Indian Slaves In Central Asia

In Caravans: Indian Merchants on the Silk Road, Scott C Levi delves into the trading activities of Multani merchants on the Central Asian Silk Route, including the controversial slave trade of the era.

Alongside textiles, Indian slaves were another commodity that was already in high demand in Central Asian markets during the medieval era. The historian Abu Nasr Muhammad al-Utbi wrote his Tarikh al-Yamini as a history of the early Ghaznavid rulers, focusing especially on Mahmud (r. 998-1030), the Turkic ruler of Ghazna whose predecessors had served as elite military slaves and commanders to the Samanid Amirs in Bukhara (819-1005). Turkic troops stationed on the Samanids’ eastern frontier raided Indian settlements and temples prior to Mahmud’s reign, but as the Samanid regime weakened and toppled, Mahmud institutionalised these raids. Mahmud led a total of seventeen campaigns against India, returning to his capital of Ghazna with immense wealth and untold numbers of people taken into slavery, earning the title, ‘Hammer of the Infidels’.

Our present interest is focused on the enslavement of Indians (non-Muslims, or, less commonly, Muslims who were adherents to sects that their political opponents deemed to be heretical) during the early modern era and their exportation to foreign markets. But several features of this trade should be emphasised. First, the institution of slavery long predated the earliest Islamic rule in India, it continued even into the British colonial era, and despite it being illegal, in certain forms it continues even today. Indigenous Indian sources such as the Arthashastra, the Manu-Smriti, the Mahabharata all refer to institutionalised slavery in India. Other sources suggest that it existed as a legally regulated institution as early as the Vedic period. Considering India in the context of the premodern world, the fact that slavery was legally sanctioned should come as no surprise. One can identify variations in legal definitions and rights, but the institution of slavery was present in virtually every ancient civilisation. In this regard, India simply was not an exception…

… While al-Utbi’s account deserves some credence due to his position as secretary to Mahmud, we must also recognise that it very likely suffers from exaggeration. Scholars who have compared al-Utbi’s chronicle with other contemporary sources have found that he included many errors in fact and he seems to have a penchant for exaggeration, especially when he thought it might serve to enhance his patron’s image as a powerful Muslim commander relentlessly bent on expanding the boundaries of the Dar al-Islam. We know that al-Utbi did not accompany Mahmud on this campaign, and, taking the context of authorship into consideration, he would have had little or no inclination to provide anything approaching a conservative estimate of his benefactor’s success. If anything, the case would have been quite the opposite.

That said, it does seem that the Ghaznavid armies enslaved an extraordinary large number of Indians. Estimates found in the sources vary, although they are uniformly quite large. Referring back to their twelfth campaign, the sixteenth-century Tarikh-i Alfi, for example suggests that the Ghaznavid armies enslaved some 750,000 people. Elsewhere, al-Utbi reports that, during the much earlier Ghaznavid invasion of Peshawar and Waihand in 1001, Mahmud and his troops captured some 100,000 youths. Written long after the actual event, the Tarikh-i Firishta reports that, following the Ghaznavid capture of Thanesar in 1014, ‘the army of Islam brought to Ghazna about 200,000 captives and so much wealth, so that the capital appeared like an Indian city, no soldier of the camp being without wealth, or without many slaves’.

It is difficult to know how much credence to give these accounts, many of which were written by chroniclers who were not present at the events described, or who lived centuries later and drew their information from oral tradition or other written sources whose reliability cannot be known. But focusing attention just on those sources whose authors were contemporaries of the events described, we find similar figures. For instance, in 1219-20, Minhaj al-Din Juzjani (1193-1265) fled from the Mongol armies in the wake of their invasion of his native Gur, in central Afghanistan. He eventually sought refuge in Delhi where he found employment at the court of the Delhi Sultans, and it was there that he went to work crafting his universal history of the Islamic world, the Tabaqat-i Nasiri, which he completed in 1260. According to Juzjani, the first ruler of the Shamsi slave dynasty, Qutb al-Din Aibak (r 1206-10) reportedly enslaved some 20,000 individuals in Gujarat and another 50,000 at Kalinjar. Turning to another contemporary source, we find similar figures presented in Zia al-Din Barani’s Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi, a history of the Delhi Sultanate from the reign of the Shamsi ruler Ghiyath al-Din Balban (r. 1266-87) to the Tughluqid Firuz Shah (r. 1351-88). According to Barani, Sultan ‘Ala’ al-Din Khalji (r. 1296-1316) owned some 50,000 slave-boys and had another 70,000 working as construction labourers across his realm. Barani estimates that his own patron, Sultan Firuz Shah, owned some 180,000 slaves.

Considering the figures mentioned in contemporary sources, it does seem possible to conclude that the practice of enslaving captives occasionally resulted in the exportation of hundreds of thousands of individuals to markets beyond the Hindu Kush. While this practice increased during the Ghaznavid era, it must be emphasised that it neither began nor ended with them. The movement of Indian slaves to markets in the north and west also dates back to antiquity, long before the advent of Islam and longer still before the lifetime of Mahmud of Ghazna…

…The processes by which Indian slaves were exported to Central Asia appear to have continued, more or less unabated, throughout the Mughal era. Emperor Akbar reportedly tried to prohibit the enslavement of those Hindus defeated in war, but his efforts appear to have been only marginally successful, and were quickly forgotten during the reigns of his successors. As previously noted, Akbar himself reportedly ordered the capture and enslavement of many thousands of tribesmen who were guilty of obstructing caravan traffic en route to Qandahar. Further, during Akbar’s reign, one Portuguese Jesuit, Father Antonio Monserrate, reported that the ‘Gaccares’ or Gakhar merchants, who dominated the Punjab region near the Salt Range, remained very active in exporting Indian slaves in exchange for Central Asian horses…Several decades later, the Central Asian noble Abdullah Khan Firuz Jang, who served the Mughals during the reign of Jahangir (r. 1605-27) and Shah Jahan (r. 1628-58), encountered stiff resistance following his appointment to serve as the governor of Kalpi and Kher. In putting down the rebellion, he reportedly ‘beheaded the leaders and enslaved their women, daughters and children, who were more than 2 lacks in number’.

As was customary, these individuals would have been marched away from their family support systems to distant markets, including those on the far side of the Hindu Kush. Additionally, large numbers of people would have been driven into slavery having been sold by impoverished parents who, especially during periods of famine, would have preferred such an outcome to starvation. Over the centuries, groups of caravan traders including the Gakhars, Afghan Kuchis (or Powindas), and many others are known to have purchased such individuals and marched them through the mountain passes. They would then be exchanged for Central Asian horses, and other merchandise in demand in the subcontinent.

(Excerpted from Scott C Levi’s Caravans: Indian Merchants on the Silk Road (Allen Lane, Rs 499), part of the series ‘The Story of Indian Business’ edited by Gurcharan Das)