The Rare World of Vintage Car Aficionados – Finding Beauty in the Old and Forgotten
HYDERABAD: A Morris Minor and a Jeep Wagoneer sit in a garage in Begumpet. The Morris has been in the family for over seven decades — its original owner, a Paigah noble Abul Fatah Khan, could not have known he was starting a four-generation legacy. Today, his great-grandson Mohammed Imaaduddin Khan tends to it with the same care. Alongside it sits a 1975 Wagoneer, acquired by Imaaduddin’s father Abul Fatah Khan II and now shared between the two. Every Sunday, they polish what can be polished, take the cars out for a drive, and make sure no speck of dust settles for too long. They wait for parts that may or may not arrive this year.
They are not frustrated. They are, by all accounts, content.
A short distance away, Mohammed Mubarak Abdullah Khan — son of Mohammed Miftahuddin Khan and brother of Abul Fatah Khan II — maintains his own 1962 Willys Jeep, a two-generation keeper in its own right. The temperament across all three households is identical — not defined by wealth or mechanical genius, but by an almost philosophical relationship with time. Weeks become acceptable units of waiting. Years become reasonable timelines for a project.
But patience alone cannot solve what is increasingly a structural problem. Mechanics who understand these machines are vanishingly scarce. When a part fails, the search spans Europe and United States — where dedicated ecosystems of spare parts and specialists still exist. In India, no such ecosystem has survived. Channels for importing vintage parts are very cumbersome and there is hardly any facilitation and no incentive.
The regulatory environment compounds the struggle. Green tax, steep re-registration fees, and exorbitant penalties for late re-registration turn the act of preservation into a financial ordeal. “When such cars are lost, a part of history is lost,” says Abul Fatah Khan II. “The government can subsidise re-registration, facilitate the import of old vehicle parts by reducing customs duties and charges. Penalties and all those things should be made reasonable and affordable.”
Restoration itself is not guaranteed. A car is only restorable if it has survived its first fifteen years without major accident damage — meaning only a small fraction of vintage vehicles can ever be saved. Each one lost is lost permanently.
What keeps this quiet community going is harder to define. There is no resale logic, no investment thesis. What these cars offer is rarer — a living connection to another era, and in the case of the Morris Minor in Begumpet, a direct line to a Paigah nobleman who once gripped the same steering wheel. If the state continues to look away, that connection — painstakingly maintained across generations — may one day simply run out of road.
