Gender, Race, and Space: African Elites, Continuity and Change in South Asian Political Landscapes, c. 1500-1800

Anisha Bhat

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-2vda-pv05

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Gender, Race, and Space: African Elites, Continuity and Change in South Asian Political Landscapes, c. 1500-1800

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Habshis—people of African descent in early modern India—are best known as military slaves in the Muslim sultanates of the Deccan region, a handful of whom rose to political prominence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Scholars argue that, unlike the alienation that characterized Atlantic African slave diasporas, military slavery encouraged the upward mobility and assimilation of Habshis into Deccan courtly culture through intermarriage, leading to their eventual disappearance as a distinct group. However, this narrative cannot explain the continuing reappearance of ‘Habshis’ in the historical record beyond slavery, often in the context of critical eighteenth-century military and political entanglements with the Maratha state and Europeans. Consequently, this paper will trace the development of a malleable yet persistent notion of Habshi ‘difference,’ often actively negotiated by Habshis themselves, in conjunction with developments in Deccan politics and society from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century. Drawing on a variety of Persian and European sources, I will analyze changing articulations of Habshi racial and gendered difference in relation to their roles on two key sociopolitical stages—courts and forts. Doing so reveals a longstanding nexus between articulations of racial difference at the crossroads of local and global networks, gendered performance of military masculinity, and territorial political claims—a mode of political engagement that I call ‘the politics of difference’—which took precedence over religious divisions, Habshis helped elaborate and carry forward the politics of difference from the period of Deccan military slavery into later periods, facilitating the rise of modern states in the region.

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