The Forgotten Alliance That Tried to Rebuild the Caliphate From Hyderabad

Near the Ellora Caves in Maharashtra, off any road a car can reach, stands a battered grey tomb built in an unmistakably Ottoman Turkish style. Few people who pass nearby know what it is. It was constructed by order of the Nizam of Hyderabad to receive the body of Abdul Majid II, the last caliph of Islam, who died in exile in Paris in 1944. He was never buried there. His remains went instead to Medina's Jannat al-Baqi cemetery, a decade after his death. The empty tomb, as historian Imran Mulla argues, is a physical remnant of one of the most improbable political projects of the twentieth century: a plan to relocate the caliphate itself from a dead empire in Anatolia to a princely state in the Deccan.

Mulla, a British historian and the author of a book tracing this story, has spent years piecing together an episode almost entirely absent from popular memory in India, Turkey and the wider Muslim world. It runs from the fall of the Ottoman Empire, through the Khilafat movement that convulsed Indian politics in the 1920s, to a secret alliance between the last caliph's family and the Asaf Jahi dynasty that ruled Hyderabad — cemented by a marriage designed, on at least one side, to engineer a caliph's return through a grandson born in India.

Why the Caliphate Mattered to Indian Muslims

The caliphate, Mulla explains, represents succession to the Prophet Muhammad, a question contested since the earliest days of Islam and given different institutional forms across history. The Ottomans laid claim to it after conquering Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem and Baghdad — the former seat of the Abbasid caliphate — and built a distinctly mystical theory of the office around it. Court-connected Sufi philosophers, who tutored Ottoman princes, described the sultan-caliph as "the shadow of God on earth," bypassing an older juristic requirement, dating to the Abbasid period, that a caliph descend from the Prophet's tribe, the Quraysh. The Ottomans were not Arab, so their scholars built legitimacy instead on custodianship of the Islamic world's holiest cities and on a Persianate political philosophy shared across Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal courts — a theology of kingship in which the ruler was cast as a near-philosopher-king.

Indian Muslims, Mulla notes, had not been especially invested in the Ottoman caliphate while the Mughal Empire still nominally existed. It was the final symbolic collapse of Mughal authority in 1857, and the accompanying British takeover, that pushed them to look outward. "The fact that the Indian Muslims did not have the Mughal Empire anymore actually introduced a great deal of dynamism into Indian Muslim political thought," Mulla says, pointing to a period of intense and often unconventional intellectual production — from Shah Waliullah's legacy through the Deoband movement to Jamaat-e-Islami — that placed South Asia at the center of modern Islamic thought, not at its margins. At the same time, Sultan Abdulhamid II was independently promoting the Ottoman caliphate's authority over Muslims living under European colonial rule, partly to project power against rival empires and partly because the empire, having lost many non-Muslim subjects in wars, had itself become demographically more Islamic. The convergence of an anxious, newly colonized Indian Muslim population and an Ottoman state eager to claim leadership over Muslims everywhere produced, in Mulla's phrase, a genuinely new "panislamic politics" — one in which Indian thinkers such as the modernist Syed Ameer Ali, based mostly in London, became direct advisers and correspondents of Ottoman reformers and, later, of Caliph Abdul Majid himself.

The Khilafat Movement and Its Hindu-Muslim Politics

This backdrop produced the Khilafat movement of the early 1920s — India's first genuinely mass, countrywide political mobilization, and one Mulla insists was never a narrow religious cause. Its stated aim was to pressure the British not to dismember Ottoman lands, particularly Anatolia, in the aftermath of the First World War. Leaders including Maulana Mohammad Ali and Maulana Shaukat Ali — the "Ali brothers," still commemorated with a road named after them in Mumbai but little studied for their political thought — traveled to London and lobbied Parliament directly. Alongside them stood Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the Aga Khan III, and Mahatma Gandhi, who argued that the British Empire, having more Muslim subjects than any other power, was as much a Muslim empire as a Hindu or Christian one — a formulation the British themselves had originated, which Indian activists then turned back against them.

According to Mulla, the mobilization was not confined to Muslims. Hindu politicians, including some who would go on to become architects of Hindu nationalism, initially saw panislamic politics as a vehicle for enhancing India's international standing and demonstrating anti-colonial solidarity — a role that international socialist and communist movements would later play for other anti-colonial struggles. There is evidence, Mulla says, that this mobilization measurably restrained British policy in the Middle East during and after the war, something visible in the anxious correspondence of British officials at the time, worried about provoking unrest in a strategically vital region.

The movement also generated real communal tension. Maulana Abdul Bari pledged that Muslims would stop cow slaughter in solidarity with Hindus, and religious passions occasionally spilled into rioting. It was this same volatility that shaped the thinking of V. D. Savarkar, later regarded as the founding ideologue of Hindutva, who argued that the Khilafat movement proved Muslims were loyal to Mecca and Istanbul rather than to India — a claim Mulla describes as a powerful and enduring strand of Hindu nationalist argument. Mulla writes about a direct exchange between Savarkar and Shaukat Ali, in which the Ali brothers rejected the premise entirely. Mohammad Ali put the counter-argument most memorably in a 1930 speech at the Round Table Conference in London, shortly before his death, describing Indian Muslims as belonging to "two circles" — India and the Muslim world — neither of which they could abandon.

A Movement That Outlived Its Cause

The Khilafat movement collapsed for several overlapping reasons, Mulla explains. Violence against British officers at Chauri Chaura led Gandhi to call off the non-cooperation campaign, making renewed mobilization difficult. Simultaneously, Mustafa Kemal's nationalist movement succeeded in Anatolia, and the resulting settlement — a Grand National Assembly in Ankara alongside a retained, depoliticized caliphate under Abdul Majid — briefly satisfied Khilafat leaders, until rumors circulated that Ankara intended to marginalize or abolish the office altogether. When the Ottoman sultanate was abolished in 1922, the Grand National Assembly deliberately preserved the caliphate, reasoning, in Mulla's account, that the decision was not theirs alone to make because "the whole of the Islamic world is interested in this" — a deference owed substantially to the intensity of Indian Muslim agitation. Abdul Majid later cited exactly this reasoning, arguing that his legitimacy rested on "the consent and the support and recognition of the world's Muslims" rather than on the Turkish assembly that had installed him.

That legitimacy proved short-lived. Abdul Majid, unlike any caliph before him, held no temporal power, yet he refused the quiet, ceremonial role Ankara wanted for him — appearing in grand Friday processions, growing a beard, meeting political figures, and issuing statements on current events. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, concluding that a rival center of prestige in Istanbul threatened his nation-building project, abolished the caliphate outright on 3 March 1924. Abdul Majid and his family were put on the Orient Express to Switzerland that same day. From his hotel there, he issued a statement declaring the abolition illegitimate and insisting the question be settled by the Muslim world "in complete liberty." It was, Mulla argues, an entirely unprecedented idea: a modern, quasi-democratic caliphate, stripped of empire, whose authority would derive from recognition rather than conquest or inheritance. On the collapse of the movement itself, Indian Muslim opinion split. Azad accepted the abolition, arguing the Grand National Assembly now carried the caliphate's authority. The Ali brothers were outraged and pushed for revival — a disagreement that widened as the Congress-Muslim League alliance fractured over separate electorates and representation, ending the brief period of open Hindu-Muslim coordination that the Khilafat movement had made possible.

Hyderabad: The Muslim Capital That Almost Wasn't Forgotten

Exiled mostly to a villa in Nice on the French Riviera, Abdul Majid turned to allies in India to engineer his restoration — and the obvious partner was Hyderabad. Ruled by Mir Osman Ali Khan, the seventh Nizam, Hyderabad was roughly the size of Italy, immensely mineral-rich, and — crucially for Mulla's argument — genuinely cosmopolitan rather than merely wealthy. Tens of thousands of Arabs, many from Yemen, had settled in the state as a soldier class in Nizami service; a dynasty in southern Yemen, the Kathiri Sultanate, was founded with Hyderabadi funds and later married into the Asaf Jahi family. Administrators, poets and musicians who had once sought patronage at the Mughal court in Delhi now gravitated to Hyderabad, and the Nizam styled himself heir to that Mughal cultural inheritance. Osmania University, India's first to teach in a vernacular language — Urdu — was founded there. "Hyderabad's status as a sort of cultural hub for Muslims," Mulla says, made it an obvious refuge and rallying point, including for Islamic modernists seeking patronage the colonial mainstream would not offer.

According to Mulla, the Nizam himself had briefly considered claiming the caliphate for himself in the years before Abdul Majid's exile — an ambition every significant Muslim ruler of the era probably entertained at some point, he says, though the British would never have tolerated a caliph inside their Indian empire, and the Nizam dropped the idea quickly. Instead, two men engineered an alternative route: Maulana Shaukat Ali, the former Khilafat leader, and Marmaduke Pickthall, the British convert and scholar best remembered for his English translation of the Quran, produced under the Nizam's patronage. Their plan had two parts. The first was political: a World Islamic Congress, to be convened in Jerusalem with the caliph present, to muster recognition for a revived office. The second was dynastic: a marriage, arranged in 1931, between Abdul Majid's daughter, Princess Durru Shehvar, and the Nizam's elder son, Prince Azam Jah — with her cousin, Princess Niloufer, simultaneously marrying the Nizam's younger son, Prince Moazzam Jah.

The marriage, Mulla is emphatic, was not simply sentimental. Abdul Majid made it a negotiating condition that any firstborn son of the union would be in line to rule Hyderabad — securing, in effect, a future in which his own grandson would sit on the Nizam's throne, carrying both Ottoman religious prestige and Asaf Jahi wealth. After the wedding, a public statement declared that the union "cannot fail to have very happy repercussions for the Muslim world," language that alarmed the Turkish government, which lobbied London to keep Abdul Majid out of Palestine altogether.

Jerusalem, 1931: The Congress That Failed and Still Mattered

The World Islamic Congress convened in Jerusalem in December 1931, organized in alliance with Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, in the tense years following the Balfour Declaration under British mandatory rule. Ankara, alarmed, pressured the British to bar Abdul Majid personally from entering Palestine, even as mandate authorities judged that banning the Congress outright risked riots. His absence meant the Congress failed in its immediate purpose. But Mulla argues it had a lasting, unintended effect: it was the moment the Palestinian cause was cemented as both a pan-Arab and a panislamic one, with delegates including future leaders of Muslim-majority states, and — a detail Mulla highlights — an early version of the Palestinian flag presented as a gift to Shaukat Ali.

Mulla is careful about how he characterizes al-Husseini, whose legacy remains bitterly contested and has been invoked in recent debate connecting Palestinian politics to Nazism. At the time of the 1931 Congress, Mulla describes him as a pragmatic figure who worked within the British mandate and had accepted a proposed parliament with proportional communal representation — a plan Zionist leaders rejected. Al-Husseini radicalized later, after being forced into exile following the 1936 Arab Revolt, and courted Axis support during the Second World War on the logic, Mulla says, that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" — a calculation he compares to Subhas Chandra Bose's wartime alliance with the same powers, and, more provocatively, to Savarkar's own overtures toward Fascist Italy. Mulla declines to render moral verdicts on any of these figures, describing that as beyond a historian's task: his interest, he says, is establishing what happened and why, not judging it.

An Elite Cosmopolitanism, and Its Limits

Pressed on how representative this global Muslim networking really was — whether it amounted to more than an elite talking to itself, comparable to cross-border friendships among today's oligarchs — Mulla accepts the charge only partially. Cosmopolitanism, he argues, has always been disproportionately available to elites with the means to travel and correspond, and the historical record itself is skewed toward them, since the illiterate majority left little written trace. But he maintains the Khilafat movement was different in kind: a genuine mass mobilization that drew ordinary, often illiterate Indians into both domestic anti-colonial politics and an awareness of distant events that would have been "absolutely unthinkable" a century earlier. The scheme to revive the caliphate through Hyderabad, by contrast, he concedes was substantially an elite affair, run by a handful of operators moving between London, Nice, Jerusalem, Bombay and Hyderabad with a fluidity new to the century.

What the Archive Does and Doesn't Show

Mulla's account draws heavily on British Library holdings of colonial-era correspondence, Ottoman memoirs and translated letters between the caliph, his secretary and Princess Durru Shehvar, alongside her own memoirs and the recollections of Hyderabadi officials such as the Nawab of Chhatari. He is candid about the limits of this material. A deed shown to him in Hyderabad, purportedly signed by Abdul Majid after the 1931 wedding and formally transferring the caliphate to the Nizam, remains unauthenticated in his account and would require expert forensic dating he could not obtain. What is clearer is that the caliphate question was actively discussed at the highest levels in Hyderabad after Abdul Majid's death in 1944: British correspondence, including a letter to the viceroy, records that he had nominated his grandson, Prince Mukarram Jah — born in 1933 to Durru Shehvar and Azam Jah — as his successor.

Among the discoveries Mulla treats as most striking is the story of Princess Kenize Murad, born in France in 1940 after her mother, Princess Selma, was exiled from Istanbul in 1924 and married an Indian prince, the Raja of Kotwara — a union Shaukat Ali himself is said to have helped break apart. Selma died in wartime poverty in Paris, and her infant daughter was raised in a convent, hidden by nuns reluctant to hand her to a Muslim father, before reconnecting with him as a young adult and traveling to India.

Annexation, and a Dream Quietly Abandoned

Any possibility of a Hyderabad-based caliphate ended in 1948, when the Indian state annexed the princely kingdom. Mukarram Jah, educated at Harrow and Cambridge, returned to India only after formally becoming Nizam in 1967 — by then a title without a state, further hollowed out when Indira Gandhi abolished princely privy purses altogether. Mulla relates an account from Shahid Hussain Zubairi, a longtime confidant, who recalled Mukarram Jah acknowledging he had indeed been nominated by his grandfather as the next caliph, though he rarely discussed it, once remarking that the first caliph, Abu Bakr, had been a shepherd — so there was no shame in choosing to live quietly, driving a tractor for years in rural Australia. He died in Turkey in January 2023, largely unrecognized by his neighbors, before his body was returned to Hyderabad for burial.

One coda to the story, Mulla notes, is that independent India itself later tried, more than once, to join the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, arguing — on the same demographic logic the British Empire had once used to describe itself as a Muslim power — that India's Muslim population exceeded even Pakistan's. Pakistan blocked the application each time. For Mulla, the episode illustrates a continuity: the Indian state, decades after the Khilafat movement, was still reaching for panislamic legitimacy to bolster its standing with the Middle East, echoing exactly the logic Khilafat leaders had deployed in the 1920s.

Why an Erased History Still Matters

Mulla situates this material against a present-day climate in which, he argues, Indian Muslims are frequently denied space for a neutral reckoning with their own past — pushed into defensive silence, or toward narratives too easily conflated with the politics of groups like ISIS or al-Qaeda, distorting what were in fact intricate, contested debates about sovereignty and identity. He resists reading Indian Muslim history solely through a national lens, insisting the story he has assembled — spanning London, the French Riviera, Jerusalem, Bombay and Hyderabad — belongs to no single nation's archive. It is, in his account, a reminder that the subcontinent, with a Muslim population once larger than the entire Arab world's, was for a stretch of the twentieth century not a periphery of the Islamic world but very nearly its center — a status now forgotten, symbolized by an abandoned Ottoman tomb near the Ellora Caves, its meaning unknown to most who pass it.