While the trade of slaves was not unknown in India, the scale of slavery in India was extremely small in pre-Islamic times.
By Shanmukh-Saswati Sarkar-Dikgaj-Aparna-Kirtivardhan
Religious Dimension in Slavery during Muslim Rule
Although Mughals enslaved both Indic and Muslim peasants and other plebian rebels, Hindus were at the receiving end more often. This is because the bulk of the peasantry was Indic. As stated before, about the end of the 16th century, only about 1 Muslim for every thousand Hindus was connected with the agriculture. Although the Muslim proportion of peasantry increased in the next century, with the mass conversions of the peasantry of provinces like Bengal and Sindh to Islam, still, peasantry remained Indic majority by far well up to 1947. Next, additional protection was accorded to Mohammedan subjects against slavery. During the Mughal era in Bengal namely the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the slave hunting of the Europeans, in particular the Portugese, ravaged East Bengal. We note that the factory records of the English East India Company testified to an imperial order served to the faujdar of Hugli in 1676, that directed the faujdar to make the English, Dutch and Portuguese sign a paper undertaking not to buy any slaves who are children of Muhammadan parents as the Portuguese did at the time. It was during this period that East Bengal was being Islamized, that is, there was still substantial sections of Hindus living there. Next, persecution was particularly severe for the Indic peasantry. During different periods of the Mughal regime, Indic peasants had to suffer higher taxes. Jaziya, a poll tax meant specifically for infidels, was banned by Akbar only late in his regime (after flip flops) and was reinstated by Aurangzeb. Thus Indic peasants failed to pay their taxes more often and also rebelled against unbearable taxes more regularly. This becomes apparent when we observe that the rebel territories mentioned above were predominantly Indic in the period under consideration. Thus the Indics were enslaved much more.
Besides, there was a greater demand for Indic slaves, because Islamic law bars a non-Muslim from buying a Muslim slave, but allows the sale of infidel slaves to anyone. There were also many Islamic lands that preferred to own infidel slaves. As Scott Levi remarks, “Because of their identification in Muslim societies as kafirs, `non-believers’, Hindus were especially in demand in the early modern bukharan slave markets.’’ Judicial records show that Indian slaves constituted at least 58% of the total slaves in the Central Asian region. The traffic of slaves to Central Asia, already known in ancient times, expanded enormously with the advent of Islam and the expansion of the Indian merchant Diasporas in Central Asia in the 16th century. Further, Indian merchant Diasporas in Astrakhan, which was the entrepot to the slave trade in the Ottoman Empire, vastly supported this traffic of slaves. Skilled Indian slaves were in great demand and many found their way to the Ottoman Empire. The existence of Indian metal workers in Bursa has been noted. The Ottoman Empire was a huge consumer of slaves till the 17th century, at least, and was a big buyer of Indian slaves’.
Indic slaves were also subjected to religious persecution, which the Muslim slaves were exempted from. Slavery was an important vehicle for the spread of Islam; thus, all Hindu slaves were forcibly converted to Islam when they were bought by Muslim owners. We now give a specific example of how slavery was a vehicle of proselytization. In 1717, Murshid Quli Khan, a powerful 18th century Nawab of Bengal, was born in a Brahmin family in Deccan. In his infancy, he was bought by a Muslim, who took him to Persia on return from Persia, he got appointed to several high offices and ultimately became the Subedar of Bengal. Not only was he converted, he was also indoctrinated to the extent that, as Nawab of Bengal, he forcibly converted Hindus, destroyed temples and, in essence, became a propagator of his faith. Murshid Quli Khan converted Hugli to a Shia colony. It became a center of Shia theology and culture. The stream of migration from Persia to Bengal greatly increased during Murshid Quli’s reign. Naturally, his reputation stands very high among members of his own sect. Salimullah rose to the level of an Abul Fazal in extolling him. He wrote, “Since the time of Shaista Khan, there had not appeared in any part of Hindustan an amir who could be compared with Ja’far Khan [Murshid Quli] for his zeal in the propagation of the faith. … From breakfast to noon, he employed himself in copying the Koran. He maintained about 2000 readers beadsmen, and chanters, who were constantly employed in reading the Koran and other acts of devotion.’’ Jadunath Sarkar commented on his religious bigotry and described him as “a puritan in his private life, …, gravely decorous and rigidly orthodox as befitted a favorite disciple of Aurangzeb, and a propagator of his faith as ordained in his scriptures’’.
The Ugly Truth of Trans-national trade – Human trafficking
Some of the slaves remained in India in the service of the royalty and the nobility, but many were forcibly deported to Central Asia. Significant number of Indian slaves lived in Central Asia during the medieval times, extending well up to the early modern times. Some estimates suggest that the percentage of slaves in Bukhara of Indian origin may have exceeded 50%. Hindu slaves were especially in demand there, and comprised of a large religious group. Even 19th century records indicate the presence of Hindu slaves and other non-Muslim slaves in Central Asia.
For the trade from Multan and Sindh to Bukhara, the southern route (Multan-Shikarpur-Kandahar-Ghazni-Kabul) route was very popular in the Mughal times, with caravans carrying goods `worth millions’ to Kandahar.
Hindu slaves were being exported to Central Asia right from the days of the Ghaznavi capture of the Indian city of Thanesar in the year 1014. Mughal emperors, from Akbar to Shah Jahan had the tradition of sending Indian slaves as gifts to the rulers of Central Asia. Scott Levi has added about the Mughal period, “By and large, the exportation of Hindu slaves to Turan [Central Asia] continued unhindered throughout the Mughal period. …Whether agriculturists or pastoralists, following their enslavement such individuals were sent in large numbers to markets beyond India’s Northwest Frontier, far away from their family support system. Even appreciating that the figures presented in the chronicles and other accounts are likely to be exaggerated it seems reasonable to accept the explanation that, over the years, Mughal expansion in India accounts for the enslavement and exportation of hundreds of thousands of individuals, or more, including not only those men who militarily resisted the mughals, but also vast numbers of women and children.’’ In the middle of the eighteenth century, during his military expeditions in North India, Ahmed Shah Abdali enslaved several Hindus and Sikhs of Punjab, Delhi, Mathura and Brindaban, and carried them off with him to Afghanistan. Further, Khushwant Singh mentions that the Afghans took many Indian women as slaves to Afghanistan, especially during Abdali’s fourth and fifth invasions of India. In the early nineteenth century, Josiah Harlan reported that Murad Beg, the Afghan ruler of Qunduz organized frequent slave raids into Chitral (currently in Pakistan). He was a “great wholesale dealer in this unholy merchandise [slave trade]’’
Slaves comprised of an important component of the transnational trade. Many slaves were exported by caravan merchants, who either purchased them outright or received them in trade for other commodities in demand in India, such as horses. The Baburnama records many caravans bound towards Kabul carrying Hindustani slaves as an important commodity. Babur has written that caravans of ten, fifteen or twenty thousand heads of houses used to come from Hindustan bringing in slaves and other commodities to Kabul.
To quote Farah Abidin, “One of the most favorite and chief exports from India to this [Kabul] region were Indian slaves, both Hindus and Muslims; then these slaves were sent to the bazaars of Central Asia in a number of ways. Some of them were taken as prisoners of war, some in exchange for Central Asian horses while others were captured during the raids on trading Caravans. The manuscript Rauzat-ur Rizwan va hadikat al gilman, written by Badruddin Kashmiri during the reign of Abdullah Khan Uzbek informs us that the skilled slaves were much sought-after Indian commodity…. Abdul Abbas Muhammad Talib, the author of Matlab at-Talib also speaks of Indian slaves in this region’’. There existed a cattle market in Kabul which sold slaves and a host of other animals, like horses, elephants, camels, horses, buffalos, cows, oxen, donkeys, goats etc. Note that during the Mughal reign the raids by bandits and plunderers on mercantile caravans rarely succeeded as the merchants usually travelled heavily armed and in large groups, organizing themselves in qafilas or caravans.
In 1558 Anthony Jenkinson has noted that Indian (and Iranian) merchants who visited Bukhara commonly exported slaves to the Bukharan slave market. Monserrate and Bernier have mentioned that the Mughal Imperial establishment routinely exported slaves for horses in Central Asia. Further, in, it has been noted that Indian traders often sold silk (raw and manufactured) and horses in the Russian empire in the middle of the 16th century, which they had likely purchased in exchange for slaves in Kabul, Astrakhan or Bukhara. Indian slaves were sold in numbers in Bukhara and Astrakhan. In particular, the Ottoman Empire was a huge consumer of Indian slaves in the 16th century, but this gradually reduced in the 17th and more or less disappeared in the 18th centuries.
The trans-national trade route from the Gangetic valley to Kabul, Balkh and Bukhara could follow two separate paths, shown in the map. In the ancient Kushana and Gupta times, it appears that the northern route directly connecting Gangetic valley and Central Asia used to pass through northern and central Punjab, cross the Indus River at Attock and then work its way through the Khyber Pass to Kabul and beyond. From at least the fourteenth century, the southern trade from Multan to Delhi and from Delhi to Ahmedabad has been in use for purposes of large scale trade. In the Mughal times, the trade with Punjab was centered around Peshawar, but the trade with other parts was based in Multan, Shikarpur and Bahawalpur. For the trade from Multan and Sindh to Bukhara, the southern route (Multan-Shikarpur-Kandahar-Ghazni-Kabul) route was very popular in the Mughal times, with caravans carrying goods `worth millions’ to Kandahar. By the middle and late 18th centuries, the southern route had become more popular with the traders, with the Sikhs and Jats, astride the northern trade routes, growing restive in north India (they used to often plunder merchant caravans). This resulted in the rising importance of Shikarpur and Multan as trade centers, and the southern route from Multan and Shikarpur through the Bolan Pass to Kandahar, Kabul and Bukhara. In the map shown below, we have marked the principal routes taken by the trans-national traders (including slave traders) from Punjab to Central Asia.
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Courtesy: Myind.net
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