HYDERABAD: Fifty four years can be a long time, even a lifetime. But in the history of cities and civilizations, 54 years is possibly just a phase. A phase that has been long enough for Hyderabad to emerge as the centre of gravity drawing people from across Andhra Pradesh, but too short a period for these cultures to integrate with each other.

People from Andhra and Telangana regions may have coexisted for over five decades, but there has seemingly been no room for fusion of the two distinct cultures.

Andhra Pradesh was formed in 1956 and ever since there has been an influx of people to Hyderabad, the bone of contention currently in the ongoing agitation for a separate Telangana state. The city may have retained its 'city of Nizams' title, but it has a rather heterogenous character.

People from Seemandhra rub shoulders with those from Telangana, many of whom are the original inhabitants of Hyderabad, but the two cultures have remained distinctly different.

It is only obvious that at the heart of the Telangana agitation are the cultural differences between people of the two regions. The coexistence of the last many years does not reflect in the way the city lives. The Telugu dialect spoken by people of each region remains distinct and so do the festivals- Bathukamma is strictly a Telangana festival and Sankranti that of Andhra. Save a few, there have been no marriages that bond the two regions.

"People in Hyderabad (from other regions) have strong linkages with their native places so they go back to their villages for festivals and this is possibly a strong reason why the identities are so distinct," says social scientist C Ramachandraiah, who hails from Kadapa and has lived in Hyderabad for the last 15 years.

There are many, however, who maintain that they have merged with the city's social and cultural fabric, made it their own over the years and thus hate the word "settlers" used to describe them. Andhra man N Ramachandra Rao, a senior executive with an IT firm says, "There are more things common than uncommon among the people of the two regions. People from both sides are patient and respect each other." He goes on to cite examples of the marriages in his own family to people from Telangana region. That these were not arranged marriages doesn't matter, he says pointing out how the families from the two regions have indeed bonded culturally and even in the way they live. "They love bagara rice as much as the food from Andhra cuisine," Rao says.

But ask people from Telangana region and they find Ramachandra Rao's explanation not entirely agreeable. They say that people of the two regions never really mixed with each other, with those hailing from Andhra staying away from all that was local. "They behaved like migrants to Hyderabad and not its residents. They came with a colonial attitude and did not make any attempt to integrate with locals whatsoever," says 'T' supporter Madhusudan Reddy, former professor of political science at Osmania University. "They turned Bathukamma into an aboriginal festival and used cinema to impose their colonial superiority while caricaturing the man from Telangana region as a buffoon," Reddy says, pointing out how there can be no cultural integration when the underlying sentiments are laced with arrogance.

What has further widened the divide is the dominance of the Telugu dialect as spoken in the Andhra region. In the corridors of power it is the dialect of Krishna district that passes off as the official language, the Telangana dialect reduced to a country cousin identity. Apart from language, there has also been considerable influence of Andhra culture and cuisine on Hyderabad, something which has not gone down well with the people who call themselves the original Hyderabadis.

Andhra food is most easily found in the streets of the city while there are no joints serving Telangana food. "But you can't blame people from Andhra if those from Telangana failed to showcase their cuisine," says realtor Ashwin Rao, who hails from Telangana region but finds the lack of cultural integration a flawed line. On the contrary, he says that Andhra food available in the twin cities and enjoying the same popularity as Hyderabadi biryani are good examples of integration. While the cuisines may have retained their original character, there is ample room for both, he says.

Ramchandraiah further notes that the identities of people from the two regions could be distinct but given that the language spoken by both is the same, albeit in different dialects, the difference is not so stark. "It does not feel too different when you interact with a person from Telangana as it would if it was say a Punjabi or Bengali, where the language is totally different," he says.

What has prevented any "real integration", say Telangana Hyderabadis is the "white man's burden" that the city's residents hailing from Andhra region seem to carry. "The fruits of Arthur Cotton's green revolution have been enjoyed more by the people of the plains (Andhra region) than people in the Deccan and so the land there (in Andhra region) is fertile. So a person from the plains is different from the one from the hilly, rugged Deccan terrain. So they (those from Andhra) have assumed a sense of superiority," says T Vivek, convenor, Telangana History Society.

He further states that Marathis and Gujaratis too spoke to people from Telangana but there was never any problem like the way there was when a person from Andhra would speak to someone from Deccan land. Citing cultural integration with other sections, Vivek says the Dakhani word, 'kaiku', carries the influence of Marathi, Urdu and even Persian.

What kept the people of the two regions socially and culturally alienated was also economics. "People from Andhra had both control and access to government funds. They enjoyed dominance in a critical combination of politics, bureaucracy and industries," says writer and T supporter Bharath Bhushan, who has authored a book on Telangana.

Those like hotelier P Venugopal from Kukatpally wonder what the fuss is all about. He recollects enjoying best of both the regions since his childhood and not really finding any difference. He doesn't agree with the argument of financial dominance, citing examples of people from Telangana doing very well. Also, Ashwin Rao notes that people from Andhra have been more industrious and thus successful in contrast to the laidback nature of people from Telangana, which is again rooted in the history of the two parts of the state - one that was directly under the British and enjoyed a systematic revenue system, making land owners more hardworking to generate more revenue from their land, and another under the Nizams where only part of the revenue earned from the land went to the 'raja' and the rest to the Nizams. Given the poor returns, the amount of labour invested was also less. And, hence, the broad dissimilarity between the attitudes of the two sets of people, which of course has enough exceptions.

But then economics has also brought people from the two regions closer in some cases. Take for instance, U Venkateshwara Rao from Guntur and Prakash Reddy from Hyderabad. The duo have been close friends for over two decades now and even started a business venture. Two years ago they constructed a residential building Jay Sridevi Homes in Madhapur. Predictably, there are no regional differences between the two, though they are unable to come up with instances of any integration.

Integration or not, people of the two regions are at one level more similar than dissimilar but at another as different as chalk and cheese. The Telangana household serves tea and the Andhra household serves coffee, the morning ritual remaining unaffected by the neighbour of many years from another region. T Vivek says, "Hyderabad's history is 400 years old and Dakhani culture has evolved over this period. This is too short a period for any integration to happen." Or is it?