India's Telangana became a state in 2014 after a very long history
Telangana only became an Indian state on 2 June 2014, carved out of Andhra Pradesh after a movement that dated back to the early 1950s. The land itself is ancient: its Deccan kingdoms traded with Rome, and Golconda was for centuries the world's source of its finest diamonds.
The oldest known polity here was Aśmaka, which flourished from roughly 700 BCE to 400 BCE along the Godavari and was the only southern kingdom among the sixteen great Mahajanapadas. Its capital is usually identified with modern Bodhan. The Satavahanas dominated from 230 BCE to 220 CE, and the Kakatiya dynasty, ruling from 1083 to 1323 with figures such as Rudrama Devi, gave the region what is remembered as its golden age before Muhammad bin Tughluq's forces ended it.
In 1518 Quli Qutb Mulk, governor of Golconda, broke from the Bahmani Sultanate and founded the Qutb Shahi dynasty. A 16th-century writer, Firishta, compared the kingdom under Ibrahim Qutb Shah to Egypt as a marketplace for the whole world, drawing traders from Persia, Arabia and Turkestan. Cotton weaving flourished too, producing muslin and calico. Aurangzeb took Golconda fort on 21 September 1687 after a year-long siege.
From 1724 the Asaf Jahi Nizams ruled Hyderabad, making the city their formal capital in 1769. Debts and a subsidiary alliance with the British cost them their coastal districts, leaving a landlocked princely state. When the Nizam refused to join independent India, the government annexed Hyderabad on 17 September 1948 in Operation Polo. In 1956 its Telugu-speaking districts were merged with Andhra State.
Hyderabad remains the capital and has become a hub for software firms and defence research labs. Telugu, one of India's classical languages, is the main official language, with Urdu second, and tribal languages such as Gondi and Koya are still spoken. One theory derives the name from Trilinga desha, the land of three Shaivite shrines.
Source: Telangana
