Older than the dinosaurs
Palaces and empires have glittered and gone; an IT hub has now taken hold of Hyderabad. Through it all, silent sentinels have watched, dwarfing the rest of the city’s rich history. Huge granite rocks in precarious positions sit stacked like a godly game of Jenga across the region. There are big rocks resting on small ones; round rocks wedged between wide ones; flat ones sandwiching higgledypiggledy collections of boulders, any one of which could flatten a crowd.
“These kinds of balancing and piled-up formations are all over the Deccan plateau,” says Frauke Quader, secretary of the Society to Save Rocks (SSR), a citizens group formed 25 years ago to save the rocks from being destroyed amid unmindful construction. “Some of them look like they are about to tip over. But, of course, they won’t.”
Some of these rocks have even been incorporated into homes in the luxury residences at Jubilee Hills. “They form parts of walls inside homes, some houses have been built on top of the rocks, and in some places they divide two properties, forming a natural boundary,” Quader says.
The rocks have been here for 2.5 billion years, since before the dinosaurs, before the Himalayas, from a time when the earth was still a hot mess. Like much of the Deccan Plateau, this landscape was formed as a result of widespread volcanic activity, which cooled over time, and weathered into odd shapes.
“Two billion years of wind, water and fluctuating temperatures can do that,” says R Pavanaguru, a retired geology professor at Osmania University. “What we have found is that apart from being a geological marvel, these rocks support rich biodiversity, including plants that have medicinal value.”
As Hyderabad grows and expands (it is now the fourth most populous city in India, with its population number rising from 6.9 million to 10.2 million over the last 10 years), though, the rocks and the ecosystems they support are under threat. “Incorporating them into construction is difficult and expensive,” says Quader. “So for the most part, they are just blasted away.”
In 1998, SSR fought to get nine formations in the city listed as protected. They then fought to expand that list and, in 2009, it grew to 25. The state of Telangana, created in 2014, recognises rocks as heritage, but none of these 25 is listed as protected.
As a result, some of the bigger precincts have been nibbled at, Quader says. “Water tanks have been built on two. We’ve fought hard, raised our voices and gone to court,” he adds. “What we really need is for the city to collectively make a noise with us.”