Place · Hadhrami community neighbourhood · India
Barkas
Also known as Chaush, Chaus, Hadhrami Arabs of the Deccan, Barkas, Barkas — the Chaush of Hyderabad
The Nizam's barracks, and the name is the word: Arab soldiers pronounced “barracks” as Barkas and it stuck to the neighbourhood outside the walled city. The men were Hadhrami, from the Hadhramaut valley in southern Yemen, and the Nizams recruited them for a reason they were explicit about — ringed by hostile Deccan powers, they wanted troops who could not defect to a rival court because they had no local ties to defect into. Their descendants, the Chaush, are still here, and across Marathwada and Telangana at Aurangabad, Jalna, Nanded and Karimnagar.
- Function
- Other / mixed
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered — The neighbourhood is established; accounts of the name’s origin and the community’s earliest recruitment differ.
- Location
- 17.313, 78.483
Worth knowing
Barkas Maidan was the drill ground, and the Chaush still speak a Dakhni carrying Hadhrami Arabic inside it — a Deccan dialect with a Yemeni substrate, spoken nowhere else.
The derivation from English “barracks” is the usual account; a minority version derives the name from Wadiya Barkas in Arabia. The community's own histories differ on whether the earliest recruits came as free mercenaries under contract or in less voluntary arrangements.
Connections (4)
- In the same set asA.C. Guards
Two foreign regiments of the same army, housed at opposite ends of the same city and routinely confused for one another. The Chaush of Barkas were Hadhrami Arabs from southern Yemen; the African Cavalry Guards were Siddis recruited from East Africa, and their lines are about ten kilometres away across Hyderabad. They were hired on the same principle — the Nizams, surrounded by rival Deccan powers and then by a paramount British resident, wanted household troops with no local loyalties available to defect into — but they were distinct communities, with distinct languages, and neither was the other.
- PrecursorBidar
The Nizam's Arab regiments repeat a Deccan pattern four centuries older. The Bahmani court at Bidar split between afaqis — the westerners, Persians, Arabs and Turks recruited from overseas — and Deccanis, the locally born, and the factional war between them wrecked the sultanate; Mahmud Gawan, an afaqi himself, was executed in 1481 on a forged charge. The logic that made foreign soldiers attractive, that they had no local faction to defect to, is exactly the logic the Nizams gave for hiring Hadhramis, and it cut the same way both times.
- TransmissionHyderabadi haleem
Harees travelled with the soldiers. Wheat and meat pounded to a paste is an Arabian dish, and the Hadhrami troops brought it to the Deccan under the sixth Nizam along with marag, mandi, kabsa and maqluba. A century of local spicing made it Hyderabadi haleem, and it is now the city's Ramzan trade and the first non-vegetarian dish in India to hold a Geographical Indication. Barkas is still where it is cooked closest to the original, and the version sold there is noticeably less spiced than the city's.
- Power passed toHyderabad
The community's fortune was the state's. Hyderabad's integration into the Indian Union in September 1948 dissolved the Nizam's irregular forces, and the Chaush lost the employment the whole settlement had been built around — Leif Manger's study of them is subtitled From Winners to Losers for this reason. Many went to Yemen or, from the 1970s, to the Gulf on labour contracts, which is how a Deccan neighbourhood came to send remittances back to the valley its ancestors were recruited from.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Barkas, Hyderabad” and “Chaush”. Leif Manger, “Hadramis in Hyderabad: From Winners to Losers”, Asian Journal of Social Science 35 (2007); Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim (2006); Ulrike Freitag and W. G. Clarence-Smith (eds), Hadhrami Traders, Scholars and Statesmen in the Indian Ocean 1750s–1960s.
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