Books on pan-Islam, Ottoman decline, Hyderabad, and the Khilafat movement generally arrive with a ready-made emotional advantage. The subject itself carries such enormous historical residue that even weak scholarship can briefly appear profound if wrapped in enough melancholy. Imran Mulla’s The Indian Caliphate: Exiled Ottomans and the Billionaire Prince benefits enormously from this atmosphere. The premise is immediately seductive and far from reality, best suited for a Mughal-i Azam-like movie: that, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the abolition of the caliphate, India, and Hyderabad in particular, may briefly have emerged as a conceivable centre of Muslim political leadership. It is precisely the kind of proposition that appeals strongly to the contemporary appetite for lost civilizational alternatives, the same way that Humayun’s Tomb is the best place for middle-class picnickers dreaming about unrealised futures, and suppressed historical possibilities.
Mulla is an intelligent writer and possesses a journalist’s instinct for dramatic reconstruction. The book moves fluently between the Khilafat movement, Ottoman exile networks, princely Hyderabad, and the larger emotional world of anti-colonial Muslim politics after the First World War. Ottoman princesses, pan-Islamic anxieties, dynastic marriages, the Nizam’s fabulous wealth, and the emotional afterlife of empire are woven together into a highly readable narrative. At times, the book almost succeeds in persuading the reader to believe in the imaginative truth that Hyderabad stood near the threshold of a larger historical role than conventional historiography has allowed. Almost. But history needs a deeper understanding, extensive study, and, more importantly, the power to separate truth from reality. This is precisely where the central problem of the book lies. Again and again, evocative possibility is mistaken for historical plausibility. Atmosphere begins to substitute for structure. Suggestion slowly hardens into assertion. Symbolic aspiration is repeatedly inflated into political architecture. A marriage alliance begins to resemble constitutional destiny. Exilic sentiment acquires geopolitical weight. The afterlife of Ottoman prestige is transformed into the shadow of an unrealised world order. The difficulty is not that Mulla speculates. Speculation is unavoidable in historical writing. The difficulty is that speculation here repeatedly presents itself in the language of historical recovery.
Mulla writes with considerable narrative confidence. However, the book repeatedly stretches interpretation beyond the tensile strength of its evidence with fragments being asked to carry more historical meaning than they can sustain. The larger problem is methodological and reflects a wider crisis in contemporary scholarship on India, particularly in the West.
Secondary sources have increasingly become substitutes for archives, especially where the primary material lies in Urdu. The linguistic labour necessary to enter those archives is now avoided with alarming ease. Mulla has read only in English-language secondary literature and here, the absence of serious engagement with Urdu primary material is impossible to miss. Increasingly, scholarship on Indian Muslim intellectual and political history is being built upon circular citation rather than archival excavation. This has produced a peculiar condition where emotionally attractive theses travel much faster than historically grounded arguments.
This book is far more invested in romance than in confronting the larger disastrous consequences of the Khilafat movement itself. Mahatma Gandhi’s populist political gamble during Khilafat had a serious impact on Hindu-Muslim relations and contributed significantly to the transformation of MA Jinnah from a secular constitutionalist of implacable integrity into the stereotyped Muslim separatist of later nationalist memory. Maulana Azad initially sharply opposed the Khilafat movement. But Gandhi’s political ambition and extraordinary instinct for mass mobilisation ultimately prevailed, and Azad aligned himself with the movement.
The problem begins with the title itself. The Indian Caliphate announces a historical possibility that never truly existed outside emotional and symbolic speculation. There was no coherent plan to transfer universal Muslim sovereignty to India. There was no embryonic constitutional imagination waiting to emerge from Hyderabad. There were Ottoman exiles in India. There was princely patronage. There was pan-Islamic emotion. There was discussion, speculation, and sentimental attachment. But none of this amounted to a suppressed geopolitical alternative. Above all, Khilafat cannot be shifted. Also, Muslims would not accept a Khalifa who is not perceived as a pious Islamic person, even if, in reality, he is contrary to what a pious person should be. Religious leadership is mostly corrupt but it is believed to be pious by the common faithful up until they are fully disillusioned. This distinction is not semantic. It is the difference between intellectual history and civilizational romance.
More serious literature on the Khilafat movement has long insisted upon precisely such caution. AC Niemeijer, Gail Minault, and M Naeem Qureshi in English, and Qazi Adeel Abbasi in Urdu, despite major differences in emphasis, converge on one fundamental point: Indian Muslim attachment to the Ottoman caliphate was historically real, politically potent, emotionally charged, ideologically unstable, and deeply romantic in character. Sadiq Sardhanvi’s immensely popular novel, Mustafa Kamal Pasha, which sold in extraordinary numbers and is still in circulation, reflects precisely this emotional climate. Even those who initially mourned Ottoman decline eventually accepted Atatürk as a heroic moderniser in Urdu-speaking India because of Sardhanvi’s novel. One may disagree with Abbasi’s populist tendencies, but his work remains a significant document because it emerges from within that emotional world itself.
Mulla’s argument depends, however, on treating precisely that instability as latent coherence. The result is repeated historical inflation.
Take Hyderabad itself. Osman Ali Khan is made to appear almost as a plausible caliphal figure by proxy. His wealth, prestige, Ottoman marital alliances, and international visibility are all made to shimmer with unrealised sovereignty. Yet the enormous gap between princely Muslim prestige and universal caliphal legitimacy is never adequately confronted. The caliphate was not transferable through dynastic glamour. Hyderabad remained firmly bound within British paramountcy. To imagine it emerging as an independent centre of universal Muslim authority requires minimising almost every structural fact of interwar politics.
The book repeatedly advances through atmospherics, through what might emotionally appear conceivable if mood were permitted to outrun structure. This is nowhere clearer than in its treatment of the Khilafat movement itself. Mulla often narrates Khilafat as though it contained within itself the embryo of a transnational Islamic political order whose Indian manifestation became only contingently entangled with nationalism. Historically, however, the opposite is nearer the truth. Khilafat derived its energy precisely from unstable fusion: anti-colonial grievance, religious symbolism, populist mobilisation, and newly emerging forms of mass politics entering the public sphere simultaneously. Its strength was conjectural, not institutional.
One of the most striking weaknesses of the book is its reluctance to engage with the darker historiography of Khilafat. Here, PC Bamford remains indispensable despite becoming deeply unfashionable in nationalist historiography. Bamford, Deputy Director of the Intelligence Bureau in British India, argued in Histories of the Non-Co-operation and Khilafat Movements (1925) that the fusion of religion and mass politics unleashed forces that neither Congress nor Khilafat leadership could fully control. His language often reflected colonial anxieties, but dismissing his observations entirely would be intellectually dishonest. Mulla scarcely confronts this dimension at all.
Khilafat was not merely an ecumenical anti-imperial movement. It also marked one of the most decisive moments in the sacralisation of politics in modern India. The Moplah rebellion, the rhetoric of and foolish hijrat to Afghanistan and jihad, proliferating millenarian expectations, and the emotional charge surrounding religious mobilisation were not marginal episodes. They formed part of the movement’s historical core.
Gandhi cannot be lightly exempted from this history. One of the peculiarities of celebratory writing on Khilafat is the extraordinary gentleness with which his role is treated. Gandhi did not merely ally tactically with Khilafat. He deepened its religious idiom. He transformed a minor Islamic grievance into a central moral question within Indian nationalism while simultaneously bringing Hindu devotional symbolism into mass politics at an unprecedented scale. Politically, this was an act of immense shrewdness. Historically, it was combustible.
Niemeijer recognised this cautiously. Bamford recognised it sharply. Even Qureshi, from a very different intellectual location, records the volatility produced by this fusion. Mulla’s reluctance to engage seriously with these consequences is not a minor omission. It distorts the historical landscape itself. The communalisation of politics in late colonial India did not suddenly emerge in the 1930s. Some of its modern grammar was sharpened decisively during the Khilafat conjuncture.
This becomes particularly important because Mulla repeatedly treats the movement as a lost cosmopolitan opening interrupted by later communal developments. But Hindu-Muslim unity during Khilafat was never some idyllic prelapsarian harmony destroyed from outside. The contradictions were present from the beginning.
Even the movement’s institutional history reveals its instability. Bamford dated the first ‘real’ Khilafat Conference to Bombay in November 1919, while others traced formative moments to Lucknow and Delhi. The uncertainty itself is revealing, but it was a north Indian Muslim-centric issue. It points not towards disciplined constitutional politics but towards improvisational mobilisation.
Nor was Muslim political opinion in India remotely unified. Qureshi was emphatic that political pan-Islam in India never produced a monolithic response. Deobandi hesitations, Barelvi distance, modernist scepticism, provincial divisions, and class anxieties all complicated the movement from within. Even where Khilafat sentiment ran deep, it did not translate into support for an India-centred caliphal future.
The hijrat movement of 1920 exposed precisely the completely unstable political theology animating sections of Khilafat politics. Mass migration to Afghanistan produced devastation and ruin. The Karachi Conference of July 1921, which declared military service religiously unlawful, demonstrated how rapidly agitation could escape nationalist discipline. The Moplah rebellion belongs within this same wider atmosphere. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there had already been recurring conflict between Mappila Muslims and Hindu and Muslim landlords under colonial protection. During the Khilafat, Malabar witnessed the brutal suppression of Muslims by the British state. Troops were deployed, martial law imposed, and thousands died.
Seen together, the hijrat movement, the rhetoric of jihad, proliferating millenarian expectations, the Karachi resolutions, and the emotional climate of Khilafat were not accidental episodes surrounding the movement. They constituted the movement itself.
This is why Mulla’s romantic rendering sits uneasily not only with specialist scholarship on pan-Islam but also with the larger historiography of Indian nationalism. Within Bipan Chandra’s influential framework of ‘Struggle-Truce-Struggle’ (S-T-S), the Khilafat–Non-Cooperation alliance appears not as the threshold of an unrealised Islamic geopolitical future but as a specific conjuncture within anti-colonial mass politics shaped by tactical alliances, contradiction, exhaustion, and eventual fragmentation. Mulla reverses these proportions.
From that perspective, the real historical significance of Khilafat lies not in a suppressed caliphal possibility but in the unstable alliance between religious idiom and mass politics that made Non-Cooperation simultaneously expansive and fragile. The Chauri Chaura incident, the collapse of Hindu-Muslim unity, and the communal tensions of the 1920s point to the limits of a conjectural political experiment rather than to a lost civilizational horizon.
The treatment of Ottoman politics is similarly uneven. Throughout the book, there is a pervasive tenderness towards Ottoman decline that occasionally slips into romantic apology. Abdulhamid, pan-Islam, and Ottoman supranational claims are often treated more sympathetically than analytically. Yet, the caliphate being mourned was itself an imperial formation, coercive and hierarchical in many respects. Nostalgia repeatedly softens the empire.
The suggestion that spiritual leadership of the Muslim world might meaningfully have shifted towards India after 1924 also underestimates how radically Turkish nationalism had already transformed the question itself. Once Ankara abolished the caliphate, the issue was not merely succession. It was delegitimation. The institution itself had already been politically hollowed out.
Likewise, Mulla occasionally exaggerates the significance of Indian Muslim support for preserving Ottoman sovereignty over Arab lands, treating it almost as evidence of globally credible Indian Muslim leadership. Much of this was rhetorical maximalism embedded within anti-colonial politics rather than practical constitutional imagination. Qureshi remains careful on this point. Mulla often is not. His treatment of Arab and Sharifian objections to Ottoman universalism also remains strangely muted, as though the principal obstacle to an India-centred caliphal future were merely European imperialism rather than the fractured politics of the Muslim world itself. But that fracture was precisely the point. There was no universal constituency waiting for Hyderabad. Only a historian enchanted by unrealised possibilities could make it appear otherwise.
Particularly revealing is the book’s occasional reliance upon successionist assumptions surrounding Ottoman legitimacy itself. The famous claim that the Abbasid al-Mutawakkil formally transferred the caliphate to Selim I in 1517 has long been regarded by historians less as a constitutional fact than as retrospective Ottoman mythmaking. Niemeijer, following older scholarly consensus, notes that the alleged ‘deed of transfer’ was almost certainly a later ideological fabrication rather than a documentary foundation for Ottoman claims.
Mulla’s portraits of Ottoman exiles possess genuine emotional intelligence. Durrushehvar emerges memorably. At moments, one wishes the book had remained what it does best: meditating upon exile, sovereignty, dynastic memory, and the afterlife of fallen empires. Its difficulties begin when meditation hardens into a thesis.
Much has been made of the book’s supposedly ‘untold history’. But very little here is truly untold. Hyderabad-Ottoman connections have long been known. Pan-Islamic currents linking India to wider Muslim politics have long been studied. Speculation concerning the fate of the caliphate after Ankara is hardly hidden archival material. What is new is not the evidence but the scale of inference. One leaves the book asking whether elite correspondence is being mistaken for political viability, whether dynastic symbolism is being transformed into constitutional possibility, and whether Muslim cosmopolitan imagination is being over-promoted into a suppressed geopolitical alternative. Too often, the answer is yes.
There is also a larger historiographical problem at work. Mulla belongs, perhaps unconsciously, to a growing genre fascinated by dormant futures, unrealised alternatives, and roads not taken. Such writing can occasionally illuminate forgotten possibilities. But it also carries a temptation: to privilege latent emotional possibility over operative historical structure. That temptation governs this book throughout. History becomes not what happened under material and political constraints but what might have emotionally happened had those constraints loosened. One may certainly write in that mode. But it should be recognised for what it is: counterfactual meditation rather than historical revision.
The irony is that the actual history of Khilafat scarcely requires embellishment. Here was a movement that fused global Islamic sentiment with anti-colonial nationalism, produced one of the largest experiments in mass mobilisation in modern India, intensified religious politics within the public sphere, generated fleeting but extraordinary solidarities, and eventually collapsed beneath the weight of its own contradictions. That history is already dramatic enough. To invoke an ‘Indian caliphate’ waiting in the wings merely obscures the more complicated and more interesting historical reality itself.
In the end, the book perhaps tells us more about contemporary longings than interwar politics. Within it lies a melancholic search for lost Muslim modernities, for alternatives foreclosed by nationalism, empire, and Partition. That search is intellectually understandable; perhaps even emotionally compelling. But historical resonance cannot substitute for evidentiary rigour.
For all its narrative power, The Indian Caliphate remains less persuasive as history than as elegant speculation. It romanticises where it should discriminate. It amplifies where it should delimit. It softens the communal and coercive dimensions of Khilafat politics. It underplays Gandhi’s role in the sacralisation of mass politics. It mistakes princely glamour for institutional possibility. And repeatedly, atmosphere is allowed to outrun the archive.
Its achievement lies in making readers care about a forgotten transnational world. Its failure lies in persuading them that this world stood on the threshold of a historical future it could never realistically have attained. What finally remains is an elegant meditation on an impossibility. Intellectually stimulating at moments, emotionally seductive throughout, but still hovering uneasily between historical argument and civilizational nostalgia.
Sadaf Fatima read for her BA and MA at Lucknow University and wrote her MPhil and PhD dissertations at JNU. She is particularly interested in Delhi’s cultural history. She now edits the Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu (Hind)’s learned journal, Urdu Adab, which has been published since 1921, and heads Anjuman’s Academic Publication Division.
