Logo

Sub-Saharan Africans have a longstanding and distinguished presence in India, where they are most commonly known as Habshis or Sidis. Habshi is the Arabic for an Abyssinian or Ethiopian, and Sidi is apparently derived from the Arabic sayyidi, “my lord”. In 1996, the authoritative Anthropological Survey of India reported sizeable communities of African ancestry in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka in southern India, Gujarat in the west, and the metropolises of Delhi, Kolkata, and Mumbai. In the last decade there has been a veritable explosion of scholarship on Habshis and Sidis in India. This book is a contribution to this growing field, but with a difference. Rather than the groups hitherto studied, its focus is on the elite of Sub-Saharan African-Indian merchants, soldiers, nobles, statesmen, and rulers who attained prominence in various parts of India between the 15th and 20th centuries, and on Africans who served at the courts of Indian monarchs as servants, slaves, eunuchs, or concubines. The book is not intended to be a complete history of Sub-Saharan Africans in India, or even of elite Africans. Rather, it is a series of snapshots, in the form of essays by specialists in the history, numismatics, architecture, and art history of South Asia.