Urbanist expansions: Planner-technocrats, patrimonial ethics and state development in Hyderabad

This paper examines the rise of urban space as locus of intervention, and planning as modality of state power in South Asia from the late nineteenth century to the early post-colonial period. I view these developments through the re-making of Hyderabad, a major metropolis and capital of a sovereign non-colonial state until 1948. The regime's autonomous status made the city a venue for political experimentations informed by varied global and regional circuits. A particular develomentalist idiom fusing an older ideology of ethical patrimonialism and emerging technocratic legitimising rhetorics underwrote planning work in Hyderabad. Tracing urban expansion, housing and infrastructural development, and state-led economic planning schemes, I suggest Hyderabad exemplifies the emergence of a crucial and enduring new form ofpower in South Asia.