African Origins and Social Status in Early Modern South Asia

Wednesday, June 11, 2025

15:00 - 16:45 GMT

Location: MFB-Nouvelle Salle

Presenter(s)

EK

Emma Kalb
University of Bonn, Germany

Paper Abstract: This paper looks at extant accounts of people of African descent in early modern Mughal South Asia, to consider how their life trajectories, their reception, and their own possible experiences may have been shaped by their origins. While their is little information about their arrival in Mughal territories, sources on this period evidence the ongoing presence of enslaved, manumitted, and free Africans referred to as habashī, a term indicating their likely roots in Northeast Africa. Recent scholarship has begun to consider how understandings of race, origin, and descent were formed in Mughal South Asia (Dayal 2019; Kia 2020; Gandhi 2022), yet the life trajectories and lived experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendents have yet to be considered, in contrast to better documented examples in the Deccan such as (most famously) Malik ‘Ambar. There are multiple records, in particular, of men of African origins rising into high status positions within the Mughal elite such as military commander or police superintendent. This presentation will thus take up the textual traces of specific individuals in Persian-language sources to begin to piece together the possible parameters of their lives. Contextualizing this evidence within broader understandings of slavery, freedom, race, and social status in this period, I will argue that enslaved and manumitted Africans, as well as their descendents, occupied a range of positions within Mughal society, marked both by negative attitudes towards their race and enslaved status/origins, as well as by possibilities for social mobility.