Servants And Slaves In The Medieval India

 

In the eleventh century, the Muslim kings of India instituted slavery. Slavery spread throughout India with the enslavement of Hindus and the employment of slaves in military forces for conquest. Muslim historians of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire said that during the invasions of the Hindu kingdoms, many Indians were abducted as slaves and sent to Central Asia and West Asia. To work in the homes of the mighty Deccan Sultanates and the Muslim troops of the Mughal Empire, numerous slaves from the Horn of Africa were also transported into the Indian subcontinent. 

 

•    After the Battle of Peshawar (1001) the army of Mahmud of Ghazni took control of Peshawar and Waihand (the capital of Gandhara), capturing hundreds and turning them into slaves.

 

•    Mahmud is claimed to have brought back so many slaves after his twelfth foray into India in 1018–1019 that their worth was only two to ten dirhams each.

 

•    Merchants from far-off places were drawn to buy them because of their extraordinarily low price, and as a result, Central Asia, Iraq, and Khurasan were overrun with them. The fair and the dark, the wealthy and the poor, mixed in one common enslavement. 

 

•    There are a lot of references to cheap Indian slaves being widely available throughout the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1555).

 

•    Some of these Indian slaves were sold to satisfy global demand, while others were exploited by Muslim lords on the subcontinent.

 

•    Some slaves were converted to Islam for protection and to advance the religion.

 

•    The Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire's efforts to establish states in South Asia led to the transfer of sizable numbers of Hindus to the Central Asian slave markets.

 

•    The rulers of the Delhi Sultanate and their subordinate Shiqadars gave orders to their forces to kidnap numerous residents in order to extort money.

 

•    Communities that were obedient to the Sultan and consistently paid their taxes were generally excluded from this practice, but payments from other, less obedient groups were routinely taken in the form of slaves.

 

•    In addition, the Delhi Sultans used the enslavement of people to finance their conquest of new lands.

 

•    Qutb-Ud-din Aibak, for instance, invaded Gujarat in 1197 while still a military slave of the Ghurid Sultan Muizz u-Din, and enslaved 20,000 people.

 

•    He enslaved an extra 50,000 people when he conquered Kalinjar some six years later.

 

•    Later in the 13th century, Balban's campaign in Ranthambore is said to have defeated the Indian army and produced "captives beyond computation."

 

•    During the Delhi Sultanate, the forcible enslavement of non-Muslims was motivated by the desire for war loot and military expansion.

 

•    In addition to the 70,000 construction slaves, Sultan Alauddin Khalji also held 50,000 slave boys.

 

•    According to legend, Sultan Firuz Shah Tughluq owned 180,000 slaves, 12,000 of whom were highly talented artists.

 

•    The Mughal Empire still had a slave trade, but it was much less in scale, mostly limited to domestic service and debt bondage, and was thought to be benign compared to the Arab slave trade.

 

•    Abd Allah Khan Firuz Jang, an Uzbek noble at the Mughal court in the 1620s and 1630s who was assigned governor of the districts of Kalpi and Kher, murdered the rebel leaders and enslaved their women, daughters, and children, totalling over 200,000, in the process of putting down the local insurrectionists.

 

•    Shah Shuja started waging war on Indian Territory beyond the Indus when he was made the governor of Kabul.

 

•    Most of the women burned themselves to death in an effort to preserve their honor. They were "distributed" among Muslim Mansabdars after being captured.

 

•    A Mughal officer named Shiqdar was in charge of administration in the Pargana and was authorized to enslave villagers or even use force to collect the required taxes if necessary.

 

•    Indian debtors and Mughal Empire rebels were the only groups allowed to export slaves from that country.

 

•    The middlemen for this slave trafficking to Central Asian consumers were the Punjabi Ghakkars.

 

In the eleventh century, Muslim tyrants in India established the system of slavery. In the thirteenth century, it rose to prominence in North India and continued to be important in the fourteenth. Slavery persisted in Bengal in the fourteenth century, although it had relocated to the Deccan by then and stayed there until the seventeenth. In the seventeenth century, it persisted in the Mughal territories to a lesser extent. In the eighteenth century, the Afghans brought about a considerable renaissance in North India.