A Song of Hyderabad: Memories of a World Gone By

This is a remarkably honest and unabashed account of a life that begins during the fading days of the wealthiest of India's princely states. Bilquis Jehan was born in 1930 into a family with ties to the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad and enjoyed the privilege and luxury of a way of life that no longer exists. Her tale takes us through her childhood and her marriage at the age of 16, just at the birth of modern India and Pakistan in 1947. Her new life in Pakistan as the wife of an executive (himself half-European), working for a multinational corporation, is recounted with insight and delight. She and her family join the cosmopolitan world of the elite in what is now the megacity of Karachi, travels and experiences the world, far beyond what her own childhood would have predicted. Through all the changes she preserves her heritage in her own way, transmitting it through her books, Mughal Cuisine and Khush Zaiqa, of Mughal and Hyderabadi cuisine.