The Caliph, the Nizam and the Wedding That Tried to Rebuild an Empire

A tomb in the Deccan

Near the Ellora caves in Maharashtra stands a battered, half-forgotten Ottoman-style tomb, reachable only on foot through 40-degree heat. Historian Imran Mulla found almost no one locally aware of what it was. It had been built, on the orders of the Nizam of Hyderabad, for the last Ottoman caliph — who, in the end, was never buried there. That structure, and the buried alliance it represents, is the starting point of Mulla's book on the forgotten political and marital alliance between the House of Osman and Hyderabad's Asaf Jahi dynasty, discussed at length on Nous Podcast.

Mulla's route into the story began not with Hyderabad but with a portrait: Abdulmejid II, the last Ottoman caliph, who painted mosques and harems in a European orientalist style, wrote poetry and composed music. Elected caliph in 1922 by Turkey's new Grand National Assembly after the empire's collapse, he lasted barely two years before Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, alarmed by his public assertions of religious authority, abolished the caliphate outright on 3 March 1924 and put the entire Ottoman imperial family on the Orient Express into exile.

A caliph without an empire

What followed, Mulla argues, was an experiment in Islamic political thought that has been almost entirely forgotten: a modern, self-consciously democratic caliphate, stripped of territory, resting its legitimacy solely on "the consent and support and recognition of the world's Muslims" rather than any state. From his villa on the French Riviera, Abdulmejid declared the 1924 abolition illegitimate and set about building an international coalition to revive the office — a project centred, above all, on India.

Two Indian figures drove it: Maulana Shaukat Ali, a former leader of the Khilafat movement, and Marmaduke Pickthall, the British convert best known for translating the Quran under the Nizam's patronage. Their first initiative aimed at Jerusalem, where Shaukat Ali allied with the Mufti, Amin al-Husseini, to convene a World Islamic Congress that would rally support for Abdulmejid's revived caliphate. The Turkish government, alarmed, lobbied the British to keep Abdulmejid out of Palestine; the British Mandate obliged, banning him from attending his own congress. The gathering nonetheless marked, in Mulla's account, the moment Palestine became simultaneously a pan-Arab and pan-Islamic cause — a fascinating early photograph, he notes, shows an early Palestinian flag presented to Shaukat Ali there.

A wedding as statecraft

The second, more consequential initiative was Hyderabad itself. The Nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan — reputedly the richest man in the world, ruling a state the size of Italy with the largest Muslim population of any political unit on earth — had himself briefly considered claiming the caliphate before recognising the British would never tolerate it. Instead, in 1931, his son Prince Azam Jah married Abdulmejid's daughter, Princess Durrushehvar, binding the Ottoman and Asaf Jahi lines together. Abdulmejid, Mulla says, treated the marriage in explicitly political terms, making it a condition of the negotiations that any first-born son of the union stand in line to rule Hyderabad — positioning his own grandson, Prince Mukarram Jah, born in 1933, as a future Nizam who would carry both dynastic wealth and Ottoman religious prestige. A statement issued after the wedding declared it could not fail to have "very happy repercussions for the Muslim world."

Correspondence Mulla found in the British Library, including a letter to the Viceroy, shows that as late as the 1940s Hyderabad's court was still discussing Abdulmejid's wish to name Mukarram Jah his successor as caliph — a plan cut short by Abdulmejid's death in 1944 and then decisively foreclosed by Hyderabad's own annexation into India in 1948. Mukarram Jah never pursued the claim; he later drove tractors in the Australian outback, invoking the Prophet's companion Abu Bakr, once a shepherd, before eventually settling in relative obscurity in Turkey, where he died in 2023.

Why Hyderabad

Mulla situates Hyderabad's role in a cosmopolitanism that ran deeper than court politics. Tens of thousands of Yemeni Arabs served as a soldier class for the Nizam, sustaining a genuine link to the wider Islamic world; the state hosted India's first university teaching in a vernacular language, Osmania University, in Urdu; poets and administrators who had once sought patronage at the Mughal court in Delhi now gravitated to Hyderabad, which Mulla describes as "the last great flowering of Indo-Islamic culture." He is candid that this was substantially an elite story — the Khilafat movement itself, by contrast, was a genuine mass mobilisation, arguably India's first, drawing in Hindus and Muslims alike, with Gandhi among its most prominent non-Muslim supporters, who saw pan-Islamic politics as a vehicle for anti-colonial solidarity.

The argument the Hindu right still makes

Mulla addresses directly the charge, still current in Hindutva politics, that the Khilafat movement proves Indian Muslims' loyalties lay with Mecca and Istanbul rather than India — an argument he traces to V. D. Savarkar's own polemics against Khilafat leaders like Maulana Shaukat Ali. The Ali brothers' actual position, he notes, was a "capacious" one, articulated by Maulana Muhammad Ali at London's Round Table Conference in 1930: that Indian Muslims belonged simultaneously to two circles, India and the wider Muslim world, and could abandon neither. That the Khilafat and nationalist movements were, for a period, genuinely intertwined — Congress and Khilafat sessions often held in close proximity, with Gandhi, Nehru and Maulana Azad in close alliance with Shaukat and Muhammad Ali — is, Mulla argues, precisely what gets erased when the episode is retold as evidence of Muslim disloyalty.

The alliance fractured, he says, for reasons that had little to do with religion: the movement's own momentum broke after violence against British officers forced Gandhi to call off non-cooperation, and separately, Congress and the Muslim League split over constitutional questions — chiefly whether Muslims should retain separate electorates — even as the Hindu Mahasabha's influence within Congress politics grew.

Two princesses and a social revolution

The marriage brought two Ottoman princesses to Hyderabad together in 1931 — Durrushehvar, and her cousin Princess Niloufer, who married the Nizam's younger son. Mulla describes both as instituting something close to a social revolution in the Hyderabad court: rather than observing purdah, they appeared in public, took up philanthropy, wore saris, and became fashion icons still remembered in the city today — Hyderabad's airport, he points out, has a Cafe Niloufer named for the younger princess. After Hyderabad's annexation in 1948, Durrushehvar settled in London, where her children were being educated, and is buried there; Niloufer separated from her husband and eventually remarried in France.

A separate figure Mulla interviewed for the book, Princess Kenize Murad, embodies the human cost of the era's upheavals in miniature: born in Paris in 1940 to an Ottoman princess exiled in 1924 and an Indian prince, she was raised in ignorance of her origins in a convent after her mother's wartime death, only reuniting with her father — and, on the same day, meeting India's prime minister — at the age of twenty.

A history built from fragile fragments

Mulla is candid about the limits of his sources: much of the book rests on obscure Ottoman memoirs, private British correspondence, and Urdu court memoirs — including those of the Nawab of Chhatari — that had gone largely unread despite being published. He also describes, and treats with caution, a disputed deed shown to him in Hyderabad purporting to be Abdulmejid's signature transferring the caliphate to the Nizam after the 1931 wedding, which he says would need forensic dating before anyone could call it authentic. On the more politically fraught figure of Mufti Amin al-Husseini — later notorious for wartime contacts with the Axis powers — Mulla argues the record shows a pragmatic administrator who worked with the British Mandate and only turned toward the Nazis after being exiled following the 1936 Arab Revolt, a trajectory he compares to Subhas Chandra Bose's, and declines to render as a simple moral verdict, "because the past, after all, is a foreign country."

Forgetting an interconnected world

Mulla's larger claim is about memory rather than politics alone. The book's transcontinental cast — Istanbul, Jerusalem, the French Riviera, Bombay, Hyderabad, London — is offered as evidence that the world of the early twentieth century was, in specifically Islamic terms, far more interconnected than is remembered today, and that India, then home to more Muslims than the entire Arab world combined, sat at its centre rather than its periphery. He notes that independent India tried, more than once, to join the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation on the strength of its Muslim population — larger, at the time, than Pakistan's — and was blocked each time by Pakistani objection, a coda he reads as evidence that Delhi, too, once saw value in the same pan-Islamic status that Hyderabad's rulers had briefly imagined claiming for themselves.