From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Hyderabadis/Shehla Burney
Hyderabadis share a rich feudal heritage, a love of poetry, and a 500-year history fashioned from many different cultural strands – Hindu, Mughal, Turkish, Persian, Eurasian, and colonial British. Hyderabadi Canadians have attempted to preserve and recreate their traditional cultural patterns, even though the distinctive features of their past have long been erased in Hyderabad itself, where, since the 1950s, a totally different Andhra culture has been established. Hyderabadi Canadians express their love of Hyderabadi culture in mehfils (“music and poetry” sessions that go late into the night), lavish hospitality and elegant cuisine, the pleasure they take in speaking the Dakhni dialect of Urdu, and the love of ornate jewellery and clothes.
The Hyderabadi tradition of patronizing poets, literary salons, and open-air mushairas (poetry readings by groups of famous national and local poets), which once attracted thousands of people from all segments of society (including women, in separate enclosures) in Hyderabad, has been continued in Canada on a smaller scale. Qawwalis (an improvised form of Sufi and spiritualist poetry sung by groups of performers), mushairas, and mehfils are often held in private homes, with invited practitioners of these arts from India.
Among Hyderabadi Canadians there is also a radical, progressive element that goes back to a strong Marxist-Communist movement present in Hyderabad in the 1940s and 1950s. Though Hyderabad was a class-oriented society, with all its prevailing ills, it had a cultivated, highly educated intelligentsia that was influenced by revolutionary movements around the world and participated actively in India’s struggle for freedom. At their celebrations Hyderabadis in Canada still sing the ghazals (love poetry with a coded political and subversive message) of the revolutionary poet and freedom fighter Makhdoom Mohiuddin.
There are no specific newspapers or television programs catering to the Hyderabadi-Canadian community, but most like to watch Hindi films and South Asian television programs. They read English-language and Urdu newspapers directed to the South Asian communities, as well as the Urdu paper, Siasast, published in Hyderabad, which often reports on Hyderabadi-Canadian life.
The leisurely feudal lifestyle that most Hyderabadis had experienced before emigrating did not prepare them for the difficulties of life in Canada. Most Hyderabadis felt marginalized in their new land, but they were unable to return home, where life and society had totally changed, and where they were no longer culturally or racially welcome.
Today, most Hyderabadis have probably still not found their proper place in Canadian society, but they are much more settled and contented, and they take pleasure in their adult children, who have done well professionally. Their circles have expanded to include other Canadians of diverse backgrounds, and they have slowly acquired a sense of being Canadian. Many have achieved status, success, and job fulfilment.
