The Khilafat movement united India briefly, but deepened its divides

How a mass movement in India, centered on a grievance among Muslims, could have prevented the Partition in an alternative vision of history

The Indian Caliphate: Exiled Ottomans and the Billionaire Prince

by Imran Mulla 

Published by Harper Collins

285 pages  ₹799

  Imran Mulla is a UK-based journalist, who studied history at Cambridge, and the Indian Caliphate is his first book. It delves into a fascinating episode from 20th century history, when wars, revolutions and social transformations shredded the age of empire and feudal hierarchies and brought a new landscape of independent, sovereign states. These new states had little patience with the vestiges of the old order, such as the princely states in India, and the cosmopolitanism of the inter-connected elites, as comfortable in Paris as in the extravagant grace and refined culture of a Hyderabad or a Jaipur. The book throws light on what has become a forgotten chapter in the story of India’s struggle for independence, the tragedy of Partition and the challenge of upholding the rich plural heritage bequeathed by the millennia-old civilisation of India. The threads from that tumultuous period still link to and reverberate in India today.

 

This is a story of how the Ali brothers, Mohammed and Shaukat, educated in the United Kingdom and part of the English-speaking cosmopolitan Indian elite, anchored a mass movement, pegged to a grievance among Muslims over the abolishing of the Sultanate in 1919 by the new revolutionary regime of Kemal Ataturk in modern Türkiye, which succeeded the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, after World War I. The Ottomans had ruled over a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-lingual and multi-cultural empire spanning Asia, Africa and Europe for over 500 years. Its ruler, the Sultan, was also the Caliph, being the custodian of the holy places of Islam —Mecca, Medina and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Palestine. The revolution brought an end to the Sultanate but the last Sultan, Abdulmejid II, initially retained the office of the Caliph. The Caliphate was abolished by the Turkish state in 1924 and the British began to manoeuvre to hand over control over the holy sites to Arab kingdoms they had carved out of the erstwhile Ottoman dominions. The Khilafat movement of 1919-24, had an explicit anti-British orientation and took shape against this backdrop. It is Mr Mulla’s contention that this was the first time street politics was born in British India and that by allying with the Ali brothers and supporting the movement, Mahatma Gandhi was able to turn the Congress Party from an elite gathering of lawyers and activists into a mass political movement, bringing Hindus and Muslims together in a manner never seen before or since.

 

The Khilafat movement failed but the politics of mass mobilisation came to stay. Paradoxically, the same movement, by bringing religion to the centre of the independence struggle, sharpened communal identities, setting the stage for the partition of the country on religious lines.

 

The Ali brothers saw the Caliphate as an idea around which a global Islamic cosmopolitan network could be re-established with India at its centre. India was home to the largest Muslim population in the world. Institutions like the seminaries of Deoband and Bareilly and the modern Aligarh University, provided the theological and intellectual heft missing in other Muslim countries. There were rich Muslim merchants and princes, like the Nizam of Hyderabad, whose wealth was legendary and who could provide the financial heft to underpin an Islamic polis. The Caliphate could find a new home in India.

 

In pursuit of this idea, Shaukat Ali helped forge a marital alliance between the princely kingdom of Hyderabad and the progeny of Abdulmejid II, then living in exile in the French Riviera. Abdulmejid’s elder daughter, Durruvshera was married to Azam Jah, Nizam Mir Osman Ali Khan’s elder son, in 1931. The Sultan’s niece, Niloufer, was married to the Nizam’s second son. The Nizam declared that his successor would not be his son, but his grandson from the union of the Hyderabad prince and the Ottoman princess. Mukkaram Jah was born in 1933. He would be designated the future Caliph and the ruler of Hyderabad and enjoy legitimacy as the head of the worldwide Islamic polis. Mr Mulla has referred to a Will or Wasiyat, signed by the Nizam, which explicitly spells this out, but it has not been authenticated.

 

Such a plan assumed that India would not be partitioned on communal lines and that Hyderabad would survive as an independent princely state with the lapse of British paramountcy. But history took a different turn. Hyderabad was incorporated into the Indian Union in 1947 through the force of arms and amid violent communal clashes. Later that year in August, Partition of the country into India and Pakistan did take place and its violent legacy continues to agitate politics in an ostensibly secular India.

 

The book begins with an account of the author’s visit in June 2023 to Aurangabad, where an empty grave lies abandoned within the faded ruins of a Turkish-style mausoleum. It was meant to be the resting place of Abdülmejid who had planned to spend the remaining years of his life in Hyderabad. The British would not allow it, fearful that this could revive the Caliphate question and ignite another mass anti-British movement in India. The derelict mausoleum, not far from where Aurangzeb lies buried in a simple grave, is a reminder of an alternative vision of a world that lies buried in obscurity. Imran Mulla deserves our appreciation for bringing it alive at a time when the world is in the throes of another wrenching transformation.

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The reviewer is a former foreign secretary