Hyderabad began as a Golconda overflow in 1591
Telangana's capital covers about 650 square kilometres on the Deccan Plateau beside the Musi River at roughly 536 metres elevation. Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah founded the city in 1591 to ease crowded Golconda; pearls and Golconda diamonds later earned it the nickname City of Pearls.
Mughals annexed Hyderabad in 1687; in 1724 Asaf Jah I founded the Nizam dynasty that made the city imperial capital from 1769 to 1948. Charminar still emblematises the Qutb Shahi and Nizam eras. The name means Haydar's city—after Caliph Ali's epithet Haydar—though legends also credit Bhagmati/Hyder Mahal, and travellers once heard Baghnagar, city of gardens. Aurangzeb restyled an epithet to Dar-ul-Jihad on local coinage after conquest.
Stone Age megaliths recorded by Philip Meadows Taylor in 1851 and later digs show deep habitation. Kakatiya power fell to Delhi's Khaljis in the early fourteenth century; Sultan Quli fortified Golconda as Muhammad Nagar and launched the Qutb Shahi line in 1518. Railways from the 1880s and early twentieth-century factories south and east of Hussain Sagar modernised industry. After 1947 the Nizam sought independence until integration into India; Hyderabad State became a Part B state when the Constitution took effect on 26 January 1950. Mubariz Khan fortified the city as Mughal governor from 1713 before Asaf Jah's viceroyalty tipped into dynastic rule.
Central location between plateau and Western Ghats, plus twentieth-century industrialisation, drew major research and technology institutions. Historic bazaars still trade; Deccani arts fused local and migrant patronage under the Nizams. The city's arc—from fortress spillover to princely capital to Indian IT and pharma node—compresses half a millennium of Deccan politics into one Musi shore. Hussain Sagar, an artificial lake older than the 1591 founding, still organises the northern cityscape the Qutb Shahis chose for their garden capital.
Source: Hyderabad
