[Caitlin]

City of Pearls part 7
Professor Ghyas Mateen, general secretary of the Hyderabad Literary Forum, describes how literary Urdu is now enjoying a minor revival. "A week without a mushaira, an evening poetry recital, is rare. Only in poems do you hear what makes Deccani Urdu so special—how it so perfectly captures our everyday world and our everyday words, which are all mixed up with Marathi and Telugu."
Children on summer vacation can now take a crash reading and writing course taught by Urdu Bachau Tahriq, the Save Urdu Movement. A new Urdu-medium university has recently been founded and a 15-volume Urdu encyclopedia, with many entries by Hyderabadi scholars, has just been published.
The seventh nizam of Hyderabad founded the Asafia Library earlier this century, which holds a vast collection of Arabic and Persian manuscripts, as well as Osmania University, which—as India's prewar center of Urdu higher education—graduated many notable figures of India's freedom struggle and at least one prime minister, P. V. Narasimha Rao.
In 1927 the nizam founded Islamic Culture, still one of the world's most respected Islamic-studies journals, and named as its first editor Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, best known in western countries for his translation The Meaning of the Glorious Koran. Sayyid Abdul Ala Mawdudi (1903-1979), the subcontinent's leading Islamic modernist thinker, spent his formative years in this intellectual milieu.
Mawdudi founded the grassroots Muslim organization Jamaat-e-Islami, whose Hyderabad chapter recently published a new translation of the Qur'an in Telugu. "We felt we needed a better way to explain our beliefs," says Anil Sohail, of the missionary group's student wing. "Much of our teaching work is done in the villages, where naturally neither Urdu nor English is of any help to us."
Even the city's architecture is culturally cross-referenced. The magnificently domed Quli Qutb Shah tombs owe an obvious debt to the monumental towers of south India's Hindu temples. A German-born architect of the British Raj named Vincent Esch added his own eclectic touch to the city skyline by topping the HighCourtBuilding, the CityCollege, and the Osmania GeneralHospital with a near-riot of squat cupolas and jali screens.
Back in the heart of Lad Bazaar, just off an alleyway called Moti Ghali, or Pearl Lane, Mir Vizarat Ali Pasha goes about the day with little concern for his city's grander works. His organization, the Toor Baitul Maal, provides interest-free loans to indigent women. All he asks in return is that they pay small monthly fees and provide as collateral a mere 20 grams (3/4oz) of gold.
Many of Vizarat Ali's 12,000 borrowers will never own much more than their gold bangles. They will almost certainly never wear the kind of jewels that Jahangir has just set about repairing in his father's shop—the four strands of pearls interspersed with emerald beads. The piece has been copied in the favored style of the nizams and nawabs of Hyderabad, who can be seen wearing such regalia in the oil portraits that hang in the city museum.