OBITURY Last Nizam of Hyderabad bows out.

MUKARRAM Jah Bahadur, the last Nizam of the erstwhile princely state of HyderAabad, pasAsAed away in Istanbul on Saturday and was laid to rest on Wednesday in the city from where his paternal ancestors had ruled a fabulously rich realm.

While the late Nizam was the heir to his paternal grandfather, Mir Osman Ali Khan, what is lesser known is that Mukarram Jah was also designated as the successor of his maternal grandfather Sultan Abdulmajid II, the last Ottoman Caliph, combining in his persona heirship to India's grandest princely state, as well as the storied Ottoman Caliphate.

According to TRT World, Mukarram Jah was 89, while as per the Press Trust of India the last Nizam was laid to rest next to his father Azam Jah after Asr prayers with state honours.

Mukarram Jah represented a legacy that is steeped in Muslim history. His grandfather Osman Ali Khan was said to be the richest man in the world at one time. While Hyderabad state's independence came to an end with the Indian invasion of 1948, he inherited the Nizam's title after his grandfather overlooked his father and made Mukarram Jah heir. His reign as Nizam would come to an end in the early 1970s when a constitutional amendment in India ended privy purses. From then on he would be known as the titular Nizam.

However, his maternal ancestry was no less impressive as his mother, Princess Durre Shehvar, was the daughter of Sultan Abdulmajid II. While the Turkish Grand National Assembly had ended the Ottoman Sultanate in 1922, the caliphate was abolished two years later. Abdulmajid and his family were thereafter put on a train to Europe by the Kemalists and, as per a report in Middle East Eye, lived in penury. It was, according to the same publication, Nizam Osman Ali Khan who came to the financial rescue of the heir to the Ottoman sultans, as...