Anuradha Reddy: “Heritage Doesn’t Need Government Permission to be Heritage”
HYDERABAD: Does a monument need a government stamp to be considered historic? Does a lake need to be notified by an authority before it earns the right to exist? These are the uncomfortable questions that heritage conservationist and INTACH convenor Anuradha Reddy is asking — loudly, and without apology.
“It is heritage, whether or not a government recognizes it,” Reddy asserts with conviction. “The question of whether it is notified by the government is very strange — because it is being looked at as though unless it is recognized by government, it has no history.”
But Hyderabad’s history did not begin with a gazette notification. It winds through the Satavahanas, through the Kakatiyas, through the Qutb Shahi reign at Golconda, through the Asafjahi dynasty — each era depositing a wealth of treasures: built heritage, music, dance, costume, and cuisine. “We are special in the Deccan,” Reddy says, “because we have taken the best out of everything — and we have, so far, been able to save it.” The question she now raises is whether that legacy will survive the present.
Reddy recounts a telling, lived experience. Ask people what Masab Tank is today, and the answer is almost always the same: “It’s a bus stop.” Few know that the name itself is a corruption of ‘Maa Saheba’ Tank — a water body built by Hayat Bakshi Begum, daughter of Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, the very founder of Hyderabad. Hayat Bakshi Begum, queen of the Qutb Shahi dynasty and one of its most influential figures, contributed this tank to the region’s water heritage. Today, the marble plaques from the site lie submerged in the water. The lake itself has been reduced to a playground.
The erasure runs deep. Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, in his Munajaat — his prayer for the city he founded — had wished: “Fill this city with people as Thou hast filled the ocean with fish, O Lord.” Reddy invokes that prayer with a bitter irony. “Those same lakes that came to us from the Qutb Shahi period — instead of being filled with fish — are filled with sharks today.”
This isn’t merely nostalgia. It is, as she frames it, a reckoning — a retrospective by someone who has watched this city transform across decades and is refusing to look away.
Reddy is equally pointed about what passes for conservation today. Restoration, she insists, must be rigorous — not cosmetic. “Is it enough to do something-ish and say we have done restoration?” she asks pointedly. She cites a heritage house replaced by what she describes as a “bathroom tile building,” justified on grounds of traffic requirements. This, she argues, is symptomatic of how heritage is treated in Hyderabad — as an inconvenience to be managed, not a legacy to be protected. “We don’t want to see a cement slab structure under the name of conservation or restoration,” she states plainly.
On tourism, Reddy offers a global lens. Countries with far fewer resources are drawing the world’s attention to their heritage — and doing it well. She points to Barcelona as a cautionary tale, where local communities have protested being overrun by unmanaged tourism. There should actually be a balance between both. Hyderabad, she argues, must attract the right kind of visitor — those who come to engage meaningfully with its history — and must protect what those visitors come to see.
Ultimately, Anuradha Reddy’s message is simple but urgent. Built heritage, lakes, trees, parks — recognized or not — are what give Hyderabad its identity. And protecting them is not optional.
“At least what we have left — of our lakes, of our trees, of our parks, and our built heritage — whether it is recognized by any governmental organization or not — we must protect and preserve. Because that is what gives the identity to our city.”
Heritage and people can co-exist in mutual harmony – our modern present and our history not in conflict, but amalgamated with each other. That, at its core, is what Anuradha Reddy is fighting for.
