Homestays in Hyderabad, Telangana

Hyderabad was laid out in 1591 on the south bank of the Musi, and the houses that came with it were built to face inward. A devdi, the walled mansion of a noble family, is a sequence of courtyards behind one very high gate, with the rooms wrapped around open ground rather than around the street. Smaller old city houses use the same logic at domestic scale: a paved court, lime-plastered walls thick enough to lag the afternoon, a carved timber jharokha leaning over the lane, and a flat terrace that becomes the coolest room in the house after dark. The Deccan granite the city stands on turns up in the plinths, and most of what survives is around Charminar, Shahalibanda and Purani Haveli.

North of the river the city changed shape twice. Osmania-era public work brought stone and arcades, then Banjara Hills and Jubilee Hills filled with bungalows built in among the granite boulders, and after the mid-nineties the western corridor filled with apartments. A courtyard house in the old city and a fourth-floor flat in Madhapur have almost nothing in common except the light.