One of the most arresting portraits commissioned by Jahangir is the deeply allegorical painting of himself standing on a globe that rests on the horns of a bull, which in turn stands on a great fish – symbols of kingship drawn from Hindu lore [see Fig. 14]. All around the emperor are seen images representing his highest aspirations. Cherubs in the sky offer him a sword and arrows. To one side is an elaborate crown above a roundel in which is inscribed his own name and those of each of his royal ancestors reaching back to Timur. Above the crown flutters a bird of paradise. To the emperor’s other side is a golden scale of justice hanging from a chain with golden bells. The chain is suspended between the globe and a javelin, against which rests a musket. In the centre of the painting, wearing a white turban, a crimson gown and impeccably white slippers, is Jahangir himself, drawing a reverse-curved bow and aiming his arrow at the severed head of his most hated enemy, Malik Ambar (d. 1626), which rests on the tip of the javelin. Perched on Ambar’s bare head is an owl, a symbol of darkness. All around the head are inscriptions that speak of the emperor’s contempt for Malik Ambar – ‘The head of the night-coloured servant has become the house of the owl’; ‘Ambar the owl, which fled the light, has been driven from the world by your [Jahangir’s] enemy-smiting arrow.’31
The painting was completed c.1616, another bad year in a series of bad years for Mughal military operations in the Deccan. From the start of his reign, Jahangir had sent army after army south to fulfil his father’s dream of annexing the plateau to the empire. Between 1608 and 1612 he launched four major invasions led by his best generals, but all were repulsed by armies loyal to Ahmadnagar, one of the three remaining major sultanates of the plateau. Although the kingdom’s Nizam Shahi house was headed by a series of weak, puppet sultans and the capital of Ahmadnagar was occupied by Mughal forces, the state was kept alive by two powerful groups: Maratha warrior lineages and the so-called Habshis – natives of east Africa recruited as military slaves. Malik Ambar, a disciplined leader and master tactician, was a member of the latter group. His career is important, not just because he and his Deccan forces managed to check India’s mightiest armies for two decades, but also for what it reveals about the place of Africans in Indian history, and about military slavery itself.
From at least the fifteenth century, cotton goods manufactured in Gujarat and the western Deccan had been reaching the Ethiopian highlands in exchange for African exports of gold, ivory and, especially, slaves. Since the Christians who ruled Ethiopia could not legally enslave other Christians, they captured pagan Africans and sold them to Arab or Gujarati merchants for Indian textiles. The captives were then sent to slave markets along African or Middle Eastern coasts, where they were purchased, converted to Islam and then became either domestic servants or were given military training and resold to other buyers. As with any type of slavery, military slaves were severed from their natal kin group, rendering them dependent upon their owners. And, as with military slavery under the Ghaznavid and Ghurid dynasties, it was assumed that, as uprooted outsiders with no local kin network, these men would be reliably loyal to the state their masters served. Ever since the fourteenth century, the sultanates of the Deccan had been weakened by incessant struggles between the ruling class’s Deccani and Westerner factions. Recruiting military labour unaffiliated ethnically or politically with either group was therefore considered a practical way to neutralize intractable domestic strife.
Masters fed, housed and educated their African slaves, receiving in return unswerving loyalty, which is why courts were willing to entrust their Habshi slaves with such important positions as governors, seal-bearers, bodyguards and commanders, as well as ordinary troopers. But the status of African slaves in the Deccan was never permanent. On the death of their masters, they typically became freedmen and served as freelancers in the service of powerful commanders, thereby exchanging a master–slave relationship for a patron–client one. While the humbler sorts sought out and served commanders as paid troopers, the more talented ex-slaves managed to attract their own troopers (often other ex-slaves), obtain land assignments and enter a sultanate’s official hierarchy as ranked commanders or amirs. Because their ties with Africa had been permanently severed, these men necessarily adopted the Deccan as their home, readily embracing the local culture and becoming fiercely loyal to the region and its political systems.
This is what happened to Malik Ambar. Born in 1548 in the pagan countryside surrounding the Ethiopian highlands, he turned up in the slave markets of the Red Sea, was taken to Baghdad and sold to a prominent merchant who educated him, converted him to Islam and changed his name from ‘Chapu’ to ‘Ambar’. From Baghdad he reached the Deccan in the early 1570s, having been purchased by the peshwa (prime minister) of the Nizam Shahi sultanate of Ahmadnagar. When the peshwa died in 1574/5 Ambar was freed by his master’s widow and became a freelancer. He also acquired a wife. For a while he served the sultan of Bijapur, who gave him the title ‘Malik’, and in 1595, having acquired a contingent of his own troops, he entered the service of a Habshi commander in the Nizam Shahi state. In 1600 its capital, Ahmadnagar, fell to Mughal forces – but not the countryside, which teemed with troops formerly employed by the sultanate. Foremost among those picking up the pieces of the fragmented kingdom was Malik Ambar, whose cavalry swiftly grew to 7,000 men. Upon finding a prince of Ahmadnagar’s royal house, he promoted the youth’s cause as the future sovereign of a reconstituted Nizam Shahi state. He also married his daughter to him and presided over his coronation as Sultan Murtaza Nizam Shah II (r. 1600–10), who for the next ten years would reign as the first of Malik Ambar’s two puppet sultans, with Ambar himself actually managing the state as peshwa and commanding its armies. Ambar’s repeated successes against Jahangir’s forces – and the source of the emperor’s frustration, as revealed in the miniature painting – lay in his mastery of guerrilla tactics. Avoiding pitched battles against the Mughals’ formidable armies, Ambar harassed Mughal supply lines, launched surprise night attacks and drew imperial forces into wooded hills and rugged ravines where they could be ambushed by light cavalry.
Between 1600 and 1627, when Malik Ambar held undisputed control over the Ahmadnagar sultanate’s military and civil affairs, the kingdom acquired a distinctly African character. By 1610 he commanded an army of 50,000, a fifth of whom were Africans.32 Habshis entered India in considerable numbers as military slaves, some of whom, after attaining their freedom, would purchase large numbers of their own Habshi slaves. This had become an established pattern. Just as Malik Ambar had arrived in the Deccan as one of 1,000 slaves of Chengiz Khan, who was then peshwa of Ahmadnagar, Chengiz Khan himself had earlier come to the Deccan as a Habshi slave. These men could experience a remarkable degree of upward mobility, moving from slaves to freelancers, to commanders, and finally to slave owners. Their experience recalls the pattern found in thirteenth-century north India, where a freed slave such as Balban acquired his own slaves and eventually went on to seize control of the Delhi sultanate. The difference was that Malik Ambar never declared himself sultan, preferring to maintain a puppet sovereign so as not to upset Nizam Shahi dynastic continuity, much as Rama Raya, a century earlier, had retained Sadaśiva to uphold Vijayanagara’s Tuluva dynasty.
Malik Ambar could not have held off sustained Mughal pressure without the substantial contributions of Maratha warrior clans that, together with Habshi slaves, had also been recruited into Ahmadnagar’s state system. Alongside the Africans, the Marathas’ swift and light cavalry units stoutly resisted the Mughals’ cumbersome armies, which they occasionally pursued as far as the imperial headquarters at Burhanpur. The emergence of such units in the Deccan’s sultanates had a deep history. Like the Delhi sultans before them, the Mughals easily recruited war-horses and cavalrymen from Central Asia, owing to north India’s proximity to that region’s military labour markets and abundant pasture lands. But the Deccan sultanates, cut off by hostile Mughal territory from inner Asia’s military labour markets and horse pastures, had to find alternatives. Either they could import warrior-slaves native to East Africa and war-horses from the Persian Gulf, or they could recruit both cavalrymen and horses from their own locality, thereby tapping into the Deccan’s military labour market.
They actually did both. Beginning with the Bahmani dynasty (1347–1518), the sultans of the Deccan understood that in order to access the grass-roots source of local wealth – the surplus grains produced by the cultivating classes – they had to recruit hereditary territorial chiefs, or deshmukhs, who were native to the plateau. The sultans also needed a reliable source of military labour. The deshmukhs not only collected revenue, adjudicated disputes and provided ritual leadership in the lands they controlled: they also recruited troops from among their own villager–clients, who formed the region’s military labour market. They would then make these recruits available to a sultan, who in return gave the deshmukhs documents (sanads) that formalized their rights to specified lands. Sultan Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah I recruited 30,000 Maratha cavalry for service in the sultanate of Bijapur. He also introduced the practice of enlisting bargirs, Maratha cavalrymen whose horses were supplied by the state.33 Many leading Maratha clans had risen to prominence in tandem with the rise of the sultanates themselves. The Shinde lineage of Kanerkhed had served the Bahmani sultans as siledars, that is, cavalrymen who furnished their own horses. The Mane lineage of Mhasvad did the same for the sultans of Bijapur. As rewards for their military service, those sultans made the Nimbalkar lineage of Nimlak and the Ghatge lineage of Malavdi sardeshmukhs, that is, ‘heads of deshmukhs’.34 The rights to lands inherited by Shivaji (r. 1674–80), who would found the Maratha kingdom later in the seventeenth century, were initially conferred on his father, Shahji, by the sultans of Ahmadnagar and Bijapur in return for his service to those states. It was the sanad from the court that gave a deshmukh authority over his own kinsmen and the state’s backing if they opposed him, as they often did. As a result, the history of Maharashtra and the Maratha polity is essentially the history of these deshmukh families.35
Under Malik Ambar’s leadership, then, the Ahmadnagar sultanate had actually become a joint Habshi–Maratha enterprise. Building on earlier sultanate methods of recruitment, the units of Maratha cavalry in Malik Ambar’s service grew from 10,000 in 1609 to 50,000 in 1624.36 In the end, however, it was the Maratha component that would have the more lasting consequences for Indian history. Few Ethiopian females were brought to India, meaning that the Habshi population there could never be self-replicating. Furthermore, the collapse of the Nizam Shahi sultanate ended the patronage system by which African military slaves had been recruited to India. By contrast, the number of fighters that deshmukh families could recruit on behalf of the sultans eventually enabled them not only to surpass the Habshis in importance, but to replace the sultanates that had initially recruited them. In short, the rise of Maratha power – such an important socio-political development between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries – was deeply rooted in the Marathas’ prior patronage by the region’s sultanates.