Listen | Did Hyderabad Almost Become the Spiritual Epicentre of the Islamic World?

A new book, The Indian Caliphate: Exiled Ottomans and the Billionaire Prince by Imran Mulla floats the possibility that the Nizam of Hyderabad’s dynasty came tantalisingly close to assuming the caliphate in the 20th century.

“With the wealth of the Asaf Jahi dynasty, Mukarram Jah, the grandson of the last Ottoman caliph, and the grandson of the seventh Nizam of Hyderabad, when he became the Nizam, he could then have claimed the title,” writes Mulla, a London-based journalist.

“It would have been more of a soft power role in the Muslim world. And it would have depended entirely on the recognition of Muslims elsewhere in the world,” Mulla said to Sidharth Bhatia in a podcast interview.

Mulla’s book explains how after the Ottoman Caliph Abdul Majid had been exiled to France by the modernist ruler of Turkey Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, his daughter Durrushevar was married to the Nizam’s eldest son Azam Jah in Hyderabad. It was their son who would have become the Caliph.

“So Hyderabad was claiming to be the successor of the Mughal cultural legacy and the new flowering of Indo-Islamic civilisation. It had a cultural prestige within India, but also within the wider Islamic world. And that really set the stage for things,” he said.

But once Hyderabad was integrated into a united India in 1948, this became impossible.

Listen in to their fascinating conversation on The Wire Podcast.

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