How Enslaved Africans Rose to Great Powers in India

Words by Konkana Ray

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How Enslaved Africans Rose to Great Powers in India

                 Portraits of Malik Ambar, a notable enslaved African

Commercial contacts between Africa and India extend as far back as 1495 BCE. Scholars Renata Czekalska and Agnieszka Kuczkiewicz-Fraś note the first verifiable mention of trade between Africa and India can be established in relation to the Egyptian queen Hatshepsut’s (c. 1473–58 BCE) expedition to Punt (modern Somalia). In the ‘Periplus of the Erythraean Sea’, a Greco-Roman document, we find the first recorded mention of the ‘slave trade’ from Africa to India, which describes trade routes from Egypt to the rest of the world in the first to third century CE. As Arab traders brought wines, olive oil, ivory, silverware, and glassware to India, so too, the Periplus briefs, they abided by the demands of Indian kings for enslaved Africans.