Author: Sunil Khilnani
Category: Nonfiction
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Malik Ambar’s journey from Abyssinia to the Deccan was a meandering one. When first enslaved, he was sent to Baghdad, where he was converted to Islam and renamed. He was manifestly clever, and his first owner taught him finance and administration, in Arabic, a practice of education not uncommon in the warrior-slave trade. African slaves were valued not just for their strength, but also for their leadership abilities, strategic intelligence, and cultural flexibility.
When his first master died, Malik Ambar was sold again, perhaps repeatedly. At some point during his West Asian sojourn, he picked up Iranian irrigation techniques. We actually have a contemporary Dutch record of one transaction in which Malik Ambar was sold for an impressive price of eighty guilders, a twisted tribute to his exceptional capabilities. Then, perhaps late in his teens, he ended up with many compatriots in an Arab dhow, plowing southeast across the Arabian Sea toward the Konkan coast, in today’s Maharashtra. He had acquired by now a cultural education to rival that of his future owners.
Malik Ambar’s new Indian master was Chengiz Khan, peshwa, or “chief minister,” of the Deccan’s fading Nizam Shahi sultanate. Chengiz was known to give his habshis room for advancement—for he was himself a habshi and a former slave. Malik Ambar made it his business to watch Chengiz closely as he managed his role as peshwa. Eventually, the slave who already had financial management and engineering skills began absorbing political strategy from his master, who would prove to be his last.
* * *
Malik Ambar’s story complicates our assumptions about slavery, particularly the view that all slaves were cut off from the avenues of social mobility enjoyed by free men. The reason he would, over time, be able to mimic his master and rise from slave to kingmaker had to do not just with his own abilities, but also with the military slavery system that dated back to the Arab world of the tenth century. When not on the battlefield, these elite slaves were often appointed to trusted roles within the household: bodyguards, valets, and guardians of the harem. They were educated and nurtured by their masters, treated almost like sons—in exchange for their total loyalty, of course. And when their masters died, they were often freed.
Some of these educated, capable freed slaves became freelancers and mercenaries, and a few maneuvered themselves into positions of genuine power, as Malik Ambar’s own master had done. When Chengiz Khan died in 1575, Malik Ambar was still in his midtwenties. He was smart, ambitious, charismatic, highly skilled—and now free.
As a mercenary serving a series of local commanders, Malik Ambar spent the next two decades building a band of loyal soldiers of his own—many of them, ironically, Ethiopian habshis engaged by him on the usual slave terms. Having seen what Chengiz Khan achieved, Malik Ambar wanted to go farther, and succeeded in part by lucky timing. By 1595 he had built a large army at a crucial moment in Deccan history. The sultan he was employed by needed him desperately, for the Mughal Empire, expanding by the day under the strategic brilliance of Akbar (16), was knocking on the door.
Akbar’s forces had been edging steadily southward, seeking to capture Maratha territory and subdue the rulers of the Deccan. They laid siege to the fortified city of Ahmednagar, the politically fractious capital of the Nizam Shahi sultanate. But in a daring nighttime maneuver, Malik Ambar and his troops managed to break out of the city and escape through the enemy lines. While the city fell, many of the cavalrymen of the defeated ruler joined Malik Ambar. He could now command a mixed group of around seven thousand crack fighters. For the next three decades, successive Mughal emperors would send their forces to try to control the Deccan countryside. Against Malik Ambar, they would fail.
As Richard Eaton observes, “Malik Ambar was one of several African commanders who were able to attract other Africans and other Indians, Marathas, to their sides and wage guerrilla warfare. It seems to have been his ability in mastering guerrilla warfare that propelled his career. And this happened rather rapidly.”
The terrain Malik Ambar mastered was hilly, forested, and full of deep ravines—“nasty turf,” in modern U.S. military parlance, not lending itself to “Clear, Hold, Build.” Yet Malik Ambar had surveyed many of these lands as an administrator, while also absorbing the combat techniques of the indigenous Marathas. Recall those owls, dead and alive, scattered about that gruesome painting of Malik Ambar’s impaled head? Maybe they symbolized not just his supposedly dark soul, but also his ability to attack under cover of darkness. Thanks to his knowledge of the contours of the area, he could cut off the supply lines of his enemy. He built his forces to some fifty thousand, and from time to time his swift-moving light cavalry surprised the Mughals in the ravines and hacked them down.
In 1610, Malik Ambar captured the citadel at Daulatabad. Set high on a hill, heavily fortified, it was one of the trophies for Deccan military campaigners. Briefly, it served as his capital. In the palace here, he consolidated his power by sometimes grim political stratagems. Earlier, in a shrewd move, he had married off his daughter to the local sultan. From her, he came to know that the sultan’s senior wife, of Persian origin, had insulted him as being a mere slave—the pretext he needed to poison both her and the sultan. He then installed on the throne the dead sultan’s five-year-old son—and proceeded to rule, not just as peshwa but also, effectively, as regent.
A Dutch merchant, Pieter van den Broecke, traveled across the Deccan in the late 1610s and left a description of Malik Ambar in his prime: a “cruel Roman face, of tall and strong build, with white glassy eyes, which are very misplaced on him.” Still, van den Broecke noted, Malik Ambar was “loved and respected by everyone and keeps good government.” Thanks to the ruler’s uncompromising punishments for highway robbers, “one may travel through his country with gold.” Drunken soldiers in the ranks had molten lead poured down their throats.
It’s from such sources, and those of his enemies, that we get our sense of Malik Ambar. Regrettably, despite his wide education and expertise, he left none of his own writings. So there are no personal insights, and no clarity on his private life.
We’re more certain about the afterlife of his guerrilla tactics, known as bargi-giri, which were adopted and refined by the Maratha leader Shivaji (19). That connection with Shivaji is an interesting one: Shivaji is the defining hero of his region, the Hindu warrior who defied the Mughals. And in the Indian nationalist story, too, Shivaji was the great resister against the Muslim invaders. Yet with Malik Ambar we have evidence of someone even earlier who took on the Mughals—and whom they could not defeat. He’s not a Hindu. He’s not a native defending some ancient motherland. He’s an Ethiopian opportunist and power entrepreneur. One of the main resisters to Mughal expansion into the south turns out to have been an Ethiopian slave. He doesn’t fit neatly into any of the standard narrative silos of Indian history: Hindu, Muslim, or European.
Even more than the later exploits of Shivaji, Malik Ambar’s military strategy unsettled the Mughals. As the seventeenth century began, Emperor Jahangir inherited the goal of his father, Akbar: crushing the Ethiopian parvenu. His preoccupation with Malik Ambar bordered on neurosis. Like other Mughal emperors before and after, Jahangir insisted on being portrayed as a source of light, bringing peace and illumination to his people. Frustrated by Malik Ambar, he cast his rival as the polar opposite, his dark skin equated with a dark and cunning heart. Jahangir’s memoirs call him “Ambar of dark fate,” “the ill-starred Ambar,” “the rebel Ambar,” “the black-fated one” and, simply, “that disastrous man.”
Which brings us back to the painting of Malik Ambar’s severed head on a spear, shot through by the archer in red robe and white slippers. The archer is Jahangir himself. The emperor commissioned the gifted artist Abu’l Hasan to paint it in 1615, exactly twenty years after the Mughal pursuit of Malik Ambar’s head had begun. But in fact Jahangir never defeated Ambar in battle, and certainly never got to release arrows into his disembodied head. As Eaton notes, “The painting is conveying his fantasy of accomplishing in art what he simply was not able
to do on the battlefield.”
* * *
Malik Ambar’s career marked the zenith of the habshi story in India: his realm extended from the island fortress of Janjira, on the Konkan coast, deep into the Deccan hinterland. With the fall of the Deccani sultanates, successor powers stopped using military slavery, and the African diaspora of India either intermarried or retreated to relatively remote parts of Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Karnataka—though Malik Ambar’s fortified port at Janjira remained controlled by habshis right down to 1948. Neither the Portuguese nor the British (or even the redoubtable Shivaji) could make it their own.
The neglect of Malik Ambar’s story, and of the African historical contribution and experience in India more generally, is rooted in a racial prejudice that shows little sign of abating. Recently in urban India it’s become fashionable to hire young Indians of African descent as bouncers at nightclubs and bars. (Employers instruct these modern strongmen to speak only English, in order to maintain the illusion of their exotic origins.) But most of the one hundred thousand or so descendants of former slaves now live in isolated communities in western India: places where they’re routinely denied the very means of upward mobility—a good education and recognition of merit—that turned a remarkable slave into an unvanquished power some five centuries ago.
18
DARA SHIKOH
The Meeting Place of the Two Oceans
1615–1659
On September 8, 1659, huge crowds gathered in Delhi to watch a Mughal prince parade through the streets. Cavalrymen, accompanied by lines of soldiers, rode beside him. The prince, named Dara Shikoh, was perched in a howdah on the back of an elephant, heading for the Red Fort. Yet this was no coronation, or victorious homecoming after battle—it was an elaborate public humiliation. A French adventurer at the Mughal court was at the scene:
This was not one of the majestic elephants of Pegu or Ceylon, which Dara had been in the habit of mounting, pompously caparisoned … Dara was now seen seated on a miserable and worn-out animal, covered with filth; he no longer wore the necklace of large pearls which distinguish the princes of Hindoustan … and his sorry turban was wrapt round with a Kashmir shawl or scarf, resembling that worn by the meanest of the people.
Dara Shikoh, the eldest son of Emperor Shah Jahan, had been his father’s chosen heir to the Mughals’ vast empire. While Shah Jahan sent his younger sons to govern far-flung provinces, he kept his eldest, Dara, close to home, giving him an annual allowance of some twenty million rupees, a sum far in excess of what other senior figures in the Mughal court received. Not surprisingly, some at court called the favorite son Baba Dara (“infant Dara”), a Mughal daddy’s boy. So what twist of fate brought this prince, descended from the emperor Akbar (16), to humiliation on the Delhi streets?
What drives Dara’s story is his inquiring mind—his great strength, which became his downfall. He spent his princely stipend exploring religious ideas and philosophy, and commissioning splendid albums of calligraphy and miniature paintings. His interests stretched across cultures and traditions, and he surrounded himself with Sufi mystics, yogis, fakirs, and holy men from a variety of faiths. With their help, he devoted much of his life to translating into Persian the world’s major scriptures. Most significant, he immersed himself in Sanskrit works, and beginning in 1656 he assembled a group of Brahmin pandits to translate the Upanishads, the philosophical bases of Vedantic Hinduism (see 8, Adi Shankara).
But Dara Shikoh’s story ran in parallel with another: that of his religiously conservative brother, Aurangzeb. “The relationship between the two men was poisonous—and poisonous from a very early age,” says Munis Faruqui, a historian at the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s the larger context that forces these brothers to ultimately see one another as competitors, and to see one another as potential killers.” The story of Dara and Aurangzeb has the elements of Shakespearean drama: the aesthete dreamer and his brother, the zealot soldier, thrown against each other in a war of succession. Aurangzeb imprisoned their ailing father and staged his own coronation at Delhi’s Red Fort, only three months before Dara’s debasing procession. He would go on to rule for nearly fifty years.
Dara’s defeat is popularly conceived as a turning point in Indian history, which supplies liberals with a favorite parlor game counterfactual. What if Aurangzeb had been paraded through Delhi on that bedraggled elephant and Dara had become emperor instead? Looking back at the subcontinent’s religiously divided, conflict-ridden twentieth-century history, wishful thinkers hold that Dara’s heterodox approach might have kept the Mughal Empire from dissipating, as it ultimately did following his brother’s death in 1707. Had Dara’s type of cultural inquisitiveness endured, India might have experienced an intellectual renaissance. This in turn might have enabled the country to meet the West on equal terms, sparing it the century and a half of colonial subjection that ended, in 1947, with a bloody religious partition.
However you play the “what if?” game, the historical record of Dara Shikoh offers a beguiling resource for liberals seeking examples from the past to parry religious extremists—one that also sheds light on possibilities for cross-cultural understanding. The Persian translations that Dara commissioned and guided gave Europeans their first knowledge of Sanskrit philosophical texts such as the Upanishads. But Dara wasn’t particularly interested in fostering dialogue across religious divides; rather, he was in pursuit of mystical unities. We, relativists by default, think of translation as giving us access to unfamiliar knowledge and experience, as a window onto differences, a way to savor diversity. Dara, though, saw his reading of the Upanishads and works from other traditions as affirming the truth he already knew.
* * *
In a seventeenth-century ink drawing, a trim young Dara Shikoh holds a falcon as he stands before his father, the emperor best known for commemorating his dead wife by building the Taj Mahal. The sketch is on fine Japanese paper, the artist Dutch—Rembrandt, in fact. Rembrandt was fascinated by Mughal miniatures, and this was one of at least twenty-five studies he made of a batch of Mughal paintings that entered Holland’s art market at midcentury. In the drawing, Shah Jahan’s head is surrounded by an almost explosive imperial halo, one that seems to cast a dark, billowing shadow behind Dara’s dainty feet. A foreboding detail, if only in retrospect.
Rembrandt’s sketch is a small reminder of the seventeenth century’s global currents, in which Dara was carried, too. When Dara was young, the devotion of his father freed him to be intellectually audacious. His passionate inquiries into religion and philosophy took him far from the Persianate culture of the Mughal court. He and his scholarly assistants embarked on translations of religious texts, including the Old and New Testaments. Around 1654 he composed a major work of his own, Majma‘al-bahrayn (The Meeting-place of the Two Oceans), which embodied his growing interest in discovering esoteric and mystical knowledge, available only to a visionary few. Dara prefaced his work by describing how, after his studies of Sufi doctrines, he wanted to understand philosophical truth as expressed in Indian thought:
Since [this book] is the meeting-place of the realities and gnostic truths of two groups that know God, it is known as The Meeting-place of the Two Oceans … I have written this investigation in accordance with my own mystical unveiling and experience, for the sake of my own family, and I have nothing to do with the common people of either community.
In other words, Dara’s interest was in esotericism, not in bridging everyday religious differences between Islam and Hinduism. Delving deep into the Upanishads, he oversaw the translation of around fifty of them in a volume entitled Sirr-i Akbar—“The Greatest Mystery.” “Nobody at that time who wasn’t the heir apparent could have pulled it off,” says Jonardon Ganeri, professor of philosophy at New York University. “Dara had the backing, the resources, and the personal commitment to learn Sanskrit. I don’t know of any other Mughal who learned Sanskrit to the extent he did.”
How far he got in learning Sanskrit
is debatable. In his search for affinities between religions, Dara seized on a famous passage in the Qur’an that speaks of a hidden book, and he became convinced that it was a reference to the Upanishads, which Hindu pandits had kept from the Muslims. Yet the pandits in his employ were seeking confluences, too, Ganeri says. “They were clever: they selected the passages from the Upanishads that would have appealed to him—the ones that were more monotheistic.”
Dara’s commissioned translations, though, were accurate, and he had reason to admire his Persian renderings—“in a clear style, an exact and literal translation,” he said. Later scholars broadly agreed. Although he wasn’t forcing meaning into the translations themselves, he believed that his study of the Upanishads was uncovering the deepest truths about his own religion, Islam—knowledge so special and so arcane that he imagined it would carry him unchallenged to the throne.
“People often tend to hive off his intellectual activities from his political activities, but I suspect from the time that he was a young man he knew that he was going to have to fight for the Mughal throne,” says Munis Faruqui. “And this was a treadmill that one could not step off. One had to participate in this fratricidal struggle. And if he was going to remain at the Mughal court, I suspect that a very important part of his larger political calculations was this possibility of presenting himself as a Perfect Man—someone who would have access to certain kinds of divine secrets that no mere mortal would have.”