Empire: World History - 52. The Slave who Ruled

Episode Date: May 23, 2023

Born in Ethiopia, 1548, Malik Ambar was taken from his people at the age of 12 and sold into slavery. First he was sold to an owner in Baghdad, where he converted to Islam, but he ended up in India, on the Deccan plateau. From there, his star rose, eventually to become ruler of the Sultanate Ahmadnagar and the arch-rival of the Mughal Empire. Listen as William and Anita are joined by Manu Pillai to discuss this extraordinary figure. Sign up to The Knowledge here: www.theknowledge.com/empire/ LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/empire This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/empirepod. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport + Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mparpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durunpool. Look, I'm going to start with a quote and then you can tell us where this quote comes from, because I find it very, very interesting. Okay, so here it goes.

In warfare, in command, in sound judgment, and in administration, he had no rival or equal. He kept down the turbulent spirits of the Deccan and maintained his exalted position to the end of his life and closed his career in honour. History records no other instance of an Abyssinian slave arriving at such eminence. It's an extraordinary quote,

and it's about the main subject of this episode. who is an extraordinary figure called Malik Umba. Now Malik Umba starts his life in Ethiopia. He's captured as a slave. His real name was originally Chappu, and he comes to India as a military slave. And what we're going to be talking about today is this strange institution that's totally counterintuitive

about the slave kings, of which there were very many in Indian history. people who started their lives of slaves, but ended it as rulers of great chunks of India. In the West, we think of these things as polar opposite. Slaves and kings are not words that have a hyphen in the West, but they do in the Islamic world, and not just once or twice, but over quite a lot of the Middle East, over quite a lot of the Middle Ages. And we have here to tell us about it.

Well, Anita, I'll hand over to you to do the introduction. Well, I'd be my great honour, because a man I'm hugely really, respect. We have Manu Pillai with us historian of India, author of the, and I really can say fantastic book, Rebel Sultans, which tells the story of the Deccan from the end of the 13th to the start of the 18th century. We're really delighted you could take the time to speak to us, Mani, thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Before we get into, you know, the story of Malagamba, which really is a tale of the early 17th century, let's talk about contemporary stuff because you told us both something startling while we were doing the sound check before we

come to record. And it was that your family owned slaves, which in itself is like a, wow. And you said until so recently that you met family members of the slaves that your family held. Tell us more about that. In fact, you know, my ancestral village in Kerala, which is on the southwest coast of India, we still have people who live there who were descended from these families that are linked to us. And, you know, slavery is not a word anybody's comfortable using anymore. Because now many of them are friends, many of them, you know, we meet at feasts and so on. But there is this rather uncomfortable history that exists between them and us. When I was growing up in the 90s and we, you know, come down to Kerala for our summer vacations, my grandmother had a lady to help

around the house and her name was Willemby. And I always found the name very fascinating because, you know, we all have these names that have all kinds of Sanskrit meanings and so on. And Willemby simply meant fair woman or white woman. And I thought what an odd name? And then I asked a question to my grandmother saying, why is it? Why is this old lady called Willemby? To which she told me that it's, well, you know, the community in which she was born, back in the day they weren't permitted proper names. So what would happen is that any time a baby was born into this family,

somebody from that family would show up. They'd stand at the edge of our estate, not allowed to even look at the house, because that would ritually defile the house. And they would shout out from there in Malayalam Krati Kravitu, which is almost like saying she has laid it. out. You can't use words like birth or delivery of a child and so on. And whoever was sitting in the portico or the main porch of the house, which would usually be one of the older male members, they would come up with some name and that would be the name of the child. So in her case, it was Willambi. There was another man called Karta Houten, which simply means black boy. Those are the kinds of names that were given to them. Although slavery as an institution was abolished in the mid-19th century, for all practical purposes, people continued. to be linked to land. People continue to serve the families that once owned them. And this didn't, legislation didn't mean there was much of a material change in their actual lives. So even in my childhood,

there was still older people who had been part of that system. They were essentially bonded laborers attached to the land, legally free, but practically not so much. And still weighed down by centuries of ritual and ceremonial pollution and all kinds of ideas. And, you know, it's a form of predile or agrastic slavery that existed in Canada. So, I mean, honestly, that revelation and just the candor with which you're sharing with, and we're grateful for it, but it's kind of shaken me to my bone marrow. Until what point in India were human beings bought and sold then? Very recently. If I'm not mistaken, in British Malabar, which was further up the coast, they abolished slavery in 1843. But of course, there were lots of princely states, which were

under Indian Maharajas, and many of them refused to immediately do what the British were doing. So it meant that there were a lot of negotiations and a lot of back and forth with these local rulers within the subcontinent. So a state like Travencore in South Kerala abolished slavery only in 1855, if I'm not mistaken. And that's the formal date. Amandu, I think what you're saying will surprise, if not shock, not just listeners from around the world, but people in India. Because I've often heard it said that in ancient India and through most of Indian history, there have been no slaves here. How far can you trace back slavery in Indian history? I think we can trace it very far back because, if I'm not mistaken, Emperor Ashoka,

the great Morian emperor before the common era, I think the second century BCE, he refers, I think, in one of his rock he dicts to the proper treatment of slaves or give some kinds of instructions how slaves are meant to be treated, which implicitly suggests that slavery did exist in this time. The Sanskrit text that we call Dharmashastra, which is the source of Hindu law as it were, many of them over 2,000 years old, they refer to slavery in different forms. So there's slavery by birth, there's slavery in times of famine, there's slavery because of deaths, there's sometimes even slavery if you've lost a bet and you've ended up becoming a slave to a third party.

So Sanskrit texts that go back 2,000 years or even more than 2,000 years do refer to slavery as an institution. Now, this is important because there are also texts that some people point to such as the visiting Greek ambassador Megathini's who comes to the Morian court at the moment exactly you're talking about. And he actually says there is no slavery in India. This historians now believe to be just plain wrong. It's a traveler not understanding what he's seeing. Is that right? It is, I think. And also Megasini was also, I think, restricted in which part of India he was in somewhere in eastern India, if I'm not mistaken.

And if at all he was referring to something, it's possible he was referring to something very local. But if, again, I'm not wrong. I think he also does refer to elsewhere in India, all kinds of magical qualities and people and things like that. I think I have that right. The Megasini does in his account include a lot of things that seem not just inaccurate. To be way off. Completely way off, yeah, exactly. And what of, I mean, as a woman and a feminist, I have heard whispers of sort of industrialized sex slavery.

that took place during, is it the Chola dynasty? And what do we have on record of sex slavery in the Chola dynasty? And what did it look like? I think Daoudali has written something about this. Who is Dawa Dali, for those who don't know? Dao Dali is a scholar based in America. He's written a great deal on courtly practices. He's written a great deal on the Indian subcontinent as well as the Middle East, if I'm not mistaken.

Correct. Great, great scholar based in Philadelphia. Yes. And he has suggested that this was an institution linked to women. and to the slavery of women in a somewhat sexual context. It's an interesting provocative article because this is obviously something lots of people are uncomfortable with, not something people want to discuss. What I think is beyond question is that you find on the walls of Chola Temples claims about capturing women.

This is where the origin of, I think, this idea, because several Chola kings in their sort of very grandiose statements about what they've conquered and where They've been the same inscriptions that talk, for example, about the Chola raids, astonishingly, on Sriva Jaya and Samatra, that you have naval expeditions leaving India and attacking Indonesia. But those same very grandiose inscriptions proclaiming the victories of the Chola Kings talk at great length and several times about the capture of women. And these women were then used so it's claimed for breeding purposes to breed further troops. Oh my word. I mean, it's just all so unpleasant. It's also, it is fair to say, a political hot potato because there are some people who say, no, that's not true. They just were an elevated culture. They didn't do it. They wouldn't have done it. They couldn't have done it. And this is a big lie. I think that's the thing, right? People, if you use blunt terms like sex slavery, it really makes people very uncomfortable. But it's essentially what the core practice was. Now, you can couch it in all kinds of prettier words. You can give it an institutional name. that sounds better, but at the core, what was happening. And perhaps that was a form of sexual slavery.

And it's not completely unprecedented, because again, if you look at the old Sanskrit texts, you do find references to kings making gifts of 10,000 elephants and 10,000 girls, to their prohids, for example, prohodes being their spiritual preceptors. Now, you can take the numbers as exaggeration, surely, but clearly the present of animals as well as human beings and specifically women, it didn't mean these were women necessarily.

to just sweep their homes or whatever. There is something, there is a connotation there, which, you know, is open to debate which people might not like, but it's certainly something we must grapple with. Manu, then we've got to grapple with yet another very thorny issue, which is when the Islamic conquest begin after the 13th century. You have the slave kings of Delhi, starting with Kutubidinaibat. What's going on there? How can you be a slave king? What's meant by that? Well, this is, to begin with, it's not slavery, as we know. in the American context, but slavery in a very military context, because often kings, especially in cultures where there's clan membership, where there's membership by caste and such

similar institutions, it becomes very difficult to sometimes trust your own relatives and kin, because potentially everybody is a claimant for the throne. Potentially everybody is as legitimate as you are. Potentially your sons could turn around and murder you, which has happened in Indian dynasties and all kinds of political spaces around the world. So you, In a situation, in a political situation where there is a trust deficit, often relying on outsiders, was a given. It was a formula that became very popular. So whether it was in Egypt with the Mamluk's there or in India with the so-called slave dynasty, or even to come back to Kerala in the south, in the 18th century when the local ruler was conquering all the other states in the region,

he brought in mercenaries from across the hills in Tamil country and got them to do his dirty business. because here the institution stood in his way, whereas people from the outside wouldn't necessarily respect those terms in the same way. Yeah, keep going. So the idea is that these guys are more trustworthy because they're dependent on you. Is that way? They're dependent on you because they're brought in from somewhere else. All their connections to their homelands have been severed. All they've got is from you.

You're the source of bounty. You're the source of prestige, position, all of that. which means that in theory, they're entirely loyalty. Of course, in practice, this may not always work out that way. But that was a theory. There is a wonderful quote, isn't there, from a Seljuk minister who once said, one obedient slave is better than 300 sons for the latter desire, their father's death, the former his master's glory.

Look, this leads us neatly to the man that we are talking about. Malik Umba, before we talk about the man himself, I think it's important to understand what the world looked like. So he is, as William said in the introduction, born in Ethiopia in the 16th century. And at that time, was there a slave system operating widely throughout Ethiopia? What was going on here? There was something happening there because clearly there were slave traders who were going in and abducting young boys and then shipping them off to Baghdad or other parts of the Middle East,

which were then transit points from where these boys would be exported to other parts of the world, a lot of them to the Indian subcontinent. Now, because William mentioned the slave dynasty earlier, that generation, we're talking about Turkic slaves. These are Turkic slaves who have been brought in by land often, and they've come accompanying all kinds of other warriors, and they eventually rise to become kings. And this again, this sort of Turkish slave kings, they exist also at the same time in Egypt. The Mamluks, Holtim by Bas, for example. He's of Turkic stock, but he ends up being the ruler of Egypt. Yes. So in India, what happens is you've got Mahmuth of Gore coming in and invading

parts of northern India. When he dies, it's his slave Kutubuddin Eibok who's been left behind in Delhi who established as an independent Sultanate. When Kutubudan Ayab dies in 1210, I think, during a polo game or something as an accident, he ends up, he succeeded

by his son-in-law, who was also a slave in an earlier period and then ended up marrying Kutabuddin's daughter. Much later down in the century, you again have a Turkic slave, Sultan Balban, succeeding when the earlier slave dynasty dies out. This chap comes in and sees his power. But these are all Turkic slaves. By the time we come to Malikamba in the 15th century,

we're talking about a huge industry of Ethiopian men who are trained in battle, who are often brought off to the Indian subcontinent, and end up being, you know, end up diffused throughout the Indian subcontinent. And this, in fact, traces of this exist even in earlier times. You've got, I forget who said it. It might be Ibnabatuta, who basically refers to how pirates were afraid of ships which carried these Abyssinian men. It's a lovely quote that, because these guys are super fierce. Yes. In the slave dynasty of Delhi, in fact, there was a female ruler called Sultan Razia.

She was toppled, of course, for being a woman, but also evidently for having a lover who was Ethiopian. His name was Yakut, and he's supposed to have been of Ethiopian origin. Now, that's a good question as to how he ended up there. In Uttar Pradesh, which is today the hotbed of Hindu nationalism in India, there's a place called Johnpur, where there was the Sharki dynasty founded somewhere in the late 15th century, again founded by an Ethiopian man who happened to be a eunach in one of the North Indian courts. And I'm using the word unuk in quotes, because that's what you see in the records.

And he ends up founding a dynasty here, which is then succeeded by Hindu slaves and then their family. In Bengal, in the next century, you've got a short-lived Hapshri dynasty. The very word Hapshi comes from Abyssinia, which is Ethiopia. And that's why they're called Habshis in India as late as the 18th century. So when you use the term hubshi, Manu, what exactly do you mean by that? Habshy, it comes from Habas or Abyssinia and I think it was a word used for people who came from that part of the world. So when these slaves are brought to India, everybody knew they came from Habas and that's where they were called Habshis and that becomes Habshy over a period of time. So let's start with Malik Amber. I mean just who were his people? Where did he come from

before he was taken. Malacamba, as far as we know, belonged to something called the Oromo tribe, somewhere in eastern Ethiopia, and that's where he was taken from. Are they pagan or Christian, Ethiopia? I think they're not Christian. That's why they're also on the fringes of Ethiopian society. They were not part of the mainstream, which would also perhaps have made it easier to enslave them. And, you know, I think the existing powers in Ethiopia would not have minded. That's my impression, too, that you have a certain amount of tolerance of slave raids on the pagan tribes, but not on the converted Christians. When you talk about Ethiopia and

the slave trade that existed there, who were the slavers? Who was coming over? How were they picking up people? Who were they picking up? And what did they do with them? As far as we know, there would have been local slavers. With Malikambor, for example, he must have been about 10. The assumed date is we don't have a clear date of birth for him. But the general date of birth is that he was born somewhere around 1548. And when he's about 10 or 20, he was about 10 or 20, he was. 12 years old, he was abducted or potentially sold by someone and his family, two slavers like this. And from there, he was picked up and sent off, I think he had a stop somewhere before he ended up in Baghdad. And it was from Baghdad that his subsequent trip to India takes place some years later.

And in the course of this movement from Ethiopia to the Middle East and then, of course, to India, what happens is also conversion to Islam. Because I think that was another way of creating some kind of glue between all these men. making them part of this Islamic network, creating space for them to join these Islamic courts that dominated from West Asia all the way to the, you know, beyond the Indian subcontinent. So conversion takes place from Chapu.

He becomes Amber. 1571 is when he ends up in India. Okay, but conversion, I mean, could be seen by some as a gift because it allows you to progress, because if you are part of this one Islamic family, was it voluntary or involuntary? I mean, would it be seen as something that was given to preferential slaves or seen as something that, again, is another means of eradicating somebody's entire history and who they are? I think perhaps both, because, you know, considering these boys were abducted when they were

pretty young, you know, adolescents at most, if not children, I don't think they would have been entirely, this wouldn't have been a transaction that was entirely consensual. And yet I think it gave them a sense of identity, because having been cut off from everything, from their families, especially from womenfolk, when they eventually, whenever they ended up later, they didn't have women with them. So they'd end up marrying local women. So having some kind of identity in the absence of their earlier birth identity

was something that mattered to them. And of course, you know, just the fact that they became part of a political network of great influence right across the Arabian Sea through, across the Bay of Bengal and a huge swath of the world. So it was a form of creating identity, but also becoming part of that political economy. So do you expect that when he arrives in 1571 in India, Malikamba is a sort of cowering slave being beaten by his master? Or is he already part of a sort of elite? Is he a sort of swaggering warrior arriving, knowing that he's got a career ahead of him or somewhere in between the two? I think it must have been somewhere in between the two.

From everything we know, he was not somebody who served in any capacity, but a military capacity, which meant that somewhere he managed to get some kind of elementary military training. The person who buys him in India, ironically, is also a Habshri, is also an Abyssinian origin man who also had come off to India as a slave. And he had risen through the ranks in what is called the Ahmed Nagar Sultanate, which is in the Deccan towards the west coast of England. India. And he became the Peshwada. He was the minister of the Sultan of Ahmed Nagar, himself a black man. He's the one who actually purchases Malikambar, but the whole other, you know, a pretty large set of people who've been brought in as the latest imports from Baghdad. Manu, in an earlier episode of our slavery series, we talked to Mary Beard, who was talking about in the Roman world, how there was this whole cast of slaves who were gladiators.

Do you get the impression that Malacamba is being trained up very specifically as part of a warrior world? Or is he, you know, could he be expected to do administration or, you know, become a civil servant or collect taxes or something? The possibility was there because we do have evidence of other Ethiopian origin men in India becoming revenue farmers. You see them becoming regents of kingdoms. You see them in charge of forts. You see them as seal bearers. The famous Mahmoud Gavan, who was the minister of the Pahmanis, South. and at a Persian nobleman, his seal bearer was an African man.

So there are, of course, other positions that they held. But often these positions came after many years of military service. To become a region, to become a revenue farmer in control of a whole province, meant that you'd put in a certain number of military years, risen in the ranks, and then become part of the local aristocracy, often by marrying local women from elite communities in India, and then established yourself. So I think Ambar would have landed here knowing very much,

much that he was meant to be a fighter. And he was for most of his career until he was almost middle age. He was a sort of mid-level or even lower-level military entrepreneur. So this is something that I need to do to get my head under a subject, but I love looking at images. And there is an image that's painted by a courtly painter, a Mughal courtly painter of Malikamba. The one I'm looking at is of an older man, but you can see just the power in him. I mean, he is very, very dark-skinned. He has incredibly broad shoulders. I mean, this is in middle-aged, so he's got the middle-aged spread that we will fear in our lives.

But, I mean, as a 20-year-old man, he would have been selected because of his physicality. I mean, if that was his destiny to be a fighter, he would have been picked out because, he was strong because he looked as though he could handle himself in battle, right? Yes. And in fact, we do have a contemporary, a traveller from Europe, if I'm not mistaken, who says that he was tall and strong of stature. So clearly this was a very tall, physically imposing man. He would have made a strong impression, perhaps even stronger than when he was middle-aged, when he was a young fighter. And I think that definitely worked in his favour. This is this wonderful Dutch traveller, isn't it? Cornelius. Is it called Cornelius from Ellison? Yeah.

And he's shipwrecked and he comes across Malacamba and gives this wonderful sketch of this character. The only thing he doesn't like about him is his eyes saying that they're white glassy eyes. I love that, go ahead. Do we have any accounts? Again, I'm looking at another miniature. This is Malikamba meeting Murtazan Nizam Shah the second. He towers above everybody else in the picture.

I mean, he's a good sort of half a human higher than everybody around him, which is unusual for a Mughal courtly painter to give him that kind of stature. So to actually make, you know, because we've done episodes before where we've had portraits painted in the Mughal court of a teeny tiny King James in the corner, you know, sort of trying to shrink the influence of Britain by diminishing the stature. The fact that he isn't diminished, even by his enemies in portraiture, is telling, isn't it? I think it's symbolic also of the fact that he was the real power in the Ahmed Nagar's alternate off the Deccan. The Mughals were of course

their enemies and for 25 years they kept trying to conquer the Deccan. And for those 25 years the one man standing as a wall between them and the conquest of southern India was Malikambar. And he was taller than the Sultan who actually reigned. The sultans were just puppets in his hands. So, Manu,

this is the point that we should pause and just sketch the political divisions in India. We're in the 1570s the what, the Portuguese have just arrived in Goa, the Mughals are now running north India, and there is a scatter of smaller sultanates in the middle of India, the Deccan sultanates. This is where we're talking about. Yes. There's three sultanates.

There's Ahmed Nagar towards the west coast. Further south, there's Bijapur in what is now largely the state of Karnataka, but also parts of what is now Maharashtra state in India. And then on the eastern side, you have the sultan of Golkonda. And Golkonda is, of course, famous for its diamond mines. There's apparently a small town in America named Golkonda because of the fame of the Golkonda are diamonds and so on. And all of these sultans themselves, by the way, come from mixed families. So the Nizam Shahis or the dynasty that rule in Ahmed Nagar, they're partially of Brahmin Hindu descent of the highest caste. But the women they married came partly from Persia, but we also know two sultans at least who were mothered by black begams, who came from Africa. So, you know,

way back somewhere in the 16th century, we had black princesses and queen mothers in the Nizam's Shahi's Sultanate, Ahmed Nagar. What was the attitude? I mean, because even now, India is such a colourist country where, you know, if you're Whittish, when people advertise in matrimonial columns, they always say their daughter is of wheatish complexion, which means their fair skin. There's a great premium put on having lighter skin. Back in those days, was their prejudice against darker skin?

Was it as colourist as it remains today? There was, because if you look at the kind of remarks, the Mughal Emperor Jahangir's left of Malikambar himself, he often refers to his skin, the dark-faced man, you know, the wicked man with black skin, you know, I don't remember the exact quotes, but there is always a reference to darkness when Malikambar comes into the picture. And I think that's not just darkness in some metaphorical sense, but he's also playing on the fact that his chief rival in the South is a black man. We also know that these two Sultans of the Ahmed Nagar Salthanate, who were mothered by black women, they didn't have it easy. Their reigns were at,

relatively short-lived. They did have support of all the black nobleman and troops of the Amandagar Sultanate, but there was also a very strong Persian faction, and the Persians did not like the African faction. So there's definitely rivalry on racial grounds in these sultanates also. And we haven't put a number on this presence. I mean, I still don't have a sense of how many people from Ethiopian descent or Abyssinian descent are in India at the moment. Do we have any idea of numbers? If I had to give it a number, we do have a reference. say around 1610 or so about Malikamba's army which says that he commands a total of about 50,000 people 40,000 of them are described as Marathas which is local Hindus, you know, sons of the

soil as well. But 10,000 are supposedly hapshys. So 10,000 of them. One fifth of his army was black men. The other four-fifths were Indians. So I would imagine that gives us some sense of what the total number was in India at that time. At least, you know, in terms of military. composition. And I mean, there are certain places you can go today. I've been to the fort of Janjira, for example, where you still see a lot of black Indians, clearly people of black African descent. Are there many places like that where you can see people who are still ethnically quite different from the local Marathans, for example? There are in Gujarat and Marashtra, again, on the west coast of India. But as far as I know, these are later immigrants. Some say as

late as the 18th century. The Janjira family that you mentioned is actually interesting because they originated in the 1480s from an African general who was sent by the Sultan of Ahmed Nagar to conquer this fort. He did and his family continued to stay there all the way until 1947. Even under the British, they were what was called an 11 gun salute to princely state. And they were styled Nawabs and so on by then. But even if you look at their photographs, you can tell that they're clearly off African descent. So that's a noble family that's continued.

What's wonderful, too, is if you go to their tombs, which are incredibly beautiful, they sit on this wonderful elevated platform looking down over the sea through palm trees. It's one of the most beautiful places I've seen in that region. And they have around this fort African boabab trees, which I've never seen anywhere else in India lining in a ceremonial square, this mortuary center. And just, I mean, just getting back to Malacamba, I feel like we've sort of leapfrogged something that I still am trying to understand. That, you know, I understand the, you know, forgive me, but I have a child the same age.

You know, a frightened little boy of about 12 being taken. He's then traded through the Middle East and through Baghdad. He ends up being traded and traded until he gets to India. And then we've suddenly leapt to he is the great Malacamba that the moguls fear. I still, I need to understand his path of travel. How is it that he is then trained, promoted? in what would have been a pretty tough, masculine and also, I mean, fairly racist as you describe it, environment. How does he rise through the ranks to get to the point where he is running a Sultanate?

Just talk us through that line of travel. So as I said earlier, it's in 1571 that we know he arrives in India. He's obviously in his early 20s at this time, a very young man, one of many African soldiers serving all kinds of military entrepreneurs and leaders in the area. So his first master is the Peshwa, the minister of the Sultan of Ahmed Nagar. Now, this Peshwa is executed by the Sultan a few years down the line. And what's interesting is that Amber, even though it's been less than five or six years, I think after Ambar joined him, Amber clearly made an impression because he was senior enough for the Peshaw's widow to release him from slavery.

She says, look, my husband's dead. He's been executed. You and are free to go do what you want. Now, for a large part of his life for the next couple of decades near, we find that Amber is a sort of middle-level military, military figure in the region. He's got about 150 cavalrymen. He's got this band that's with him and he keeps moving from one sultanate to the other, depending on who take his services.

And he is now free by this point. He is free. Yes, his first master's widow, frees. He becomes a military entrepreneur in his own right. Briefly, he serves the Amadnagar Sultanate for a while. He serves the Sultan of Mijapur. He's sort of flitting between course. He's a mercenary.

He's a mercenary. He is a mercenary. And he's not moved up the ranks very much. The number of people serving him stays more or less constant. And among the people serving him are other black African slaves from the same military world? Yes, they would be hapshishis. The 150 cavalrymen were mostly hapshires. But what creates opportunity for him is in the 1590s when the Mughal conquest of South India begins through these day consultants. So as William was referring to earlier, you've got North India under Mughal domination. You've got the Ahmed Nagar Sultanate abutting the Mughals and then you've got these two other sultanates as well, Bijapur and

Golcunda. And obviously, Ahmed Nagar sits first in the light when the Mughals want to come down into South India. So in the 1590s, the Ahmed Nukar court is already in disarray. There's all kinds of succession disputes. There are complete chaos. On top of that, Emperor Agbar in 1595 orders an invasion. It's an initial kind of reiki really because they don't intend to really come down into their territories. But there is defeat inflicted on them soon after. By 16 the capital of the Ahmed Nagar Sultanate has fallen. So the kingdom's capital is gone. There's various princelings floating about.

There's different power interests all over the place. And this is when Malikamba emerges as a great hero. Because he was clearly some kind of fabulous military strategist. He clearly had talent. He was physically impressive. And now you start seeing that the numbers of people serving him start to go up. So, you know, from 150 people for much of his career, for a good 20 or years, he moves up to perhaps 300 people.

But by the late 1590s, he's got a thousand people following him. Soon that turns into 3,000. By the turn of the 17th century, he's got 7,000 people. And these are not just hapshis. These are local Hindu maratas as well, who realise that their interests can also be met and served by allying with this star who's clearly on the rise. Manu, thank you very much for the trajectory there.

We're going to come back after the break, where we're going to find out what it was about this, man and his battle style, which made him and marked him out for greatness. Join us after this short break. Welcome back. So just before the break, Manu was giving us this very clear trajectory of a man who is destined. Well, I mean, it's not clear that he's destined for greatness, but he's a very effective

mercenary. William, I mean, you're fascinated in just how he manages to stamp his mark on battle. Yes, and this, I think, is why he's an important figure in the decade, is that he doesn't confront the moguls straight up, does he, Manu? He doesn't meet them in battle lining up cannon to cannon, cavalry regiment to cavalry regiment. He invents the kind of guerrilla tactics which will later be used by the marathas to such effect against the moguls. Yes, because I think Malikamper realized that he didn't, he couldn't match the moguls in terms

of numbers or sheer financial resources. So the moguls were this great, big empire on the north. They had the resources to really put men into the field. whereas the Deccan's alternates were rich, but not anywhere where they could compete on terms of equality with the Mughals. So what happens is Malikamba starts using the landscape to his advantage. The Deccan for those who visited is a very dry upland country. You know, there's hills, there's dry terrain, there are great fortresses, and it's a difficult, rough kind of space. So even the warriors here were sort of raised to be these rough and hardy figures on their local country horses, sort of, you know,

learning that kind of life and learning to survive in that kind of environment. And he starts using this to his advantage. So the Mughals are handicapped because he have these great massive armies with huge baggage trains and dancing girls and all kinds of, you know, this massive retinue that comes along with the army, coming down into this mountainous zone. And all Malikamba has to do is show up every now and then from one of these, you know, hillsides, come down, attack the baggage train, cause complete chaos and turmoil there. retreat. After about three days, he reappears from a completely different direction, attacks the head of the army, and then disappears again. And this becomes a popular means that eventually ends up bogging down the Mughals in the Dekken. And some would argue to even shatters the Mughal Empire a couple of generations later, because the locals in this region use this

to their advantage. They use the terrain to their advantage where you don't necessarily need numbers. You just need to be clever and you just need to use the geography to your advantage. Just to give a kind of visual picture of the sort of terrain we're talking about, describe these extraordinary fortresses, which later become associated with Shivaji and the Marathas. Well, it's difficult to even trek up some of these fortresses. Their locations are obviously on top of hills. Often they've got cliffs that you simply can't scale. So those sides, anyway, no enemy can come up.

The other sides are fortified very, very well, very sturdy walls that have survived all these centuries. Often, if you look at a fort like Daulatabad, even the pathway, to the fort is very, very narrow, to the main gate of the fort. So there's no question of a large army being able to move up. It's really just smaller files of men who are able to move up, which means even a smaller army can meet them and make an effort to push them down the slope as it were. So I think the fortresses definitely helped.

The landscape and the terrain definitely helped. And Malikamper, as I said earlier, was also a very good strategist. He knew exactly what to do, how to do it. And he kept his army very loyal to him. You find this even, you know, after the Mughal conquest really pays, picks up and the Marathas rise in the same region. All these sultanates collapse, the Mughals have defeated the sultans, and then it's the local Hindu Marathas who are leading the resistance.

And you find that they pay tribute to Malikambar, the great Maratheh, hero Shivaji. Really? In a court poem compares Malikamba to the gods. He says he was as bright as the sun. These are the kinds of terms that are used. Shivaji says that. Shivaji himself says that. Shivaji in his court poem, the commission of 1670s in the Sanskrit language,

does pay tribute to Malikamber. And Malakamba, one of the people who served him who worked with Malikambar was Shivaji's grandfather. So you can see that Shivaji didn't emerge in isolation. The great Maratha hero was in some ways a political successor to Malikamba, which is quite something, right? This great Hindu icon today was in many ways inspired by a man born in Ethiopia, who was born Chapu in the Oromo tribe and then lived as a slave before ending up in India. So when we say Shivaji, that's a name that's going to resonate a lot in India. India, but for those here who, do we have an equivalent in European history of how big Shivaji looms? No, I don't think there's anyone who equals Shivaji or Shivaji in modern Hindu nationalist myth, certainly.

In Shivaji is regarded today as the man who turned the tide back on 400 years of Islamic invasions. And there is a historical basis for this. He took on the emperor Orang Zeb. He reinvents a kind of Hindu kingship. He brings Brahmins from Varanasi. He summons the local spirits of the mountains. And he begins a whole new form of Hindu kingship, which fights back against this 400 years of Islamic dominance. He attacks the Mughal port at Surat. And over the next hundred years, his successors and the wider Confederacy of Marathas will reach as far as Attic in what's now Pakistan in their northernmost strike. It's actually very hot current. with the present administration.

He is an embodiment of sort of Hindu muscularity, the bulwark against the invasion of Islam. I mean, he's a very popular figure today. More than a figure, he's considered in many quarters to be a god. Yes. And all you need to do is enter Mumbai or Bombay. You'll find the airport, the museums, a lot of places named after Chathrapati Shwaj.

Because he is a cultural icon. And I think there's nobody in Marashra, at least in Western India, who towers over Shivaji in terms of that kind of icon. But Shivaji's grandfather served Malacamba, and Shivaji himself credits his own military prowess. It raises two questions in my mind. Number one, it seems like this man is an extraordinary fighter, which makes me think there must be many accounts of what he was actually like.

Like I say, you know, it's always my test of would I want to hang out with him, Manu? I mean, is he, you know, what kind of human was he, first of all? You probably wouldn't because he was also a very brutal film. For example, during his ascent in the Deccan, as I said, the earlier Sultanate of Amundagar collapsed. There's opportunity for him to move up, but that also means there are others who see the opportunity. So if you read Richard Eaton's book called The Social History of the Deccan, you'll read how Malikambar had a rival popularly called Raju Dakhne. And he essentially had to make sure this rival got out of the way. And he liquidated everybody else who stood in his way.

He got a puppet Sultan installed from the old royal family, a little boy. The boy grows up and starts asking questions. Firstly, Malikambar gets him married to his daughter. So again, what you see is an African slave's daughter, a black woman becoming the queen of Bidjab of Ahmed Nagar. Except that the son-in-law, the sultan, he doesn't really like his father-in-law. He realizes he's being treated as a puppet and starts asking questions. So Malikambor murders him.

Simple, you know, done. He installs a puppet again. This puppet also grows up, also starts questioning Malikambar and Malikamber bubs him off also. So this was clearly about. power. Malacambar had no loyalty to the king as such. The king was just an instrument for him to wield power. He was the man who was in charge. So I did think you'd be having a drink with Malacumber down at the riverside. No, no, no. I think I'll pass on hanging out with Malacamba. Also, he was a very, very devout Muslim. He certainly didn't drink. He didn't allow his army men to

drink. He prayed almost every day with them. There are counts about how he would join them in the prayers and lead the prayers as well. So he was a very devout, very austere Muslim. And I've heard that if any of his soldiers was caught innipeated, having drunk too much, he would pour molten lead down their throat. Yes, public spectacle. Violence is public spectacle to send a message. Yeah, I'll give it a miss then. Okay, well, crossing that out of my day, panel. But also, what is surprising to me is that the moguls were really, I mean, they were just lumbering and they didn't learn, did they? because in previous episodes, we've talked about Mohamed Shah Rangheela turning up with his entire retinue of courtisans and musicians and chefs

and, you know, basically jalebi makers and they're all lined up. And then they get, you know, sort of polished off in short order by the swivel guns. Of Nader Shah. Of Nath Shah. It just seems to be that the Mughals don't learn very easily at this point at time. They do eventually because into the 16th tens and by now Malikamba is aging, He's clearly at his peak. He's founded a whole new city, a place called Kyrki.

He's got all these Marathas around them, an army of 50,000. But he also, until then, has the support of the other sultans in the area, who are also not very keen for the Mughals to start descending into the Deccan. So you've got the Sultan of Bijapur, you've got the Sultan of Kolkonda. They're all financing Malikambar because they realize that Malikamba's keeping the Mughals at bay. Let's send him money. Let's enable this resistance that he's leading. So the Mughals do eventually learn that,

while they can't necessarily beat Malikambar when it comes to his guerrilla warfare techniques and so on, they can pull the rug from under his feet if they directly negotiate with these other sultans. And that actually works. So the Sultan of Bijapur suddenly turns face and becomes a friend of the Mughals. And Malikambar loses support. And in fact, now he's not just facing the Mughals coming down from the north, but he's also got an enemy behind him because now the Bijapur Sultans become an ally of the Mughals. And at this point you see Malikamber does stumble.

he does face a couple of military reversals as well. He needs to sue for peace and come to an understanding with the Mughals. But again, he recovers very quickly. Not only does he resume his fight against the Mughals, he goes and sacks the Bajapur Sultan's favorite town of Nauraspur as well, which the Sultan had built up from early in his career with great devotion. You can still see the ruins, can't you, to this day, outside Bidjapur. Exactly, as left by Malikamber.

So, you know, he does get his revenge. And by the time he dies in the late, around 16, 20, If I'm not mistaken, or 1626, Mali Kamba's back. He's completely back in charge. He dies. Of course, the Emperor Jahangir has this famous painting. Describe the painting. It's the most wonderful, wonderful painting.

It is where I think my memory serves well. Jahangir is standing on a globe. He's got a bow and arrow. Not just a globe. It's a globe on a fish. It's a globe balanced on a fish. I'm looking at it right now. It is an extraordinary image.

Yeah, go on. And he's taking aim with his bow and arrow at Malikamber. head, which is put up on a spear, again, right, on the left side of the picture. And Malikamba's obviously dead. His head's been cut off. Except this is something the Mughal Emperor never achieved. This is something the Mughal Emperor would have wished had happened. But in reality, Malikamba died somewhere in his 80s, very secure, very confident in a fortress

that he had built and his tomb today in Koldabad. It's a beautiful tomb. I've been there, yes. It is, it is. And it sits in a very beautiful location, not encumbered, but too many buildings. around it. Very striking structure. Almost, again, you see a sense of austerity to the building also. It's not an over-ornate kind of tomb. It's something, it fits the man who lies inside.

And it's in rather dark stone, too, in deck and trap. Nothing austere about this painting. I just feel I need to just tell you more about what amuses me about this painting. And, you know, maybe it explains the Mughal failure to defeat him. Because Jahangir is standing on a globe, you're absolutely right, which is balanced on a goat, which is balanced on a big fish. So one thinks maybe more stable ground would have helped while he's firing arrows into the severed head of Malacumba and his fever dream of what never is to be. What other monuments has he left in India?

What other things can we see? And do people know that they're connected? You're in India. I'm not. William is. But do people know that what is left behind belong to this man, Malacumbra? Has he been erased from the modern historical consciousness? Sadly, he's mostly been erased because even when he's mostly been erased because even when he's,

people talk of the Marathas in their eyes in the 17th century, they don't draw back that political legacy to Amber. Even if the founder of the Maratha kingdom, Shivaji himself did pay tribute to Malik Amber, you don't necessarily see Malikamba discussed in biographies of Shivaji,

which I think is a huge gap, including recent biographies. I read a biography last year, and it barely makes any reference to Malikamber or traces Malikambar's influence both on Shivaji as a person but also in terms of his military strategy. when he was fighting the Mughals two or three generations later.

Malikamba's tomb, of course, exists, but it's a bit out of the way. What remains really is what is now called the town of Orangabad in Marashra. This was a village called Kyrki. This is where Malikamba built his capital. He named different parts after the Maratha kings. I hadn't taken that in. Kyrki, which Malikamba builds is Arangabad. It is Orangabad.

Because Orangabat came down, conquered it. Of course, with the usual modesty of kings. named it after himself and called it Orangabad. Now, of course, the current government has changed it again. I think now it's called Sambhagi Nagar after Shivaji's son. Because Orangzeb executed Shivaji's son there or near there. And that's why it's called Sambaji Nagar. But the person who actually founded it is Malikambar.

And in fact, if you enter Orangabad, the old part of the city with its walls and the big gate, you'll see the gateway that Malikamba is built over there. You'll see several other structures from his time and then structures others have built. I hadn't taken that in. I know those walls well. How extraordinary. That's Malacamba's legacy. That is Malacamba's legacy, except nobody knows it now, nobody speaks of it now, and everybody connects it purely to the Marathas, even though the Marathas themselves did not hesitate to credit Malikamba as a source of inspiration. So, Manu, tell us what happens to this military slavery system. You get the impression this is something which is present in many courts in the 16th and 17th century. does it, how long does it last? It fades out because what happens is just as there was a huge,

it wasn't just the military slaves, there was a large number of people coming in from Persia. They'd become governors here, they'd become, you know, noblemen and fighters here. The Habshis would come in through the same trading networks. But what happens is that with European colonialism becoming more and more powerful, a lot of these old networks and the Arabian see snap. And that's when you start seeing the number of Habshis coming into India, as well as the number of Persians immigrating across the Arabian Sea starts to go down.

It starts to diminish. And slowly over a period of time, having a harpsi in your court in whatever capacity becomes more of a status thing rather than a game of large numbers. So in Malikambas time, there were thousands and thousands and thousands of them in the region. By the 18th century, you don't have that. You still get a few, don't you, in 19th century luck now, still clinging on. Oh yes, I think you have them in Wajid al-Lishah's court. You've got them in the Nizam of Hyderabad's court, but in some ways, these are ornamental

presences. These are not, you know, they don't necessarily have roots in the region. They have not set down. They've not become part of the power structure. In fact, the big difference is that the early military slaves, they became part of the power structure. In fact, in Bijapur, in Golkona, in Amitnagar, and all of these places, you have African men becoming regents to kings.

The kings are puppets. These African men who are actually in charge. It's a totally forgotten bit of history. I mean, I think our Indian listeners will be. be as surprised by this as anyone. Yeah. And what happens later is just, you know, you've African wives and African hareming mates and perhaps a few African bodyguards, including women bodyguards for the Nizam of Hyderabad, if and old stories to be believed. But that doesn't quite match what was achieved earlier. And I'm just sort of minded every time you've said the

word Habshi, I have a slight cringe on because, I mean, the first time I came across this was in a V.S. Nypole book where it's, I think it's a scene in Brooklyn where an elderly Indian man is going down some steps, and he passes some black youths and he sort of spits hubshi at them, which is obviously a curse word. It is not a good thing. So to come from, you know, is it an insult these days to use that word? I think it's an insult on racial grounds maybe ever since the harpshee's lost power, because then they were just reduced to the colour of their skin and treated poorly as they were treated in so many other parts of the word. But I think when the hapshis were a powerful military elite

actually ruling large parts of the deacon, it wasn't an insult. It was definitely something that caused people fear. It caused awe. It caused a degree of dread. It had a certain amount of prestige to associate it with it. You know, the cover of my book,

Rebel Sultans, shows one of the Sultans of Bijapur writing an elephant. But sitting behind him is a hapshi. You know, right there in a royal portrait. Ilkhaz Khan. Exactly, Khaas Khan. He's sitting on the same. royal horse with the sultan riding that royal elephant, which I think shows exactly the kind of

status as Habshy's had back in the day. And when the word wasn't some kind of negative cuss word, it wasn't something that was meant to be insulting. It was a mark of prestige in stages. And as you said, the state of Jangerah, which is a black African-run state, continues right up until 1947 just south of Bombay. Yeah. In fact, the family is still around. Can we circle back to where we began, because I mean, just slavery, the systems of slavery in India, and you started with that astonishing story of your family owning slaves and knowing some of the descendants of those slaves. What does this tell us about India's relationship with slavery? Can we draw some broad stroke conclusions from this? I think now there's a discomfort with it. There are a so-called

Twitter intellectuals who claim slavery never existed here, and as William was alluding to earlier, If at all it existed, it was because Islamic power came in and they enslaved Hindus or mass and sort of exported them to other parts of the world, etc, etc. But the frank truth is there was agrestic slavery to start with. By agrestic, you mean working the land. Is that right? An agricultural worker? Yes, yes. I gave you an example from Kerala, but it also exists in Tamil Nad across the border. So it existed definitely in peninsular India. I don't know about North India, but definitely in peninsular India. And remember, these are all, Peninsula India is also about trading societies. So I don't know if there are influences from elsewhere, but it definitely existed here until

very, very recently. It wasn't just slavery in terms of physical enslavement. There was also a caste angle to it, especially for grastic slaves. There was a ritual aspect to it. I remember my grandmother telling me, even when she was growing up, the Polair's, which was one of these erstwhile slave communities, who, as I said earlier, were formerly free, but for all practical purposes, continued enslaved. At feasts, they couldn't have the same lentils that served to the upper castes, right? So the polair would be served one kind of, I think it was called pigeon graham. Another caste would be served what was called horse graham. It was only the upper castes who ate what William would know, Mungdal, which is, you know, what we all eat today. But it was

only the apacast who permitted that. There was unapproachability. There was unseeability, which is, you know, they couldn't look at you, they couldn't approach your houses, they couldn't touch you, they couldn't come near you. There were all kinds of rules around it. We have evidence, even for the 19th century of the rates for which slaves were sold, six rupees for a slave. In fact, British rule exacerbated the problem a little bit because what happened is that, you know, after a period of political turmoil, the East India company comes in and political powers now settled, which means there's greater agrarian expansion in parts that had, you know, where agriculture had ceased, and suddenly demand for these aggristic slaves goes up, which means prices shoot up. You find that

children could be separated from mothers, wives could be separated from husbands. In some places, there were rules in the sense that you couldn't send slaves too far off from where they were born. So if you belonged to village X, you could be moved around in the district, but not sent off somewhere very far where you completely lose touch with your relatives. But the very fact that children could be separated from their parents as children, I think that tells you that this wasn't by any stretch a pleasant system where, you know, the masters took care of their slaves and all of that. No, it was just as traumatic. It was just as emotionally damaging. And it's just a reality we as Indians have to have to face up and deal with.

Well, Manu, we are so grateful because this has been really an eye-opener of an episode. I think you'll be a huge surprise to almost all our listeners. Yeah, we're very, very grateful for your time. Thank you very much. Manu Pillai's fantastic book, Rebel Sultans, the Deccan from Kilgi to Shivaji, is one of the great books on Indian history. And I would recommend it wholeheart. heartily 21. Until next time then, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnynne. And me, William Dalrymple.