In this episode of UNAPOLOGETIC, we speak with journalist and historian Imran Mulla about his gripping new book The Indian Caliphate: Exiled Ottomans and the Billionaire Prince.
The conversation uncovers a forgotten plot to relocate the Ottoman caliphate to India after its abolition in 1924 — a story involving exiled Ottoman royalty, the fabulously wealthy but austere Nizam of Hyderabad, British imperial paranoia, and an audacious vision for a modern, post-imperial caliphate rooted in the subcontinent.
Imran walks us through the hidden alliances between Ottoman exiles and Indian Muslim thinkers, the astonishing marriage engineered to fuse two royal houses, the political stakes of Hyderabad’s autonomy under the British, and how the dream of an Indian-centred caliphate was ultimately crushed by partition and rising nationalism.
This episode is a sweeping look at empire, modernity, loss, cosmopolitanism, and the forgotten place of India at the centre of the Islamic world — and why recovering this history matters today.
UNAPOLOGETIC is hosted by Ashfaaq Carim
Chapters
0:00 Intro & Soundbites
2:00 Tomb in Rural India
9:00 How This Story Began
18:00 Reinventing the Caliphate
27:00 Hyderabad, Empire and Wealth
36:00 Archives, Travel and Tomb
45:00 Partition, Federation and Palestine
54:00 Empire, Freedom and Violence
1:03:00 Princes, Princesses and Exile
1:12:00 Modernist Pan-Islamic Politics
1:21:00 Anglicised Radicals at Oxford
1:30:00 What History Taught Imran
1:39:00 Writing the Book, Closing