Documenting Heritage of Localities around Hyderabad Issues and Challenges

The story of irrevocable erasure and thoroughgoing transformation is part of the story of ‘development’ around Hyderabad as it is elsewhere. A case study of the transformation affecting the villages in and around the new Financial District of the Hi-tech city around Hyderabad was undertaken with the limited aim of focusing on the cultural loss due to these fast moving changes and the way the society thus impacted remembered its heritage. The reflections in this essay are about the unequal access to resources and facilities that the inner core of the settlement experiences, surrounded as it is by opulence of an unimaginable kind. While these conditions of materiality are important and deserve our attention, it is the tenacity of thoughts, emotions and social relations - all embedded in the cognitive space of people emanating out of these - that permit us to still access the cultural past of a community. This study has also prompted a questioning of the current methods of doing conventional historical research that is heavily dependent on the written word and the archive.