HYDERABAD: Hyderabad’s most respected historian Narendra Luther passed away on Tuesday at a private hospital in Hyderabad at the age of 88. Also a bureaucrat, poet and an authority on all things Hyderabadi, he is survived by wife Bindi, son Rahul and daughter Sandhya. He was getting treated for a fracture and passed away after developing some health complications. His funeral took place at Vaikunta Mahaprasthanam in Whisper Valley, Jubilee Hills in the evening.
An IAS officer in the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh, he moved to Hyderabad in 1959 and developed deep roots with the city. He penned 13 books about Hyderabad’s history and had an undying love for the city’s rockscape. In fact, his house, built around a rock, in itself was a conversation starter. He served as the president of ‘Save The Rocks Society’.
He has written well-researched books, and the best known is ‘Mohammad Quli Qutb Shah, the Founder of Hyderabad’. He helped set up parks such as Jalagam Vengala Rao Park and the sound and light show in Golconda Fort.
He will be remembered for his multifarious contributions to the heritage of Hyderabad. Not only did he author several volumes on the history of Hyderabad and Secunderabad, often laced with interesting anecdotes, but also made it a passion to protect its heritage, including the rocks.
Though born in Budha Goraya in Punjab province, Pakistan, he represented the ‘Ganga Jamuni tehzeeb’ of Hyderabad and its very quintessence. When I, as the head of AP Tourism department, visited him for the first time in the rock-adorned living room of his house in Banjara Hills in 1993, he read out from his manuscripts of the ‘Autobiography of Hyderabad. While doing so, he was dreamy eyed, as if narrating his own autobiography! That was the sensitivity and passion which characterised all his publications (nearly a dozen ) on Hyderabad’s history and rockscapes of the State.
He was equally effusive when he spoke about the Golconda Fort in the seminar we arranged as part of the Golconda festival, and also on the city’s rocks, in his capacity as president, ‘Save the Rocks Society’.
In his administrative career, he also significantly contributed to the urban planning and heritage conservation of the city as its Municipal Commissioner (city father, as he would call it with a chuckle) and vice chairman of erstwhile HUDA (precursor to HMDA). As head of the Information and Public Relations department, he tried to usher in a new perspective.
He meticulously planned the celebrations for the 400th anniversary of Hyderabad in 1991-92 and was always proud of the legacy of the deccan heritage and his association with the city. As he mentioned in his autobiography, ‘A Bonsai Tree’ (not a memoir, as he specified), “It was a popular saying in Punjab that one who had not seen Lahore had not yet been born. Coming to Hyderabad, I felt twice-born.”
In fact, his autobiography, compared to the bravado and self adulation that marks many civil servants’ memoirs, is a refreshingly candid and honest account of his life and times. Having lived a full life, Mr. Narendra Luther sums up afterlife in his autobiography with these words: “According to a saying in the South, I have seen a thousand moons. For those who have accomplished that feat, there is no mourning when they cross over. There is only celebration of their life.” Let’s indeed celebrate the life of this chronicler of Hyderabad, as we bid adieu to him.
— BP Acharya, IAS, Retd, Former Spl Chief Secretary, Telangana