Writing this letter was a defining moment in the life of Sultan, the protagonist in Nelluri Kesava Swamy's short story, “Vimukti” (Liberation). Against the long history of the nawabi and ashraf practices of his family, this act of writing a letter itself was a groundbreaking move—and signifies his desire to embrace a version of modern Islam and reformism. Whereas this specific period of the 1940s represents several strands of modern and reformist debates in the larger Islamic world, I suggest that the case of Hyderabadi Muslim identity offers us a quite different example—one of an entirely modern Islamicate milieu. The short stories published during and around this period seem to function as a site of tension between the normative expressions of Islam and the shifting paradigms in the everyday life of Muslims in Hyderabad. Basing my discussion on Swamy's stories, I will examine how these two mutually connected concepts deal with gender equality, social justice, and pluralism—the key ingredients that shaped an alternative Muslim identity in the aftermath of the Police Action in Hyderabad. The production and circulation of such an intriguing discourse led to the creation of what we can call a version of the “New Muslim” (nayē musalmān) in the history of the Hyderabad state during the turbulent 1940s. I take this term “New Muslim” from my interlocutors such as the post–Police Action writers and activists, who were specifically mentioning the rise of a new Muslim consciousness in the wake of the Police Action.

For the entire community of Hyderabad state that had suffered either directly or indirectly during and after the Police Action, the Muslim identity was a daily recurring challenge for at least two decades after the event.