Andhra Pradesh and Telagana are together an irregular rectangle with a northeast tapering protuberance. From the eastern long side which fronts the Bay of Bengal the land tilts upward to the dry Deccan Plateau, home to cotton growers. The Eastern Ghats are interrupted in the heart of the province by the Godavari River system, and to a lesser extend by two other rivers.
Well over three out of four speak Telegu, but Urdu speakers are more than one in ten and dominate in and around the state capital. More than one in ten use Hindi as a first language and it is the prevalent second language.
Religious belief approximately follows these linguistic lines, with Hindus being the overwhelming majority and Moslems appoaching ten percent.
The Urdu and Moslem center is Haidarubad ( formerly spelled Hyderabad), located in the Deccan on a tributary of the Krishna. Far to its northeast is the industrial seaport of Vishakhapatnam. Between, not far upstream from the mouths of the Krishna, is Vijayawada.
People arrived in southern India within a relatively short time of leaving Africa. Speakers of the ancestral form of Telegu left writings from 1400 years ago but were certainly around centuries earlier. About 900 years ago Telegu took its medieval form, heavily influenced by Sanskrit. The modern spoken language took shape in the last few centuries. In the first millenium B.C.E., the Hindu religion reached the Deccan, syncretically absorbing indiginous religions. This area participated in the old religion's evolution(2) and in the rise and nibbana (extingushing) of its chief rival, Buddhism.(3) Islam arrived in the 13th century and gained adherants under local Moslem states in the next couple of centuries. With the new religion came linguistic change; Urdu became the lingua franca of the Moghal Empire and increasingly the language of all of India's Moslems.
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Asia
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The Moghal Empire
Castes in India
The Eastern Ghats
(1)Pradesh means state.
(2)Strict Vedic traditions were initially in opposition to Shavism and Vaishnism but are now integral to Hinduism.
(3)Jainism also spread south, only to decline and virtually disappear there by early in the last millenium.