India, May 30 -- 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 p...