Places to Visit in Telangana

Telangana came into being on 2 June 2014, carved from the north-western districts of the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh after a decades-long statehood movement — making it India's youngest state at the time. Yet the land it encompasses is ancient beyond reckoning: the Deccan plateau here was shaped by some of the oldest granite formations on the subcontinent, and human settlement in this region stretches back to the Neolithic period, and Iron Age megalithic burials are found across Karimnagar and Medak districts.

The dominant architectural and cultural imprint, however, belongs to two successive dynasties. The Qutb Shahi sultans founded Hyderabad in 1591 and built in a style that blended Persian geometry with local granite; their six-arched gateways and domed mosques in blackened limestone still anchor the old city. The Nizams of the Asaf Jahi dynasty who succeeded them — beginning with Mir Qamar-ud-Din Khan in 1724 — accumulated staggering wealth partly from the Golconda diamond trade, and that wealth produced palaces and libraries, while their prime ministers, the Salar Jungs, assembled one of the world's most idiosyncratic private art collections, now housed in the Salar Jung Museum.

Beyond Hyderabad, Telangana's terrain opens into a different India: the Kakatiya temples of Warangal, built in grey-black hornblende schist and known for their exquisitely perforated stone screens; the biodiversity of the Amrabad Tiger Reserve, the Telangana half of the former Nagarjunasagar-Srisailam reserve; and the serene Pocharam and Singur reservoirs fed by tributaries of the Godavari. The state's cuisine — spice-forward and unapologetically rich, from Hyderabadi haleem to Karimnagar pesarattu — rewards the visitor who eats where the locals eat, not where the hotels suggest.