Hyderabadi walks into sunset
SERISH NANISETTI
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Bilkiz Alladin was not just a social figure but someone in love with the city, its heritage, its people and its literature.
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Bilkiz Alladin.
People who knew her called her Bilkizapa. People who wanted to become familiar with her too called her the same as a fair, wrinkled, frail lady with a handbag tucked under her arm wearing a Basra pearls necklace, and chunky gold earrings walked to the front rows of many a cultural dos in the city. Now, she will be the one familiar face missing from literary/cultural events as she passed away on October 16.
It was an eventful journey for someone born and brought up in Bombay, where she learnt tap dancing as well as kathak and travelled around the world before her marriage to a Hyderabadi Iqbal Alladin and moved to the city in 1954.
Not one to sit and lounge around, she reinvented herself with a gusto as a historian and a literary person by digging up Hyderabadi history. Incidentally, it was Bilkiz Alladin's notes copied from the National Archives in Delhi that proved helpful to William Dalrymple during his research on White Mughals. Her help is loaded with delicious irony that Dalrymple was following a story that Bilkiz wrote in 1989 `For the love of a Begum: The romantic story of James Kirkpatrick'.
If Begum's love was one story of cross-culture that Bilkiz Alladin helped bridge, we can also thank her for another love story that makes Hyderabadis go ga-ga: The love story of Golconda kings. It was Bilkiz who after a trip to the Pyramids realised the wonders of sound and light show and it was she who put together the first Golconda son-et-lumiere way back in 1975 with a budget of Rs. 4000.
A real polymath, if the later generations know her as a person in the forefront of reconstruction of Raymond's tomb in Malakpet, an earlier generation would know her as the person who wrote Gandhi: The Mystic Lotus and a story of Prophet Mohammed and for children Ramayana Retold.
The recognition for her efforts came way back in 1984 when the French honoured her with Chevalier dans I'Ordre des Arts et Lettres, but it would be more appropriate if her literary/historical legacy is preserved and cherished.
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