The Indian Ocean in the Making of Early Modern India

Pius Malekandathil

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138234826
• eBook ISBN: 9781351997454
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume looks into the ways Indian Ocean routes shaped the culture and contours of early modern India. IT shows how these and other historical processes saw India rebuilt and reshaped during late medieval times after a long age of relative 'stagnation', 'isolation' and 'backwardness'.

The various papers deal with such themes including interconnectedness between Africa and India, trade and urbanity in Golconda, the changing meanings of urbanization in Bengal, commercial and cultural contact between Aceh and India, changing techniques of warfare, representation of early modern rulers of India in contemporary European paintings, the impact of the Indian Ocean on the foreign policies of the Mughals, the meanings of piracy, labour process in the textile sector, Indo-Ottoman trade, Maratha-French relations, Bible translations and religious polemics, weapon making and the uses of elephants.

The book will be of interest to students and scholars of early modern Indian history in general and those working on aspects of connected histories in particular.

CHAPTER 1
Africa and Africans in the Making of Early Modern India

EDWARD A. ALPERS

Gwyn Campbell, Director of the Indian Ocean World Centre at McGill University in Montréal, Québec, Canada, argues persuasively that Africa must be regarded as an integral component of the Indian Ocean World global economy.¹ In making his case he vigorously distances himself from the dismissive attitude of Kirti Chaudhuri, who says relatively little about Africa in his seminal Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) and explicitly excludes it from his later Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). It is therefore most welcome that in a volume devoted to the place of the Indian Ocean in the making of early modern India, the editor has decided to include a chapter on Africa. In fact, Africa and India, especially western India, have a long tradition of ‘connected histories’, to use Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s felicitous construction.² In this modest contribution I propose to focus on the presence of Africans in India and the trade in textiles from India to Africa during the period under consideration as a means to understand the contribution of Africans and Africa to the early modern history of India.

India and Africa were linked by circulatory processes of exchange long before the early modern period. To take only one very early example, Indian spices were traded to Roman Egypt through the Red Sea port of Berenike, where the largest archaeological single find of Malabar pepper was excavated.³ In the medieval period, Indian textiles were traded to the important Swahili city-states of eastern Africa in exchange for gold and ivory. In the fourteenth century the intrepid Moroccan traveller and jurist, Ibn Battuta, travelled extensively in India. Near the great fortress city of Gwalior, in modern Madhya Pradesh, Ibn Battuta described the small town of Alabur, the governor of which ‘was the Abyssinian Badr, a slave of the sultan’s, a man whose bravery passed into a proverb. He was continually making raids on the infidels alone and single handed, killing and taking captive, so that his fame spread far and wide and the infidels were in fear of him.’⁴ Later, when he embarked from the Bay of Khambhat bound for Malabar, the ship on which he sailed was accompanied by a roofed galley, ‘which had a complement of fifty rowers and fifty Abyssinian men-at-arms. These latter are the guarantors of safety on the Indian Ocean; let there be but one of them on a ship and it will be avoided by the Indian pirates and idolaters’.⁵ Finally, at the great port of Calicut, which was the principal entrepôt for Chinese merchants in India, he noted that when the factor of one of the huge Chinese merchant vessels went on shore, ‘he is preceded by archers and Abyssinians with javelins, swords, drums, trumpets and bugles’.⁶ In short, wherever Ibn Battuta travelled in India, he encountered Abyssinians, whether slave or free, serving as valued military personnel on both land and sea.

Elsewhere in medieval Muslim India, African military slaves were present in both the Delhi and Bahmani sultanates, where they often played an important role in palace intrigues by siding with one faction or another. As early as the first half of the thirteenth century, notable Africans appear occasionally in the early history of the Delhi sultanate. A century later the overextended Delhi sultanate began to break up and by the mid-fifteenth century independent sultanates were established across northern and central India. Africans played important roles in all of these new states. In Bengal an Abyssinian dynasty ruled briefly from 1487 into 1493.⁷ In the Bahmani state of the Deccan, Habshis—the generic name for enslaved and freed Africans from northeast Africa—and Muwallads—the offspring of African fathers and Indian mothers—tended to side with their Deccani hosts against outside claimants to leadership. One visible sign of African presence in the Bahmani sultanate is the Habshi Kot (Abyssinian fort) at Bidar, where a number of important African figures from this period are buried.⁸

The presence of African soldiers and political elites was not, however, confined to the medieval period. Conditions of conflict in both India and Africa combined to create a demand for military slaves in Gujarat and a ready supply of captives in warfare in Northeast Africa. Northeast Africa had long been a source of supply of bonded labour for India, but in the sixteenth century the outbreak of intense warfare between Christian Abyssinia, with its Portuguese allies, and Muslim Adal, supported by the Ottoman Empire, yielded thousands of captives who were shipped off to Arabia and India. The spark for this conflict was the decision by the Abyssinian ruler, Lebna Dengel (r. 1508-40) to strike a decisive blow against Adal after decades of alternating fighting and trade. At the same time in Adal there emerged a radical party to challenge the ruling Walasma dynasty, which shared many economic interests with the Solomonic rulers of Abyssinia. In 1527 a jihad was declared under the leadership of Ahmed Guray; two years later his army crushed the Abyssinians at the Battle of Shembera Kure, to the east of modern Addis Ababa, and Lebna Dengel was driven into monastic exile. In subsequent years, Ahmed Guray’s armies swept across the Ethiopian highlands every dry season. Finally, with battlefield support provided by a Portuguese force led by Cristovão da Gama, in February 1543 the army of Emperor Galawdewos (r. 1540-59) defeated the Muslim army and killed Ahmed Guray at Wayna Daga, east of Lake Tana.⁹

Irrespective of whichever side had captured its opponents in battle, the sultanate of Gujarat was the major consumer of these soldiers. In the sixteenth century, the rulers of the sultanate of Gujarat found themselves challenged on land by the expanding Mughal empire and on the coast by the Portuguese. Maintenance of a powerful army was absolutely essential to the survival of the state and soldiers were recruited from wherever able-bodied men were available. During the reign of Bahadur Khan (1526-37), a population of some 5,000 Habshis inhabited the sultanate’s capital at Ahmedabad. While not all of these individuals would have been soldiers, indeed some were probably captured women, such a great concentration almost certainly reflects the consequences of the Muslim victory at Shembera Kure in 1527.¹⁰ Bahadur’s successor, Mahmud Khan (1537-54) is also reported to have had a retinue of Habshi servants and appointed several Habshi slave soldiers to high office.¹¹

As is fairly well known, Habshi military slaves and high officials became especially prominent in the Deccan during the early modern period. As Sunni Muslims, Habshis were natural allies of Deccani Muslims against Shi’a Muslim mercenaries who were infiltrating the kingdom from the north. Habshis were centrally involved in court intrigues following the collapse of the Bahmani kingdom and its replacement by several new, independent kingdoms. They were especially important in the sixteenth-century kingdoms of Ahmednagar, Bijapur and Golconda. By the last quarter of the sixteenth-century competition for political dominance in Ahmednagar had become fierce between the Deccanis, who included Habshis among their ranks, and the Afaqis, who were mainly immigrants from Persia and the Arab world. One of these Habshis was involved in the chaotic political aftermath of the assassination of Sultan Murtaza Nizam Shah I in 1588 and his son Sultan Miran Husain Nizam Shah II a year later. Led by a millenarian figure named Jamal Khan, who was a follower of the Mahdawi movement, the Deccanis seized power and reduced the latest ruler, Ismail Nizam Shah, to a puppet. According to Abdullâh Muhammad al-Makki, author of the Arabic History of Gujarat, who claims he was a witness to these events, military support by Habshi military slaves was critical to Jamal Khan’s victory. ‘They were Malek Farhād Khān, Shamshir Khān, Abnak Khān, Shujā‘at Khān, Jahāngir Khān, Habash Khān, Dilāwar Khān. They were all habshis and their chief was Farhād Khān. They were ten thousand horses in strength.’ This writer notes further that the ‘pomp and glory of the habshis got strengthened’.¹² Farhad Khan was appointed chief minister (peshwa) by Jamal Khan, but two years later Jamal Khan was removed from power and the puppet monarch replaced by his father, Burhan Nizam Shah II (r. 1591-5). During what became a bitter struggle against the Portuguese at Chaul, Farhad Khan was dispatched as head of some 4,000 reinforcements to relieve a fort Burhan Nizam Shah had ordered to be built overlooking Chaul. In the final battle in September 1594 the Portuguese decimated the Ahmednagar forces, killing as many as 12,000 men. Among the captives taken by the Portuguese was Farhad Khan, who was ultimately converted to Christianity and taken to Portugal.¹³

The most famous of these influential Habshi figures in the political history of the Deccan was Malik Ambar, who was wazir and the virtual ruler of Ahmednagar from 1600 to 1626.¹⁴ Probably born in southern Ethiopia and bearing the name Chapu, he was enslaved, driven to the coast, and transported to Mocha. From there he was sold in Baghdad to an insightful merchant who recognized Chapu’s intelligence, had him educated, converted to Islam, and renamed him Ambar, the Arabic word for ambergris and a characteristic slave name. His value undoubtedly enhanced, in the early 1570s his owner sold him to Chengiz Khan, himself a Habshi and former slave who was by then peshwa of the sultanate of Ahmednagar, one of the Bahmani successor-states. Over the next quarter century Malik Ambar rose to prominence as a military leader and savvy political operator, working tirelessly to beat back the encroachment of the Mughal empire under his contemporary Akbar the Great (r. 1556-1605) into the territory of the Nizam Shahi rulers of Ahmednagar. Having arranged a marriage between his own daughter and his favoured youthful claimant to the Nizam Shahi throne, Malik Ambar’s army defeated an invading Mughal force in 1601 and secured the throne for the chosen heir, Murtaza Nizam Shah II. As regent and prime minister Malik Ambar rearranged the kingdom’s revenue system, organized the army to defend against the Mughals, founded a new capital city at Khirki (later Aurangabad) in 1610, and ordered the construction of a sophisticated water supply system to the town. Following Malik Ambar’s death, another Habshi, Hamad Khan, replaced him as major-domo for the kingdom, while he in turn was followed by Malik Ambar’s grandson. During this same period, the Habshi Ikhlas Khan (1627-56) served as wazir of Bijapur.

Related to the renown enjoyed by Habshi military and court officials in the Deccan at this time was the emergence of a small Habshi state as the dominant naval power along the coast of western India. Following the conquest of the coastal region of the southern Konkan coast from Gujarat either in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, the ruler of Ahmednagar gave command of the island fort at Janjira to the Habshi Sidi Yaqut because of his military exploits and leadership during its capture. Over the next century, successor Ahmednagar officials, none of them Sidis, ruled the strategically located island, rebuilding its wooden fort as a massive stone stronghold, construction of which was completed in 1567. In 1618 Malik Ambar appointed one Sidi Surur (r. 1618-20) to govern the island-fortress and its environs. For the next two centuries the Sidis, as they became known, dominated the coastal waters to the south of Bombay, whether serving Ahmednagar, the Mughals, or their own interests, and holding off challenges by both the English East India Company and the Marathas.¹⁵

Before leaving the broad topic of the African military presence in early modern India, it is well to remember that the Portuguese themselves regularly manned their ships with both slave and free Africans. Owing to the very high mortality rate of Portuguese sailors on the Carreira da Índia, without the labour of both slave and free Africans as sailors, the Portuguese would arguably not have been able to operate as an Indian Ocean maritime power in western India.¹⁶ Portuguese troop strength in India was also supplemented by the African slaves of Portuguese nobles, as well as by local mercenaries. Among these local freelance soldiers were both Indians and Sidis, the descendants of enslaved Habshis. In 1686, for example, the Portuguese army at Daman included a number of Sidis.¹⁷ As R.J. Barendse notes, these bands of free, armed Sidis were often as much a threat to those who employed them as their allies. In 1693 a group of Sidis threatened violence against the Dutch at Surat, who had imprisoned one of their number for manslaughter.¹⁸ Four decades later, during the intense competition between rival merchant groups at Surat to control the trade of Mocha, Sidis were still reckoned to be ‘a powerful group in both the trade and politics of Surat’.¹⁹ In general, however, it is quite evident that the Portuguese slave trade to India was minimal, most captives serving as a form of conspicuous consumption for Portuguese notables who emulated their Indian counterparts by engaging ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Africa and Africans in the Making of Early Modern India
• 2. Trade in the Shaping of Early Modern India: Notes on the Deccan
• 3. The Story of Bengal 's Urbanization: Role of Trade in the Early Modern Period
• 4. Aceh-India Commercial and Literary Relations in the Seventeenth Century
• 5. Warfare in Early Modern South Asia, c.1520-c.1740
• 6. What Does the Emperor of India Look Like? European Representations of Indian Rulers (1650-1740)
• 7. 'Floating Political Rhetoric' in the Indian Ocean: Situating the Portuguese in the Mughal Foreign Politics
• 8. Scourge of the Seas: Malabar Pirates and the European Expansion in the Indian Ocean (c.1600-1800)
• 9. Weavers in Early Modern South Asia (Sixteenth-Seventeenth Centuries)
• 10. Indian Textiles in the Ottoman Empire: The Example of Damascus around 1700
• 11. The Maratha Court and the Embassies of Saint-Lubin and M. Montigny: A Truce towards Cordial Relations
• 12. The Unquiet Religious Backdrop to European East Indies Trade: Christian Polemical Literature and the First Portuguese Translation of the Bible, 1642-1694
• 13. The Techniques of Sword Making and Trade Practices: Taiid-e-Bisarat, a Treatise from Eighteenth Century Mughal Court
• 14. Elephants and the Making of Early Modern India
• List of Contributors