After the First World War ended in Ottoman defeat, Indians of diverse religious and political backgrounds lobbied British authorities not to terminate the position of the Ottoman caliph. Scholars have typically—and not incorrectly—regarded the so-called Khilafat Movement as an attempt to appropriate a geopolitical crisis to forward domestic goals, namely, a renegotiation of the power assigned to Indian subjects within the British Empire. What has not been addressed is the extent to which the movement also reflected a contemporary current in Indian notions of sovereignty, within which abstract conceptions of nationhood found expression in the bodies of royal figures, whether historical Indian monarchs like Shivaji, Akbar, and Ranjit Singh, or contemporary British royals like Victoria, Edward VII, and George V. These embodied notions of sovereignty were fueled by expanding and intersecting networks of print culture, bazaar art, and popular cinema, which standardized representations of royal figures and enhanced the ability of everyday Indians to consume them. But in this visual arena, the Ottoman caliph is curiously difficult to locate: despite the centrality of Mehmed VI (r. 1918–22) and, later, Abdülmecid II (r. 1922–24) in Khilafat discourse, images of either are rare in the Indian public sphere. While this stems in part from the state’s occasional proscription of Khilafat materials, it also points to the distinct role that the caliph was assigned within an emerging constellation of royal icons. If images of British and historical Indian monarchs served to offset their subjects’ perceived distance—whether temporal or geographic—then the tendency to leave the Ottoman caliph unrepresented suggests an embrace of his remoteness. Rendered distant, undefined, and usually even unnamed, the nonetheless omnipresent figure emerges as a pliable and capacious symbol through which to tie together multiple understandings of Islamic history and Indian nationalism. This paper seeks to unlock the ways in which the indeterminate figure of the Ottoman caliph emerged within, and contributed to, a broader tendency to specify and visualize royal figures in late colonial India. It also uncovers, as a corollary, how the Ottoman line maintained its allure among many Indians even after its abolishment in 1924, as evidenced by their interest in the Ottoman Empire’s early modern history and the public attention they afforded to the future Nizam of Hyderabad, Mukarram Jah (1933–2023), who, as the grandson of Abdülmecid, gave the Ottoman legacy a fully embodied—and distinctly Indian—form.