Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  The next morning, I stand in Iqbal’s office in Badin town–which doubles as a Sheedi meeting-place and tea-drinking stop–looking at the photograph which hangs there of a tomb. Garlands of red roses have been draped along the grave; the pale yellow stone, now badly chipped, was once carefully chiselled with sharp architraves and floral swirls. Before the tomb is a chubby toddler dressed in a white shalwar kameez, his skin dark and smooth as a lychee stone.

  The photograph was taken in Hyderabad eighteen years ago. Today, the small boy, Awais, is by my side: still wearing a shalwar kameez, but twenty years old now, and six feet tall. As for the tomb, it has changed beyond recognition, blandly renovated to reflect its incumbent’s new fame as the hero of Sindh’s freedom struggle. Nowadays it is enclosed within a concrete shed, and the yellow stone flowers have been smoothed grey with cement. On the black and white placard propped up against the stone is a clue to the tomb’s new importance. It reads:

  Shahid Sindh General Hosh Mohammed Sheedi ko khirayitah Sindh (Martyr of Sindh, General Hosh Muhammad Sheedi, Sindh salutes you)

  General Hosh Muhammad Sheedi was killed on 24 March 1843, in the final, bitter confrontation between the Talpurs and the British. He was buried where he fell, on a battleground north of Hyderabad, and for over a hundred years his grave stood untended and unnoticed by the local population, next to those of the other battle dead, including the British. Then, in the mid-1980s, when Sindhi nationalists were searching their history for indigenous champions to unite them against the immigrant Urdu-speaking Mohajirs, somebody thought of honouring the last anti-imperial defender of Sindh. Hosh Muhammad was seized upon and promoted as a local hero.

  What the Sindhis didn’t seem to notice was that, like their Mohajir enemies, Hosh Muhammad was of immigrant descent too: from Africa.

  Little is known about Hosh Muhammad Sheedi’s life. He was born a slave into the ruling Talpur family, joined the Sindhi army and was quickly promoted to General. When the British invaded, and the Talpur forces in upper Sindh capitulated, it was Hosh Muhammad who rallied Sindh’s army in the south with the patriotic cry, ‘Marveso marveso par Sindh na deso: I will fight and fight but I will never give up Sindh.’ In a country where, since 1947, not one Sheedi has become an army officer, the story of Hosh Muhammad’s rise from slave to army commander is a damning testament to the fact that before British rule, African slaves were highly regarded and given positions of power.

  Today, Lower Sindh, or Lar, the land between Hyderabad and Thatta, is the home of South Asia’s largest African-descended population, and by the time Hosh Muhammad Sheedi died, it had been at the centre of a maritime trade, in black slaves and other goods, between Africa and India for centuries. The people of the lower Indus valley were trading with Mesopotamia five thousand years ago and with Africa since at least the time of Pliny (in the first century CE). The slave trade itself was age-old within Africa; but it was Arabs who, even before the time of the Prophet Muhammad, first developed the trade out of the country. Then came Islam, with its single-minded conquests and trans-oceanic merchant networks, and the business spread from Arabia to the Iberian coast, from East Africa to South Asia.

  Islam had a complex relationship with slavery. As in the Bible, slaves were an important part of the Qur’an’s social system–Muhammad himself sold the Jewish women of Medina into slavery–and the Qur’an, which has a rule for everything, scripted a strict code regarding their treatment. Slaves were not objects, but human beings, and they were to be considered as part of the family. Although the East African slave trade was vicious and brutal, even in the cruel nineteenth century it appears not to have reached the extremes of the Christian-run Atlantic trade from West Africa to the Americas. One reason for this may have been that sellers and buyers were Muslim. In Islam, good treatment of slaves incurred heavenly benefits for the owner. Freeing a ‘believing slave’ was regarded as so pious that it negated the sin of killing a Muslim accidentally. Prophet Muhammad set the example, venerating Bilal with the nickname–in terms a trifle patronizing to Bilal’s homeland–‘the first fruit of Ethiopia’.

  As a result of this close and paternal relationship between owner and slave, Islamic societies, wherever they grew up, made slaves a central feature of society. Slaves were not just a silent underclass, as in ancient Greece or the Americas, but often became an elite, with responsibility as soldiers, advisers or generals, and power over free persons. From the ninth century onwards, slave armies and administrations became one of the defining characteristics of Islamic polities.

  The armies of Islam recruited slaves widely from wherever Muslim soldiers marched–lower Sindh, the Eurasian steppes, Africa. Africans, in particular, became extremely popular in Muslim states, from Spain to Persia. The tenth-century Baghdad Caliph had seven thousand black eunuchs (and four thousand white ones). African women were renowned as good cooks; the eunuchs were trustworthy servants. Then there was the aesthetic consideration: being surrounded by black servants made the master’s complexion seem paler. Black slaves served a similar role in Europe, where, as one English writer put it in 1675: ‘[A Towne Misse] hath always two necessary Implements about her, a Blackamoor, and a little Dog, for without these she would be neither Fair, nor Sweet.’

  As Islam’s reach into Africa deepened, and the number of black slaves being exported to Arabia increased, so did Arab racism about Africans. Some historians trace this to the revolt by black slaves working in the mines and plantations of Mesopotamia, in 883 CE. But in his last sermon the Prophet made the dubious point that ‘no white has [priority] over a black except in righteousness’–and perhaps it was this that licensed Arabs to export two million sub-Saharan slaves between 900 and 1100.

  Like the Christian slave traders–who ransacked the Bible in search of passages denigrating blacks–Islamic traders found justification in the ‘Hamitic hypothesis’ that Noah had cursed his son Ham to have black-skinned descendants who would be forever the servants of non-blacks. The Arabs also adopted the racism of the places they conquered. The Zoroastrianism of Persia pitted light against dark in a manner that easily mutated from the abstract to the epidermal; pejorative categories such as ‘barbara’ were enlisted from the Greek; and Arabic translations were made of the works of Galen, the Roman physician who wrote that the black man had a ‘defective brain’. Important Muslim thinkers such as al-Masudi and Avicenna seem to have taken his words seriously. It is the sight of a black slave topping his fair queen which prompts King Shahryar’s uxoricide in The Thousand and One Nights–the juxtaposition between black and white became a favourite aesthetic of Arabic literature.

  When the first Muslim-Arab army arrived on the shores of Sindh in 711 CE, it arrived with plenty of African slaves, and these stereotypes intact. But in India–a continent with a huge variety of human skin types–the polarity could not function so smoothly. India had its own dark-skinned population and its own non-African slaves. Arab prejudices were at times reinforced by local conditions, at others dissolved.

  Four centuries later, when Islam expanded permanently into India, immigrant Muslim kings–themselves descended from Turkish slaves–ruled over a native population of Hindus. Now it was the Hindu who became negatively associated with blackness, in comparison to the fair Turkish warrior. While Jewish and Christian commentators had assumed that the slave children fathered by Ham, Noah’s unlucky son, were Africans, Ferishta, the Persian historian, now added the peoples of ‘Hind’ and ‘Sind’ as well.

  The Indians, in their turn, sometimes found the colouring of their conquerors abhorrent. A Kashmiri Hindu recoiled in horror on beholding the pale Ghurid ambassador, a Muslim from Afghanistan:

  it was almost as if the colour black had shunned him in fear of being stained by his bad reputation…so ghastly white he was, whiter than bleached cloth, whiter than the snow of the Himalayan region where he was born.

  The difference in skin colour between the ruling Muslim kings and the native population persisted through the Mughal era, su
ch that when European travellers began exploring India in the seventeenth century, they understood the word ‘Mughal’ to mean white: ‘The word Mogull in their language is as much [as] to say the great white king,’ wrote Robert Coverte in 1612.

  India’s immigrant Muslim rulers, meanwhile, considering Africans more loyal than indigenous servants, encouraged slave galleys to bring ever more Africans to India in fetters. In direct contrast to the Atlantic slave trade–where huge numbers of African men were purchased to work on the sugar plantations in the Americas–Asia, which already had a large agrarian population, needed twice as many women as men. Presumably these African women were used as concubines, servants, wet nurses and cooks. But the record is silent about what happened to them (an example, perhaps, of the far greater assimilation of the slave race here than in the Americas).

  Elite male Africans, however, were highly visible. In Delhi, the convention of African slaves being given positions at court reached its dramatic climax in 1240 when Razia–the city’s first and only female sultan–was deposed for having an affair with her Ethiopian slave minister, Yaqut.

  Razia, herself the product of a Turkish slave dynasty, was an unusual woman who refused to marry, wore ‘manly garb’, and rode a horse, all of which shocked the conservative clergy. It was her extramarital affair with an African slave, though, which led to her deposition. In the early fourteenth century, Ibn Battuta, a Moroccan trader and writer who stayed in the city after her death, repeated the Delhi gossip, that ‘she was suspected of relations with a slave of hers, one of the Abyssinians, so the people agreed to depose her and marry her to a husband.’ Africans could hold places of honour, but there was a line beyond which they were not allowed in tread. Yaqut was executed.

  Nevertheless, after Yaqut there were many more African slave rulers in India. A fourteenth-century Sultan of Delhi had a black vizier who was elected governor in eastern India. The governor’s adopted black son then became an independent ruler who struck his own coinage. Throughout the fifteenth century there were black slave soldiers all over India, from the Deccan to Bengal. Two hundred years later, the Portuguese sailor João de Castro noted that Ethiopian soldiers were proverbially reliable throughout the country, and that Indian armies were always commanded by Africans. In the early seventeenth century, Malik Ambar, a slave from Ethiopia, grew so powerful in central-southern India that he assembled his own army and successfully defeated the Mughal emperor Akbar’s attempt to take over the region. (In Lyari, I was even told that the south Indian ruler, Tipu Sultan, was a Sheedi.) And in 1858, when the British besieged mutinous Lucknow, they found themselves being fired upon by the Nawab’s richly dressed African eunuchs, whose ‘skill, as marksmen’, wrote William Russell, war correspondent for The Times, ‘caused us great loss’.

  In Mughal India, Africans were also sailors of repute. Ibn Battuta had already observed that they were renowned as the ‘guarantors of safety’ on the Indian Ocean, and as late as the seventeenth century, African admirals worked for the Mughal empire on prestigious salaries. Janjira, an island near Bombay, was colonized by African sailors in 1100 and they continued to control much of the trade off the west coast for the next six hundred years. In the seventeenth century, the Marathas in western India attempted unsuccessfully to defeat them; and it took the British until the early nineteenth century to stop the African presence hampering their colonial designs. Seth Naomal, the Hindu trader who helped the British take Karachi, referred to the period of ‘Shidi rule’ in Bombay–indicating that Africans wielded not inconsiderable power, in local memory at least, as late as the nineteenth century.

  Early English travellers remarked upon the phenomenon of African influence in India with some awe. In 1698, John Fryer noted that Africans were offered some of ‘the Chief Employments’ in India; ‘Frizled Woolly-pated Blacks’, he wrote, were given ‘great Preferments’. In 1772, John Henry Grose remarked that Ethiopian slaves were ‘highly valued’ by Indo-Muslim rulers ‘for their courage, fidelity, and shrewdness; in which they so far excel, as often to rise to posts of great trust and honor, and are made governors of places’. Since many Muslim kings in India were themselves from slave dynasties, Grose observed, they treat their African slaves with ‘great humanity, and bind them to faithful and even affectionate service, by their tenderness and next to parental care of them’. But during the nineteenth century, after the British took over the running of large parts of India, this legacy was suppressed. ‘European historians,’ E. Denison Ross observed in his Arabic History of Gujarat (1910), ‘have failed to attach significant importance to the part played by the Habshis in the history of that country.’

  This is borne out by British ethnographic writing on Sindh. When the British began to explore what is now southern Pakistan, they found that along the coast ‘no family of any consideration was without male and female slaves, and the greater number of Sidis, or negroes, came from Muscat.’ Freeing the slaves of the Talpurs–whom the British had just evicted–was repeatedly presented as colonialism’s justification, its great moral crusade, a distraction from the crime of conquering the country.

  With Britain as the ruling administration, however, the perception of Africans worsened. Richard Burton, the traveller and explorer, was a young soldier in Sindh during the early days of British rule there. In 1848, he wrote a report for the Bombay Government in which he noted under the section Slaves that ‘Formerly great numbers of Zanzibarees, Bombasees, and Hubshees (Abyssinians) &c. found their way into Sind…All of them are celebrated for their thievish, drunken, and fighting propensities.’ Three years later, in his book on Sindh, The Unhappy Valley, he described a Sheedi dance at the Muslim shrine at Manghopir (now in north Karachi). The ‘bevy of African dames’, he wrote, have ‘uncomely limbs’ and dance with ‘all the grace of a Punjaub bear’ the men howl ‘like maniacs’ and drum with ‘all the weight of their monstrous muscular arms’. Burton’s prejudices surfaced again in his book, Sind Revisited (1877), in which he dismissed the African admirals of Janjira as ‘pirates’ and ‘sea-Thugs’.

  Burton’s jottings were typical of the unpalatable British colonial reaction to Africans in India. Where an Indian might have associated an African aristocrat or slave with the long history of African presence there, British imperial servants–seeing them as threats, or perhaps simply as cogs in a racist colonial endeavour–voiced prejudice and suspicion. The British abolished slavery, but it is possible that one of the effects of a hundred years of British rule was the decline in status of black people in India.

  This deterioration is evident in the way the word ‘Sheedi’–which has no plain etymology in Arabic or any Indian language–was interpreted over the centuries. In the eighteenth century, John Henry Grose explained that ‘Siddee’ was the title given by Indian Muslim rulers to those Ethiopian slaves whom they had elected as governors–an honorific. But Burton’s 1851 spelling of the word–‘Seedy’–is innately uncomplimentary; and in 1877, when he used the variant spelling ‘Sidi’, he implied that it was a term of abuse. In Sindh today, most people will tell you that Sheedi means ‘black’ or ‘African’ or even ‘slave’. One Western academic has speculated that it derives from the Arabic shaydâ, ‘fool’ or ‘senseless’. Al-Habsh, a semi-defunct Sheedi cultural group in Hyderabad, perhaps embarrassed by the negative connotations attributed to the word, claims in a Sindhi-language pamphlet that it means nothing at all. In Badin, however, Iqbal’s uncle gives me a proud and evocative etymology. Sheedi, he says, is a mutation of the Arabic word Sahabi: friend or companion of the Prophet. This is contentious, for an association with the Prophet is generally the privilege of Sindh’s social and religious aristocracy. But the Sheedis think of themselves as the kinspeople of Bilal; and it was to him, after all, that the Prophet said ‘Ya Sahabi’, my companion.

  Even after the British conquered Sindh and banned slavery, the trade persisted. As late as 1890, when Alexander Baillie wrote his book on Karachi, an English boat captured a man-of-war with twenty-five
slaves on board. In his autobiography, the Hindu merchant Seth Naomal recalled how he had offered to find four thousand fighting men from Zanzibar to supplement British troops in Karachi during the 1857 ‘Mutiny’ in north India. Whether the Zanzibaris were slaves or mercenaries, he didn’t say. But his comment is an example of just how closely Sindhi and Gujarati traders like Naomal were involved in the trade as middlemen, and had been for centuries.

  Whereas Africans were assimilated by Islamic societies, there was no place for them in Hinduism, and very few African slaves became Hindus. Anybody outside the caste system–especially one with dark skin and tightly curled hair–was a mleccha, a barbarian. Today, as any Indian or Pakistani mother with a daughter of marriageable age can tell you, the northern subcontinent is a morbidly skin-colour conscious society. Thus ‘Fair & Lovely’ skin-lightening cream is available all over Pakistan, in villages beyond the reach of tarmac and buses, in even the most scantily stocked tea-shacks. In the Classified Ads section of India’s national newspapers, girls and boys of ‘fair’ or ‘wheaten’ complexion are demanded and proffered. ‘Gori gori gori’ (fair-skinned girl) sing the heroes of Bollywood films; and girls all across Pakistan sit up and take note.

  I vividly remember the first time I saw Bollywood playing racism for laughs. Six years ago, I was sitting in the Eros cinema in Delhi watching Hadh kar di apne, a Bollywood B-movie, with an Indian friend, when on to the set lumbered two parody Africans. Clumsily made up in black face-paint and Afro wigs, they towered menacingly over the diminutive Indian actress and attempted to rape her. Her screams brought the rotund Indian hero running to her rescue, and as the audience cheered, he threw the Africans to the ground and kicked them into submission. The hero and heroine swooned into each other’s arms and exited back to the main narrative; the ‘Africans’ disappeared as suddenly as they had come.

  In the Bombay film industry, stereotypes of primitivism have long been a staple. Song and dance routines use African or Indian ‘tribals’ as objects of parody and exoticism. Even in the twenty-first century, ‘Africans’ (usually blacked-up Indian actors) make pantomime appearances. Pakistan’s cinema industry is currently even cruder; but the films made there are generally so bad, and Bollywood’s dominance of Pakistan’s cable TV channels so complete, that they play to near empty houses.