Review: Bhagmati: Why Hyderabad's Lost Queen Is the Soul of the City

Bhagmati: Why Hyderabad's Lost Queen Is the Soul of the City by Moupia Basu
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hooter: Queen Bhagmati of Hyderabad - Erased or a myth?

In Bhagmati: Why Hyderabad’s Lost Queen Is the Soul of the City, Moupia Basu stitches together legend and archival fragments with the flair of a poet and the caution of a historian. The result is a book that reads like a love letter to Hyderabad’s old soul. Basu resurrects the figure of Bhagmati; said to be a Hindu devadasi from Chichlam; whose dance in a temple is believed to have first enraptured the teenage prince Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah. One of the most fascinating threads is how Basu re-examines the lore of the Purana Pul, the old bridge over the Musi River, purportedly commissioned in 1578 to allow Quli safe passage to meet Bhagmati across the waters. She also probes the theory that the city was first named Bhagnagar (or Bhagyanagar) in her honor, before evolving into “Hyderabad.” Yet Basu never loses her grip on nuance: she admits there is no definitive inscription, coinage or tomb that confirms Bhagmati’s presence in official Qutb Shahi records. That tension between myth and evidence is exactly what gives the book its heartbeat. For readers drawn to the intersection of memory, identity, and romance, Bhagmati is as much a reclamation of forgotten voices as it is a city’s origin story reverberating through centuries.

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