KCR’s planned demolition of Osmania Hospital undermines COVID efforts, city’s heritage
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, on 15 July, a general ward in Hyderabad’s 95-year-old Osmania General Hospital was flooded with ankle-deep water following heavy rainfall. Videos of the flooding soon began circulating on social media, showing hospital staff desperately pushing water out as packets of personal protective equipment floated nearby. Thirty patients from the inundated wards were shifted to another ward on the second floor of the already packed hospital, after state-response teams arrived.
Osmania hospital is one of the only tertiary hospitals in old city, home to nearly half of Hyderabad’s total population. The Telangana government’s various failures in dealing with the pandemic, including its low testing rate and the underreporting of cases, are likely more pronounced in the old city, which is poorer and more densely populated. Despite this, on 25 July, the state government said it would begin a consultation process with legislators to order the demolition of the Osmania General Hospital.
The hospital is a historical landmark and a key feature of the architecture of the old city. I have grown up all over the world and currently live in New York, but I have returned to Hyderabad nearly every year of my life. In each visit, there is one sight I know I can rely on to greet me on my approach to the old city: the cascading domes of the regal Osmania General Hospital on the banks of the Musi river. Like the hospital, many of Hyderabad’s most important landmarks date back to the reign of the city’s last Nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan. The Nizam has left an indelible imprint on Hyderabad, whose streets were a maze of Indo-Saracenic architecture that gave the city its distinctive identity. With the progressive erasure of its Nizamate past falling into disrepair, the past century has not been kind to this heritage. Recent governments have furthered this process by frequently demolishing buildings of this era for infrastructure or out of a short-sighted reimagining of the identity of the city.
The Telangana government’s attempt to demolish Osmania hospital is part of a larger trend of attempting to architecturally modernise Hyderabad at the cost of the city’s rich heritage and history. The government has frequently argued that giving the city an architecturally modern image would attract foreign investment. In 2016, following his first victory in the Hyderabad municipal corporation polls, K Chandrashekar Rao—the state’s chief minister and head of the Telangana Rashtra Samiti—gave a speech about attracting investment for infrastructure that would make Hyderabad “truly a global city.” This vision has been central to Rao’s plans for Hyderabad. However, in doing so, the government has ignored—or expedited—the erosion of the city’s cultural and historical identity.
On 7 July, Rao had another historical landmark, the 132-year-old Saifabad Palace—which was a part of the secretariat complex—demolished without warning in the middle of the night. Many of these demolitions were not because the buildings were structurally unsound, but because of the government’s desire to placate the powerful construction and real estate lobbies of the city.
The government’s attempt to demolish Osmania hospital is over half a decade old. According to a report by The News Minute, an online news portal, in October 2015, C Laxma Reddy, the state’s then health minister, said that the building was structurally weak and unfit to run a regular hospital. Following this, the Telangana government delisted Osmania Hospital as a heritage site and proposed a plan to demolish the hospital and build two blocks of 24-stories that would serve as a modern hospital. However, following opposition from civil society and organisations such as the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage—which works on heritage preservation—the government decided to roll back its plans.
An August 2015 report by INTACH declared that the building was in a “very good and structurally stable condition,” and added that the building was not a threat to its occupants. In November 2019, the state’s department of archaeology and museums and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture—a philanthropic organisation that works with heritage conservation—argued that Osmania hospital only needed some straightforward maintenance. The report stated that, “The structure was stable and in a good state of preservation with no apparent threat of structural failure or collapse.”
However, the recent flooding has given the government an opportunity to resume the process that was started in 2015. On 22 July 2020, K Ramesh Reddy, the state’s Director of Medical Education wrote to the hospital administration asking it to vacate the entire building including its six wards and two operation theatres. The government has already declared eight of the eleven blocks in the hospital unfit to use. Backing the government’s stand, on 20 July, the Telangana State Government Doctors’ Association organised protests in front of the hospital asking for a new structure to be built. The same day Etala Rajender, the current health minister of Telangana, announced that Osmania hospital would be demolished “soon.”
“What is appalling is that, in the midst of a pandemic, the state’s largest public hospital could be shut down,” Anuradha Naik, a Hyderabad-based conservation architect, told me. “In Hyderabad, the pandemic hit the old city the hardest, and the poorest people will not have the means to go to a hospital further away from them—taking that away from them at this time is unforgivable.” The issue, according to Naik and other experts, is not a structural problem, but sheer neglect. “If you have a patient who is sick, you don’t kill the patient, you fix the problem.”
So why would the government choose to kill the patient—in this case, a grand century-old building? The answer lies in a broader tragedy that’s been unfolding across the city for decades. Determined to cast itself as an ultra-modern high-tech global hub—the city is home to Amazon’s largest campus outside of Seattle, and Google, Facebook, and Apple all have major offices there—Hyderabad has committed itself to striding into the future at the expense of its rich past. “You have to have a basic sense of history, culture, heritage, and an idea of its importance,” Sajjad Shahid, a historian and conservation activist, told me. “These are markers of identity, these are icons of the past—if you don’t retain that, Hyderabad is no longer a 400-year-old city.”
Seeing the city I love become more and more unrecognisable with every visit breaks my heart. Vivid childhood memories of breezy drives through Banjara Hills and Jubilee Hills seem like wishful fabrications when I inch along those same streets blanketed in standstill traffic. Growing up, I marvelled at the impossibly tall Ashoka trees that towered above my grandparents’ home on a quiet street. Now, their villa is the only standalone house left on a busy major road, and the once daunting trees are dwarfed by dozens of soaring apartment blocks that have sprung up around them. My father grew up in the perennially congested lanes of the old city; he still gets a quiver in his voice as he laments the disappearance of all the beautiful mansions that once lined the boulevards—the few archways and filigreed balconies that linger from elegant buildings of yore succumb further and further to decay and obscurity.
I have often written about Hyderabad’s vanishing heritage, and on each of my trips back, I set out in pursuit of vestiges of the city’s glorious past. From obvious landmarks, like the Charminar monument or Qutub Shahi Tombs and Chowmahalla Palace, to lesser-known jewels, like the Paigah Tombs, a complex of ornately carved marble mausoleums, the Goshamahal Baradari, a 17th-century freemasons hall, and Badshahi Ashurkhana, a Shia mourning place. However, the Osmania General Hospital still remains a cherished landmark in the eyes of Hyderabad locals.
The building of the hospital by Osman Ali Khan, in the early 20th-century, was part of a broader reimagination of the city, in a period of flux, much like the present. Khan is hailed as the architect of modern Hyderabad, spearheading an ambitious construction frenzy that gave the city electricity, railways, postal services, an airport, libraries, parks, dams, bazaars, courts, and hospitals. In fact, it seems like the rapid modernisation the city has fixated with in recent years is not new—for all his flaws, the Nizam was ahead of his time when it came to urban planning. But unlike contemporary buildings, which are often ugly, uninspiring blocks, the Nizam also had a keen eye for aesthetics. The City Improvement Board, which he set up in 1912, sounds far more poetic in its Urdu iteration: Araish-e-Baldia, or “embellishment of the city.”
Modern medicine was thriving in Hyderabad under the Nizams. The city pioneered a major chloroform study in 1888, Hyderabad Medical College was established in 1847 and Nobel Prize-winning doctor Sir Ronald Ross discovered the malaria parasite at the medical college. In 1919, Khan commissioned British architect Vincent Esch to design a modern new hospital befitting his modern metropolis. This resulted in the Osmania General Hospital, as striking for its Indo-Saracenic architecture as it was for its cutting-edge facilities. While the building certainly needs repairs today, its layout and design are still remarkably versatile—it is not a converted palace or heritage building, and was specifically built as a hospital with modern medicine in mind. “It will still be relevant for another century unless there’s some massive medical change,” Naik said. “Why are we removing a health facility from the heart of the old city where it is most needed?”
Since 2015, Rao has been determined to erect a glossy new structure in the Osmania hospital’s place, leaving his own indelible mark on Hyderabad’s history. “The hospital is on 26 acres right in the middle of Hyderabad city, and a lot of people look at it in terms of real estate,” Naik told me. “What is on the land is priceless, but not a lot of people see it like that—they put a price on everything.” Hyderabad’s recent politicians have been so focused on leading the city into the future that they have been alarmingly myopic about the past, worrying more about their own legacies than preserving those of leaders that came before them.
Rao had expressed a desire to demolish the 132-year-old Saifabad Palace as early as 2014, when he first came to power in the state. Rao had vastu—a pseudoscience which prescribes architectural design rules—practitioners study the secretariat, who concluded that the building would bring bad luck. Following this the chief minister has not worked out of the secretariat, instead working out of an office in Pragati Bhavan, the chief minister’s official residence.
Revanth Reddy, a Congress member of parliament and the Forum For Good Governance, a Hyderabad based civil society organisation, challenged Rao’s decision to demolish the secretariat, including the Saifabad palace, in the Telangana High Court. On 29 June, the high court dismissed the pleas, after which the Telangana government demolished the secretariat. According to heritage activists, this building was also sound and simply in need of refurbishment, but the government was insistent on tearing down the entire complex and building a glossy new secretariat campus in its place.
“You cannot establish your own architectural identity without first getting rid of something that is more prominent, more entrenched in the minds of the public,” Shahid, the historian and conservation activist, told me. But judging by the rather bland, uninspired expanse of modern Hyderabad’s skyline, political leaders have not shown themselves worthy stewards of the city’s architectural fabric. “We have to be sensible people,” Shahid added. “We haven’t voted his aesthetic sense into office.”
On 17 August, the Telangana High Court is scheduled to hear several petitions challenging the impending demolition of the hospital. In the meantime, thousands of Hyderabadis have signed a petition opposing the demolition in an attempt to salvage one of the city’s few remaining architectural marvels. “There’s a quote—a city without a past is like a man without his memory,” Naik told me.“In Hyderabad, we are going to become like high-tech zombies without having a soul, because we don’t have anything from our past.”