar Jung I, who served the sixth Nizam and pushed through significant administrative modernisation including judicial and revenue reforms, the introduction of a modern currency (the Hyderabadi rupee, distinct from British Indian currency), and infrastructure development including early railway lines.
A crucial and often-tested feature of Hyderabad State's internal politics was the demographic and social imbalance between its ruling elite and its general population: the Nizam and much of the administrative, landholding and military elite were Muslim, while the overwhelming majority of the population — a large proportion of it Telugu-speaking in the Telangana districts, alongside substantial Marathi- and Kannada-speaking populations in the state's other regions — was Hindu. This imbalance, combined with limited political representation, restricted press freedom, and Urdu-medium administration and education that placed Telugu speakers at a structural disadvantage in government service and higher education within their own home region, generated growing social and political grievance through the early twentieth century. This grievance produced two major, closely related movements covered in later chapters: the Andhra Mahasabha movement within Hyderabad State, which organised Telugu-speaking subjects of the Nizam for linguistic and political rights from the 1920s–1930s onward, and the armed Telangana Peasant Uprising (Telangana Armed Struggle) of 1946–1951, a communist-led agrarian rebellion against both feudal jagirdari exploitation and Nizam rule that is examined in Chapter 9 alongside the state's eventual integration into India.
The Growth of Political Consciousness and Early Congress Activity
The final decades of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth saw the Telugu districts of the Madras Presidency emerge as an increasingly active centre of Indian nationalist politics, producing leaders who would later anchor both the all-India freedom movement (treated fully in Chapter 11) and the specifically regional Andhra Movement (Chapter 8). The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, found early and enthusiastic support among educated Telugu professionals, lawyers and landholders in towns like Rajahmundry, Machilipatnam, Guntur, Vijayawada, Nellore and Kurnool, several of which became sites of vigorous local Congress committees, public associations and vernacular newspapers well before independence. The Andhra Jateeya Kalasala (Andhra National College) at Machilipatnam, founded in 1907 in the wake of the Swadeshi movement, and similar national schools established across the Telugu districts, reflected a self-consciously regional as well as national assertion of identity — Telugu-medium, locally funded institutions established partly in protest against what nationalists saw as an anglicised and Madras-centred colonial education system.
A distinct and important strand of this politics was the early articulation of the demand for linguistic reorganisation of Indian provinces. Telugu public opinion, led by figures associated with the Andhra Mahajana Sabha (founded 1913) and later formalised through the Andhra Provincial Congress Committee, began pressing from the early twentieth century for the creation of a separate Telugu-speaking province carved out of the multilingual Madras Presidency — decades before this demand crystallised into the mass movement and the fast unto death that finally produced the Andhra State in 1953. The Indian National Congress itself, at its Nagpur session in 1920, formally endorsed the principle of linguistic reorganisation of provinces for the purposes of party organisation, reconstituting its own provincial committees (including a separate Andhra Pradesh Congress Committee) along linguistic rather than the old presidency lines — an important early precedent frequently cited in Chapter 8's account of the Andhra Movement, since it shows that the principle of a Telugu linguistic province had elite political backing from Congress itself a full three decades before Potti Sriramulu's fast.
Coastal Andhra during this period was also a stronghold of Justice Party politics (a non-Brahmin political movement strong across the Madras Presidency) in certain districts, and later saw significant participation in the major all-India movements — non-cooperation (1920–22), civil disobedience and the salt satyagraha (1930), and the Quit India movement (1942) — drawing in Telugu leaders whose contributions are detailed in Chapter 11. The Madras Presidency legislature, reformed successively under the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909, the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms of 1919 (which introduced dyarchy) and the Government of India Act of 1935 (which introduced provincial autonomy), gave Telugu politicians increasing, if still constrained, avenues for public office, with several coastal Andhra leaders serving as ministers in the Madras Presidency government during the 1937–39 Congress ministry under C. Rajagopalachari and in subsequent administrations.
Comparative Table: Coastal Andhra/Rayalaseema (Madras Presidency) vs Telangana (Hyderabad State)
| Feature | Coastal Andhra & Rayalaseema | Telangana |
|---|---|---|
| Ruling authority | British Crown, via Madras Presidency | Nizam of Hyderabad (Asaf Jahi dynasty), a princely state |
| Came under this authority | Northern Circars: 1765–66; Ceded Districts: 1800 | Continuously under Asaf Jahi rule from 1724 to 1948 |
| Administrative language | English (higher administration), Telugu locally | Persian, then Urdu (administration and education) |
| Revenue system | Mainly Ryotwari, with some Zamindari estates in the Circars | Jagirdari and diwani (state-administered) land tenures |
| Key transformation | Godavari/Krishna delta irrigation (Arthur Cotton, 1852–55) | Limited modern irrigation; large feudal estates persisted |
| Political trajectory | Congress-led Andhra Movement from early 20th century | Andhra Mahasabha and Telangana Armed Struggle (1946–51) |
| Joined Indian Union | Automatically, as British India became independent in 1947 | Integrated by Operation Polo/Police Action, September 1948 |
Timeline: Andhra Under the Nizams and the Madras Presidency
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1687 | Mughal conquest of Golconda; Deccan becomes a Mughal suba |
| 1724 | Asaf Jah I defeats Mubariz Khan at Shakar Kheda; founds Asaf Jahi (Nizam) dynasty |
| 1746–1763 | Carnatic Wars between British and French East India Companies |
| 1753 | Nizam Salabat Jung grants Northern Circars to the French under Dupleix |
| 1763 | Treaty of Paris; French power in India curtailed |
| 1765 | Mughal emperor Shah Alam II grants British firman over Northern Circars |
| 1766 | Treaty with the Nizam formally cedes Northern Circars to British Company rule |
| 1793 | Permanent Settlement (Zamindari system) introduced by Cornwallis in Bengal, later extended to parts of the Circars |
| 1800 | Ceded Districts (Rayalaseema) transferred by the Nizam to Company control under Wellesley's subsidiary alliance system |
| 1820–1827 | Thomas Munro as Governor of Madras; consolidation of the Ryotwari system |
| 1852 | Dowleswaram Anicut on the Godavari completed under Arthur Cotton |
| 1855 | Krishna river barrage at Vijayawada completed |
| 1876–1878 | Great Famine across Madras Presidency, severely affecting Ceded Districts |
| 1881 | Kandukuri Veeresalingam organises first Telugu widow remarriage |
| 1897 | Gurajada Appa Rao's Kanyasulkam published |
| 1954 | Yanam and other French enclaves transferred to India |
Key Facts at a Glance
- The Asaf Jahi (Nizam) dynasty was founded in 1724 by Mir Qamar-ud-din Khan (Asaf Jah I), a former Mughal viceroy of the Deccan.
- Hyderabad State under the Nizams was the largest princely state in British India, covering most of present-day Telangana plus parts of Karnataka and Maharashtra.
- The Northern Circars (five coastal districts) were ceded to the British by the Nizam in 1766, following a 1765 Mughal firman.
- The Ceded Districts of Rayalaseema (Cuddapah, Kurnool, Anantapur, Bellary) were transferred by the Nizam to British control in 1800 under Lord Wellesley's subsidiary alliance system.
- Coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema were administered as part of the Madras Presidency; Telangana remained under direct Nizam rule until 1948.
- The Ryotwari revenue system, pioneered by Thomas Munro, was dominant across most of Madras Presidency's Andhra districts; Zamindari (Permanent Settlement) prevailed in parts of the Northern Circars.
- Sir Arthur Cotton built the Dowleswaram Anicut on the Godavari (completed 1852) and the Krishna barrage at Vijayawada (completed 1855), transforming the deltas into Andhra's rice bowl.
- Kandukuri Veeresalingam is regarded as the father of the Telugu renaissance and social reform movement.
- Yanam, a French colonial enclave on the Andhra coast, remained under French rule until 1954, later becoming part of Puducherry rather than Andhra Pradesh.
- Hyderabad State's administration under the Nizams used Urdu as the official language, disadvantaging the Telugu-speaking majority of Telangana in education and government service.
- The Andhra Mahasabha and the Telangana Armed Struggle (1946–51) emerged from grievances against Nizam rule and feudal jagirdari exploitation.
Practice MCQs
- Who founded the Asaf Jahi (Nizam) dynasty of Hyderabad?
a) Salar Jung I b) Mir Qamar-ud-din Khan (Asaf Jah I) c) Mir Osman Ali Khan d) Nizam Ali Khan
Answer: b. Mir Qamar-ud-din Khan assumed the title Asaf Jah in 1724 and founded the dynasty. - In which year were the Northern Circars formally ceded to British control by the Nizam?
a) 1753 b) 1763 c) 1766 d) 1800
Answer: c. A 1766 treaty with the Nizam confirmed British Company control over the Northern Circars. - The Ceded Districts of Rayalaseema were transferred to British control in which year and under what arrangement?
a) 1766, by Mughal firman b) 1800, under Wellesley's subsidiary alliance c) 1853, by Dupleix's grant d) 1948, by Operation Polo
Answer: b. In 1800 the Nizam ceded these districts to the Company in lieu of maintaining a subsidised military force. - Who pioneered the Ryotwari revenue system widely applied in the Madras Presidency?
a) Lord Cornwallis b) Thomas Munro c) Arthur Cotton d) Salar Jung I
Answer: b. Thomas Munro, Governor of Madras (1820–1827), is credited with consolidating the Ryotwari system. - Which engineer built the Dowleswaram Anicut on the Godavari river?
a) Thomas Munro b) Arthur Cotton c) Robert Clive d) Dupleix
Answer: b. Sir Arthur Cotton completed the Dowleswaram Anicut in 1852, transforming Godavari delta agriculture. - The Permanent Settlement (Zamindari) system was first introduced in Bengal by which Governor-General?
a) Lord Wellesley b) Lord Cornwallis c) Lord Dalhousie d) Warren Hastings
Answer: b. Lord Cornwallis introduced the Permanent Settlement in Bengal in 1793. - Which French colonial enclave on the Andhra coast remained under French rule until 1954?
a) Pondicherry b) Karaikal c) Yanam d) Mahe
Answer: c. Yanam, located within the Andhra coastal belt, remained French territory until 1954. - Who is regarded as the father of the Telugu social reform (renaissance) movement?
a) Gurajada Appa Rao b) Kandukuri Veeresalingam c) Potti Sriramulu d) Salar Jung I
Answer: b. Kandukuri Veeresalingam pioneered widow remarriage and girls' education in Telugu society. - Which play by Gurajada Appa Rao, published in 1897, is a landmark of modern Telugu social-critical literature?
a) Amuktamalyada b) Manucharitramu c) Kanyasulkam d) Vasucharitra
Answer: c. Kanyasulkam critiqued social evils including the dowry-like bride-price system. - What was the official administrative language of Hyderabad State under the Nizams?
a) Telugu b) Persian, later Urdu c) Marathi d) English
Answer: b. Persian was used initially, later replaced by Urdu, which disadvantaged the Telugu-speaking majority. - Which European power controlled the Northern Circars briefly before the British, under Dupleix's 1753 grant?
a) Portuguese b) Dutch c) French d) Danish
Answer: c. The French, under Dupleix, obtained a grant of the Northern Circars from Nizam Salabat Jung in 1753. - The Carnatic Wars were primarily fought between which two powers?
a) British and Portuguese b) British and French East India Companies c) British and the Nizam d) French and Dutch
Answer: b. The Carnatic Wars (1746–1763) were fought between British and French East India Companies for dominance in South India. - What was the Hyderabad Contingent?
a) The Nizam's personal bodyguard b) A British-subsidised military force maintained under the subsidiary alliance c) A Telangana peasant militia d) A French mercenary unit
Answer: b. The Hyderabad Contingent was the subsidised force whose costs led the Nizam to cede the Ceded Districts in 1800. - Which reforming Prime Minister modernised Hyderabad State's administration under the sixth Nizam?
a) Mir Osman Ali Khan b) Salar Jung I c) Asaf Jah I d) Thomas Munro
Answer: b. Salar Jung I introduced judicial, revenue and currency reforms in Hyderabad State. - What movement emerged from Telugu-speaking subjects' grievances within Hyderabad State from the 1920s–1930s onward?
a) Andhra Mahasabha b) Vishalandhra Mahasabha c) Andhra Sahitya Parishad d) Servants of India Society
Answer: a. The Andhra Mahasabha organised Telugu speakers within Hyderabad State for linguistic and political rights.