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Imran Mulla, "The Indian Caliphate, Exiled Ottomans and the Billionaire Prince" (Hurst, 2025)
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A
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B
Hello, I am Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. In this podcast we interview fiction and nonfiction authors working in around and about the Asia Pacific region. In 1924, Republic of Turkey voted to abolish the Ottoman Caliphate, ending a 400 year long claim by the Ottomans that they were the leaders of the Islamic world. Abdulmejid ii, who had been elected to the position by the Republic of Turkey just two years before, decamped for Europe. What followed was a bold plan by Indian Muslims and the Nizam of Hyderabad, one of the world's richest men at the time, to potentially revive the Caliphate as told in Imran Mullah's book the Indian Exiled Ottomans and the billionaire Prince. Imran is a journalist at Middle East Eye in London, which forgy studied history at the University of Cambridge. So Imran, thank you so much for coming on the show to talk about your book. I want to start by asking about the Caliphate. The Caliphate's kind of been this title kind of the nominal leader of the Muslim world and then the Ottoman Empire kind of ends up holding the Caliphate. What did it mean for the Ottomans to kind of be the seat of the fourth Caliphate? And did it give the Ottoman Empire kind of any responsibilities or any as the term we use today any soft power?
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C
Well, it's a very good question, and thank you very much for having me on. The Ottoman Empire was considered by historians, a previous generation of historians, to be uninterested in the issue of the caliphate. You know, they nominally held the caliphal title. The sultan was a caliph, meaning the successor to the Prophet, God's shadow on earth. But it wasn't particularly important. But actually, more recent scholarship has shown, particularly in the 16th century, the caliphate was crucial to imperial ideology. So the Ottomans, they took the holy cities of Islam, Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem. They had Baghdad, the former Abbasid capital, so a former capital of the caliphate. And this gave them pretty strong grounds to claim that they were the leaders of the Muslim world. And during the Ottoman Empire's rule, the caliphate became reconstituted from what it had been before. So the Ottomans, they used philosophers and Sufis, the royal court, to conceptualize the caliph as a kind of mystical figure, you know, endowed with kind of special attributes from God. The Ottoman Caliphate was considered to be the seal of the caliphate, and they would rule until the very end. And this was different from what the caliphate had previously been, which was it was defined by jurists. And the jurists who defined it in the medieval period generally believed that the caliphs had to be of the Prophet's tribe. So they had to be Arab, certainly, and the Ottomans were not Arabs. So we have a kind of revolution in Islamic political thought. Although, obviously the Ottoman caliphates still did have crucial elements in common from previous caliphates. But the caliphate became reconstituted multiple times in Ottoman history. So very Significantly, in the 19th century, Sultan Abdul Hamid II came up with a sort of new idea of the caliphate that was really designed to deal with the loss of a lot of Ottoman power in Europe. And the Ottoman Empire became more of a Muslim empire in its population than it ever had been because of the loss of lots of European territories. And also Muslims elsewhere had lost their empires. So, for example, the Mughal Empire in India was gone. And the Mughal Empire had been extremely powerful, more populous than the Ottoman Empire. And so Muslims in the Indian subcontinent, where the largest number of Muslims were, hadn't cared at all about the Ottoman claim to the caliphate. But now that the Mughals were gone and they were under British rule, they did care, and they started to look to the Ottoman Caliph as their leader in Islam. And so the Ottomans played up to that role to some extent. And, of course, in 1908, there was the famous Young Turk revolution, which was a constitutional revolution, and that reconstituted the caliphate Again, so the caliphate then became a constitutional revolution caliphate, where the Caliph was accountable to a constitution. It was a kind of quasi democratic idea. And so the one of the main figures in my book is Caliph Abdulmejid ii, who was the last Caliph. And he styled himself during this period as the democrat prince. He was a strong supporter of constitutionalism. But by the time he actually became the caliph in 1922, the Ottoman Empire had collapsed. After World War I, the empire was gone. A new Turkish government was trying to fashion a new nation. They abolished the Sultanate, so the source of Ottoman legitimacy. But they felt they couldn't abolish the caliphate because of its importance to the Islamic world more broadly. So Abdul Majid became the first and last elected Caliph of modern Turkey. He was appointed to the role by the Grand national assembly in Ankara. And this was a very short lived caliphate. The Caliphate was then abolished in 1924 because the Turkish government felt that it wasn't possible to have a Caliph in Istanbul without challenging their own authority in Ankara. And so they exiled Abdul Majid. And that's crucial to my book. But what's interesting here is that the Caliphate was reconstituted again. This was a radically modern caliphate, an Ottoman Caliphate without an Ottoman Empire. And so it didn't have an empire from which to draw legitimacy.
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B
So before we kind of get into all of that, I do want to kind of ask about Abdul Majid and kind of, you know, who was he before he became this last caliph? You know, what was his life like before he was eventually kind of kicked out of this role. It didn't seem like a, like fully happy life, you know, before he was eventually elected caliph.
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C
Well, he grew up essentially under Sultan Abdul Hamid ii, who is his cousin. Now, the Sultan was extremely paranoid and locked up most of his cousins, the princes. And so Abdul Majid was kept in relative confinement. He wasn't allowed to partake in public life, certainly not politics. But that meant that he spent all his days in intellectual and artistic pursuits. Now, the way I actually first came to this book was through my interest in Abdul Majid II because he was a great artist, actually a painter. And a few years ago some of his artwork was exhibited in Istanbul and he painted Orientalist style paintings. He was a calligrapher. He loved classical music, European in classical music, and played the, you know, the violin and the cello and the piano. He was even a rumored harpsichordist. But he also liked Ottoman classical music. So he was a very European figure in many ways. But he saw himself as an Ottoman European Muslim. And he believed these different facets of his identity were entirely coherent. And so we have a very cultivated member of the dynasty in Abdul Majid ii, someone who was, you know, quite liberal, quite modern, very pluralistic. And then in 1908, the revolution happened, and suddenly he was allowed to go out in public. And so he fashioned himself as a public figure who would comment on politics, who was a constitutionalist, called himself the Democrat Prince. And he continued this role. He was a strong critic of the Young Turks during the First World War, and then he was a critic of the sultan after the First World War, when the Ottoman lands were under European allied occupation. And the Sultan didn't go along with the national movement that was rising in Anatolia to fight back against the occupation. And the Sultan was sort of under British occupation and didn't lend his to that movement. And Abdul Majid was a very strong and prominent supporter of the national struggle. And this sort of perfectly primed him to step into the role of caliph after the Ottoman Empire fell.
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B
So, as you noted in your first answer, I mean, Abdul Medjid was kind of this strange, very brief experiment in having a constitutional caliph, an elected caliph. Of course, this all falls apart a couple of years later, kind of. How does. How does this kind of experiment fall apart, you know, under the Republic of Turkey and kind of what happens next?
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C
So the main reason that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, when he abolished the sultanate, didn't abolish the caliphate was because of the interest from Muslims elsewhere in the world and the importance of the caliphate in that regard, and the interest of Muslims, particularly in the Indian subcontinent, which was sort of demographically the most significant, but also politically extremely significant because it was under the British Empire. And so Indian Muslim lobbying helped restrain British policy in certain respects. And Mustafa Kemal and the nationalists had been in close communication with the Indian Muslim Khilafat movement, the Caliphate movement, which was in support of the Ottomans under allied occupation. And so they wanted to keep the Indian Muslims happy. And they also recognized that this concern from the rest of the Muslim world had been very useful to them as they fought against the allied occupation. And so they kept the caliphate, and that was crucial to it. But that source of kind of support for the caliphate, the broader Islamic world, also began to become a problem during Abdul Majid's caliphate. So Mustafa Kemal was there in Ankara. He had a new government. He wanted to fashion a modern state. And in 1923, Turkey actually declared itself a republic. But now what do you do about a caliph in Istanbul who actually has tremendous Prestige. And Abdul Majid was not a man to sort of be silent and hide away and shut up. He was a very kind of loud, prominent caliph. He did these grand, almost imperial processions through Istanbul, very prominent, very popular, both in Turkey and in the wider Islamic world. And Mustafa Kemal began to see this as a threat. He felt that it challenged the coherence of Turkey and was sort of an obstacle to Turkey becoming a modern nation. And so the Grand National assembly in March 1924, took the extraordinary step of actually abolishing the caliphate and ending hundreds of years of this institution. Now, Abdul Majid's response to this was that, well, the Grand national assembly does not have the right to abolish the caliphate because true legitimacy comes from the recognition of the world's Muslims. So Abdul Majid and his family were bundled off onto the Orient Express and they were all exiled, sent to. They ended up in Switzerland, actually. And from his Swiss hotel, Abdul Majid launched a grand plot, a scheme to revive the caliphate. So he immediately proclaimed publicly that it is now for the Muslim world in complete liberty and with full authority to decide on this vital question. So he was again appealing to a broader kind of Islamic community. And so this also was a radically new idea of the caliphate. Now there was no Ottoman Empire. He wasn't even in Istanbul anymore. And he was seeking a revived caliphate based on the support and recognition of Muslim leaders and notables from across the world. So, again, a radically modern Islamic political experiment.
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B
So we. We've talked about the. The Indian Muslims a few times who. Who are very much a part of this. Of this conversation. And you. You also talked a little bit of, kind of like, why the Indian Muslims were so interested in. In the caliphate, but kind of what. What role does this conversation have in the Indian independence movement? I mean, these. These are. These are other politicians that are kind of pushing back against British colonialism. They're also talking about the. How does this conversation about the caliphate kind of interact with the conversation about Indian colonial politics?
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C
Well, there was a huge battle in the late 19th century over the idea of the caliphate and of Islamic power and the Muslim world. So the British Empire actually came to define itself. So leading British thinkers and then statesmen defined the British Empire as the world's greatest Mohammedan power or the world's greatest Muslim power, which is a very bombastic claim based on the fact that the British Empire had more Muslims within it than actually the Ottoman Empire did. And so it was a demographic claim. And India was, of course, crucial to this. And it was India that shaped Britain's engagement with Islam in general because Middle Eastern policy was often dictated by what was happening in India. And Britain's Indian empire also had possessions in, in the Gulf. So actually in the Arab world on the Arabian and the Arabian peninsula. So India was seen as kind of central to British discourse about Islamic and Indian Muslim politicians In the early 20th century started to appropriate and adopt for themselves this idea that British, that the British Empire was the greatest Muslim power because it allowed them to make demands of the British that, you know, we're a Muslim power as much as we are a Christian or a Hindu power and therefore Britain must fulfil her obligations to her Muslim subjects. This was the claim. And so that's the root of the Khilafat movement which was India's first truly pan Indian mass mobilization. It was the birth really of the Indian independence movement. And it was all about the Ottomans. So it was about the allied occupation of Anatolia and Istanbul. And Muslims in India were, were furious and campaigning against this and to lobby the British to preserve the caliphate. But what's really important here is that it wasn't just Muslims but also Hindus who participated in this kind of global Islamic politics. So actually one of the leaders of the Khilafat movement was none other than Mahatma Gandhi. It was the Congress Party as well as the Muslim League that was crucial to the Khilafat movement. And this was partially because of a desire for Hindu Muslim unity. And this would be the forging of a pale Indian identity that could demand greater rights and later on it would be independence from the British. But it was also because campaigning for the Caliphate was actually seen as a useful means of anti colonial solidarity. And it was through this kind of global Islamic politics that India could assert its importance in the world at large in anti colonial struggles across the world. So even some thinkers who would later become Hindu nationalists supported the Khilafat movement. And this was a movement which had huge ramifications and saw the birth of civil disobedience on a wide scale in India, the non cooperation movement. And it fell apart after the Caliphate was abolished really. And people didn't know what to do. And by this point there were increasing divisions between Gandhi and some of his former Muslim allies over domestic politics and what sort of rights and representation Muslims should be guarant guaranteed as, as India became more democratic. And so the whole thing splintered. However, some Indian Muslim politicians and crucial to, to my book is the Ali brothers, two leaders of the Khilafat movement, Maulana Muhammad Ali and Maulana Shoket Ali. They stayed in touch with Caliph Abdul Majeed who is in exile and they actually wanted to revive the caliphate.
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B
So now we've come to, to Hyderabad and the Nizam of Hyderabad. So how is, how is he. And you know, are you. People talk about him being the, the world's, the world's richest man. I remember flicking through, I think was it Fortune magazine's first ever issue in 1930. There's a small entry about the Nizam of Hyderabad. So he's very wealthy, he's quasi independent and then how does he end up getting involved in this conversation about the Calphe?
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C
Yes. So about a third of British India was actually under the princely states which were really under indirect British rule. So the princes had great autonomy in their internal affairs. Now some of these princely states were very small, they were glorified estates, but some of them were the size of country. And Hyderabad, which covered vast swathes of western and southern India was the size of Italy roughly. So huge state, tremendously wealthy. The Nizam had, you know, vaults and vaults of diamonds underground. The legend went he was on Time magazine as the COVID of Time magazine as the world's richest man, an extraordinary figure who was also avowedly austere. And so despite his extreme wealth being a billionaire, he would famously walk around in a tattered sherwani and give dinner invitations on scraps of paper and he wouldn't want clothes being thrown away. He even famously stormed away from an ice cream stall because the price was too high once. So this, this man was also a shrewd, a very shrewd operator and considered to be a kind of figurehead of Islam in India. So it was a princely state, but this was a princely state that claimed to be the last great flowering of Indo Islamic civilization. So the Nizam saw himself as the heir to the legacy of the Mughal Empire and it drew the former Mughal officials, Urdu scribes from all around India, lots of administrators from the Arab world. It became a hub for modernist Muslim thinkers as well. And so by the early 20th century and particularly by the 1920s, Hyderabad was a sort of capital of the Muslim world, which is something that's completely forgotten today. People really don't realize that, but it genuinely was seen as absolutely immense and important. And the Nizam had quite a credible claim after the fall of the Ottoman caliphate to being the premier Muslim ruler in the world because of the size of his state and his vast wealth, the riches of his dynasty and his importance in India. So the Nizam actually gave the Caliph a pension so the exiled Ottomans ended up on the French Riviera and the Caliph was in a Nice seafront villa in Nice and it was paid for by the Nizam. This was a kind of act of Islamic solidarity, but also solidarity between, you know, from one ruler to another to a ruler that had fallen on hard times. And this was brokered by these Indian Muslim politicians who had been part of the Khilafat movement. And then in 1931 came the Grand Alliance. So Maulana Shoket Ali, the former Khilafat Movement leader, former ally of Mahatma Gandhi, brokered a marriage between the Nizam's eldest son, Prince Azan Jah, who was the heir apparent, and the Caliph's only daughter, Princess Durushavar. And this marriage took place in, in Nice. And it was the joining of the Ottoman and the Asaf Jahi dynasty was what which ruled Hyderabad. It was the alliance between these two great dynasties by marriage. So here you had the family of the Caliphate, immensely important in the Islamic world and you also had the richest Muslim family in the world. So it was extremely politically significant. The alliance was opposed by Turkey, it was watched anxiously by Britain, but they felt they didn't dare to do anything to stop it. And there was specifically political intent. Caliph Abdul Majid, in the marriage negotiations, actually made it a condition that the firstborn son of this marriage will be the Nizam of Hyderabad. And so he was securing the future of his lineage. His grandson, he hoped, would come to rule this vast princely state in India. And the marriage also happened at a time when Abdul Majid was working with Shocket Ali to muster support for a revived Caliphate from Muslim leaders around the world. And this was centered in Jerusalem. So Mawlana Shaukat Ali instigated the World Islamic Congress of December 1931, which was the first great pan Islamic conference to take place in Jerusalem. And it would be historically quite significant because it was the first time that the Palestinian struggle was established as a sort of Pan Islamic and Pan Arab struggle. But actually one of the goals of the conference was through alliance between Shocket Ali and some Palestinian leaders, was to have Caliph Abdul Majid come over to Jerusalem and and address assembled Muslim leaders from across the world and be recognized as the rightful Caliph. But Turkish spies got wind of the plan. They lobbied the British to stop it. The British banned Abdul Majid from entering the British Mandate of Palestine. And so that plan failed. However, the marriage succeeded and two years later a prince was born. Prince Mukarram Jar, whose grandfather on his maternal side was the last Caliph of Islam and his grandfather on his father's side was the Nizam of Hyderabad. And it was secretly decided by the Nizam that his son Azan Jah would not be the next ruler of Hyderabad. It would pass directly to Prince Mukaram Jah who was by then still a baby.
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B
So I do want to talk about this like document this, this deed that I think deals with kind of the, the transfer of these titles. But before I ask about that you know, very quickly you mentioned that Nizam had a, had a, had a reputation, you know, maybe deserved or not for austerity despite his massive wealth. I get the sense that wasn't true of his sons. Could you talk about I guess all the partying his sons did when they were traveling around Europe?
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C
Yes, particularly because I mean they were very young at the time when they got married they were in their 20s and they had been sent to Europe to be educated which in practice often meant you know, cabaret halls and casinos. And Prince Azam Jah, I think he was asked about three things he considers most important and he said first polo, second my duty and then women. Prince Moazemcar, his younger brother who also married another Ottoman princess. Actually he was known as the best dressed man in Europe and he would have 30 suits brought with him by his entourage everywhere he went. So extremely flamboyant characters. But actually the Ottoman princesses are generally considered to have been much more cultivated. Princess Durashevard, the Caliph's daughter was a very, very impressive woman. She was famously photographed in Hyderabad by the also famous photographer Cecil Beaton. And Dehereshavar was, she was trained in poetry, she spoke and wrote in multiple different languages. She was an artist. She would go on walks on the promenade with her father the Caliph in Nice. These Ottoman princes and princesses would often party in Nice. It was a sort of heyday of high living on the French Riviera. And then she found herself whisked off to Hyderabad but she wasn't forced into it. The Caliph had said that the marriage is only going to happen if my daughter actually takes a fancy to the Prince. And so she, she did take a fancy to Prince Azan Jah and he to her and she, she chose to go to Hyderabad and was suddenly whisked away from this life of exile but relative freedom in France to courtly life in Hyderabad which was extremely strict and suddenly all eyes were on her, all the pressure was on her. But she became a very important woman and is considered to have pioneered social reform in Hyderabad particularly with regards to women's Rights, education, philanthropy. So an extraordinary figure, Prince Azim Jah, her husband, not so much. He was considered by the Nizam to be unfit to rule. And the Nizam would later, you know, write to others that Azam Jar was decadent and overly flamboyant and engaged in all sorts of kind of degenerate behaviors which presumably Azam Jar would have strongly denied. So very colorful characters, all of them.
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B
So let's talk about this document that is, that seems like half the historians you talk to swear it's legitimate. The other half seem to think it's fake. What exactly is this? Is this deed that you came across?
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C
So it was, it surfaced in 2023 and I saw the deed myself when I was in Hyderabad and it's purportedly signed by Caliph Abdul Majeed about a week after the wedding in Nice, the marital alliance. And it hands over the caliphate essentially to the Nizam and says that the firstborn son of this union will be the next Caliph. Now the provenance of this deed is hotly contested and I think it will continue to be contested. What you'd really need is kind of carbon dating and that sort of thing to decisively figure out when exactly it was written and how legitimate is it. But it's not in a museum, it's in a private home. And so the precise truth on the deed and where it came from is unknown. But actually the evidence that I consider to point to the Caliph wanting to revive the Caliphate in Hyderabad comes from elsewhere. So I already mentioned that the Caliph did want the succession, he did want his grandson to be the Nizam of Hyderabad. And this is, I found this in the archives during, you know, the negotiations, the marriage negotiations. It was established then, however, the British considered that the Nizam had been sort of drawn in to a scheme by these Muslim politicians to revive the Caliphate and that the Nizam wasn't really wanting to go along with it in the end once he realized what it was, and this doesn't seem quite plausible to me, the Nizam was an extremely shrewd operator and when Maulana Shoket Ali came to him with the marriage idea, he would have known exactly what Shocket Ali was after. And I think the most plausible explanation is that the Nizam, he understood well the implications of this marriage for his dynasty and the prestige that it would bring his dynasty. However, he was not a populist and he didn't want, you know, mass protests on the street, of, of demonstrations on the streets of Hyderabad and Bombay for a revived caliphate. And this would anyway infuriate and alarm the British. And so he didn't allow any public talk of that. But there was an official proclamation when the marriage happened that this marriage will have very happy repercussions for the whole Muslim world. So the fact that it was kind of immensely political and there was a kind of pan Islamic significance to the marriage was reckoned, recognized and acknowledged at the time. Now what happens later on is extremely interesting. In 1944 Caliph Abdul Majid died of a heart attack in Nazi occupied France. And I've seen correspondence between British officials in which they discussed the Caliph's will and they discuss that he did nominate his grandson, Prince Mukarim Jah to be his successor in the Caliphate. The Nizam's Prime Minister, the Prime Minister of Hyderabad State, the Nawab of Chetari, wrote his memoirs in Urdu as well. And I read those and found in them that Chatari was also sort of, he said that it was being discussed by the Nizam and Prince Azam Jah that the Caliph had wanted the Caliphate to come to Hyderabad except Azim Jar was saying that, you know, it was he that should be the Caliph. So you have sort of a contestation there. And what did the Nizam really think? Well it's, it's not clear now what's really interesting in all this is what on earth did the British think of this? So in, in 1946 there's a letter, a top secret letter from the Secretary of State in Delhi to the Viceroy of India in which they say that look, the Nizam wants to bury, he wants the Caliph's body to be brought over to Hyderabad and buried here. And should we allow this to happen? Because there's a risk that the news about the Caliphate being transferred to Hyderabad will become public and it will cause great embarrassment to us. But they eventually calculated that they're not going to. The Nizam's not going to disclose this because it will draw attention to Mukaram Jaheim, his grandson, who actually by this point it was not publicly known that he was designated as the next Nizam. And they also calculated the Princess Durushavara wouldn't reveal it either. So because the British felt that their departure was on the horizon, they thought, you know, it doesn't really matter and so they allowed the tomb to be built. And this is evidence that the Nizam wanted to honor, you know, at least part of the Caliph's final wishes. And so I went to Maharashtra, western state in India and sort of hiked through the relative wilderness in Hildabad to find this magnificent old Extremely derelict now. Ottoman mausoleum. And it's incredible. An Ottoman mausoleum in the middle of India and people there generally don't know, you know, what it is and it's got graffiti inside it, it's tattered, nearly crumbling. But this was built for the last Ottoman Caliph although he eventually wasn't buried there because of the fall of Hyderabad state. So what did the Nizam actually want? Did we know that Maulana Shocket Ali's scheme was for an Indian Caliphate? For a caliphate, the seat of the Caliphate to be in Hyderabad? There's pretty good evidence that Caliph Abdul Majeed wanted this. But what did the Nizam want now? I spoke to Shahid Hussein Zubairi, he's quoted in the book. He's a man who knew Prince Mukarim Jah better than almost anyone else. He was a confidant of the Prince, he managed his estate for years. And Zubairi told me that Mukarram Jah himself told him that the Caliph had nominated him to be the next Caliph and that the Nizam was sort of keen on this idea and that this was the point of the marriage. There were also British sources from the period from the 1940s which suggest this as well. So Rosita Forbes, a British writer who was toured around Hyderabad State by Sir Akbar Headri, one of the Nizam's ministers and who had been, you know, Finance Minister at the time of the marriage in 1931 and was there at the time and crucial to it all, she wrote that she learned that Hyderabad aspired to the Caliphate and was committed to the principle of the caliphate. Philip Mason, a British civil servant who was the tutor to a young Mukarim Jah and who knew Princess Deeshavar very well during the 1940s and he wrote years later that the intention behind the union was the Caliphate and the Nizam wanted to claim the Caliphate. And this may well be true because when the British left in 1947 and partition happened, the Nizam decided to go for independence. He wanted to make Hyderabad an independent state. So although the precise truth there isn't known, it is highly plausible that the Nizam actually went along with this idea.
- [38:16]
B
So I mean, speaking of, you know, independence of Hyderabad, India eventually does their quote unquote police action which ends Hyderabad's independence. And to me, I mean, I've covered this topic a few times on the show and I feel like an independent Hyderabad is like one of these big what ifs, you know, what if he was able to maintain independence? And I guess the caliphate stuff adds another Wrinkle this. I mean, what if, if the caliphate really did move to Hyderabad and how might that have affected, you know, its independence or when it gets subsumed into India? I mean, kind of, what are, what are your kind of thoughts as to what, you know, I guess whether an A, an independent Hyderabad or B, a caliphate based in Hyderabad, whether or not it was dependent from India, whether or not that was ever really possible.
- [39:09]
C
So I think we should situate this idea for a caliphate centered in Hyderabad within the idea of a scheme for an Indian federation. This was what Maulana Shaukat Ali had wanted. It was what many of the politicians of the time actually wanted. And it was what was possible and even seemed perhaps likely as late as 1946. So it's often considered that, you know, the, the Muslim League was sort of driving everyone towards partition and the creation of an independent Pakistan, but this isn't quite true. In, in 1946, the Muslim League and the Congress agreed to the creation of an Indian Federation. And, and this would have effectively Pakistan, but within India. And it would be a federal model. And within this model, the princely states would retain their autonomy. So within that context, one can imagine how Hyderabad could continue to be a powerful and autonomous state and connected through this Indian federation that it would be a part of to the rest of the Muslims in India. And so it could claim this kind of soft power as a seat of the caliphate and could seek to draw legitimacy and attention from Muslims across the world. And what's very interesting is that in independent India, the Indian government would later try multiple times to have India join the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which was and still is this alliance of various Muslim countries. And India wanted to join on the basis that they had such a large Muslim population, but Pakistan blocked their entry. And so this would be a kind of an example of Indian soft power within the Islamic world, influence in the Middle east, connections with the Middle east and beyond. And that was really the idea. It wasn't to have the Nizam as caliph take over the rest of India. You know, an Islamic caliphate takeover of India. It wasn't that it was Hyderabad, but it was, it would be an Indian caliphate. It would be important to India in general. And the federal model was something which many politicians believed would solve the problem of majoritarianism and solve the problem of religious conflict, because you'd have Hindu majority zones and Muslim majority zones and the rights of minorities in each would be sort of guaranteed by the other zones and there would be an all India center. Now, many people point out That a federation could have led to, you know, just religious conflict and civil war. And that's quite plausible. And a, you know, Prince Mukarim Jai eventually becoming the Nizam of a powerful Hyderabad and claiming the Caliphal title could also have fomented religious conflict. But the Nizam's rule was generally very pluralistic. He was, you know, he declared Hindus and Muslims are my two eyes. There was lots of religious violence in the final days of Hyderabad state but that was when order had broken down. The Nizam's rule was not characterized by a kind of, you know, Muslim war on the Hindu population. And what was partition if not a civil war anyway? So the 1946 plan for a federation was tanked as everyone, as many people know, and partition became inevitable eventually. So the Congress sort of decided that we'd rather have, you know, one partition and still get our kind of independent state that we can deal with than have a federation in which we wouldn't really be able to enact our vision. And so once partition became inevitable it was very difficult to see how Hyderabad could remain independent and how India would accept an independent state the size of Italy in the middle of its territory. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, went to the Nizam and appealed to him to have Hyderabad join Pakistan. There were all sorts of ideas within the Muslim league during the 1940s of having Hyderabad as a kind of third zone part of Pakistan. There was an idea to make the Nizam the constitutional monarch of the King of Pakistan. The Nizam didn't want to join Pakistan. It wouldn't be, it was not even vaguely plausible after Partition maybe it would have been with the federation. And so Jinnah eventually persuaded the Nizam or encouraged him although the Nizam probably wanted to do this anyway to be independent. And Jinnah pledged Pakistan's support in case India tried anything against Hyderabad. And in 1948 Jinnah died and actually the very next day the Indian troops marched into Hyderabad and you have the fall of this princely state and the end of any hope for an Indian caliphate really. And what would it have looked like? Well, we can never know. It's possible that the Nizam as Caliph would have been ignored by everyone in the Islamic world if politics had gone in a different direction. It's possible that it would have been, you know, there would have been some legitimacy in the eyes of many Muslims around the world. We can't know. But what's so important about this history in my view is that it really shines a light on these forgotten connections between actually far flung regions of the world. And it reminds us of a forgotten fact, which is that the Indian subcontinent was considered the epicenter of the Islamic world in the early 20th century and had great influence within the Middle east and was really considered central. Hyderabad was a capital of the Muslim world. This is also forgotten. So these are forgotten histories. And the plan to revive the caliphate has largely been forgotten. It's barely in public consciousness. And that's why I wrote the book, really, to try and excavate this fascinating hidden history. There's some very important and colorful characters that sort of illuminates a chapter in 20th century Global history and shows how interconnected it always was.
- [46:21]
B
So I think with that, that's a great place to end. Our conversation with Imran Mullah, author of the Indian exile Ottomans and the billionaire Princess Imran. I actually have two final questions for you, which are where can people find your work? Not just this book, but all of your work, and what's next for you? What do you think the next project might be? Well.
- [46:42]
C
You can find my book in any good bookshop in Britain. So it's published by Hearst. It's going to be published in the us, Canada and Australia in a few months in March, I believe. And it's going to be published in India late, later in January. We're recording this on the 10th of January. So later this month it will be published in India by HarperCollins India. And so it'll be available there, but you can order it online. And what's next? For me, it's a very good question and I don't really know. I write in my day job as a journalist about British politics, particularly foreign policy to do with the Middle East. And I'm also writing quite a lot about British Muslim politics, which is kind of strangely connected to this history that I've been writing about because the idea of Britain is a great Muslim power kind of crops up quite a lot in that book. And it is also something that kind of. Yeah, it's worth reminding people of when thinking about Muslims in Britain today who are kind of small minority but quite a big part of the national conversation and worries about multiculturalism. So that's what I work on a day to day basis at the moment.
- [48:11]
B
So you can follow me, Nicholas Gordon on Twitter at Nick R I Gordon. That's N I C K R I G O R D O N. You can go to asiareviewbooks.com to find other reviews, essays, interviews and excerpts. Follow them on Twitter at bookreviewsasia. That's reviews plural. And you can find many more author interviews at the New books number@newbooksnumber.com we're on all your favorite podcast apps, Apple Podcasts, Spotify rate us, recommend us, share us with your friends to support us interviewing those running in around and about Asia. Next week, join us for interview with Namit Arora, author of Speaking of Conversations About India's Past and Present. But before then, Imran, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
- [48:47]
C
Thank you very much for having me. Greatly enjoyed it.