Slavery and South Asian History

1.Renewed and Connected Histories: Slavery and the Historiography of South Asia

1 Renewed and Connected Histories: Slavery and the Historiography of South Asia Indrani Chatterjee This volume is conceived as an attempt to reconnect the histories of South Asian slavery with the new revisionist scholarship of slave holding that is appearing elsewhere. We hope to enable South Asianist scholars of all shades and disciplinary training to rethink some of their formulations about power, culture, identity, voice, and memory in temporally and spatially sensitized contexts. Consider, for instance, the new work on slavery in the eastern Mediterranean between the sixth and eleventh centuries by Youval Rotman ,1 alongside that of northern Africa during the same centuries.2 Arguing that scholars had hitherto presumed upon Roman legal concepts like res and Marxist concepts of a discrete proletariat of labor, Rotman reveals how these categories prevented scholars from understanding the nature of slavery in the eastern Mediterranean world during the post-Roman centuries. These were the very centuries in which slavery was believed hitherto to have ended. Instead, Rotman argues, wars between Arab princes and Byzantine potentates led to new doctrines regarding the treatment, status, and ransoming of “captives.” These shifted ideas of freedom and slavery in turn. Janet Ewald suggests that the Roman Catholic military orders allied with two religious orders, the Trinitarians and the Mercedarians, to collect alms with which to ransom “Christian” captives during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.3 During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as Iberian and other sailors came increasingly into conflict with Arab sailors and traders in the waters off the northwestern coasts of Ifriqiya (current Africa), the ransoming of captives became even more organized and was supported by the newly reorganized states in the Iberian peninsula.4 Thus, as Ewald notes, at the very historical moment when Iberians and other Europeans began to use African slaves on plantations in the Atlantic Ocean, an image of “Muslim slavery”as particularly brutal emerged in the western Mediterranean. Such revisions of the historiography of slavery that tie together different theaters of warfare with the shifting discourses on slavery and freedom and ethico-spiritual epistemes can be productive for scholars of South Asian pasts. First, these new histories explain the transportation of ideas regarding “Muslim slavery” into early modern South Asia by Portuguese sailors and elites. They also invite a reappraisal of the discourses on captivity and redemption produced by Portuguese and Catholic friars in the Indian Ocean.5 Second, these histories draw attention to the surprising gaps in the social history of warfare in early medieval and early modern South Asian histories as a whole. Notwithstanding the new scholarship on warfare and warriors,6 and the studies of slave-soldiers and slave-commanders presented in this volume (Jackson, Kumar, Eaton, and Walker), till Daud Ali’s essay herein, South Asian historiography had left unstudied the fates of combatant prisoners and hostages and their subsequent treatment by host societies. Perhaps this neglect can only be explained by the hostility that professionals trained in post-Rankean methods feel for records characterized— also by those nineteenth-century conventions—as“literary,”“hagiographic,” “religious,” or “eulogic.” Notwithstanding the inroads of literary criticism and hermeneutic developments, few scholars of South Asia deploy such interpretative practices when faced with older literatures,7 and hence they continue to discount the historical fidelity of “narrative” records. But as Ali’s essay herein suggests, all records, even when writ on stone, are “literary” in specific ways that demand attention. Such sensitivity is even more necessary when narratives and poetry alike persist in their suggestion that warfare was just as fundamental to South Asian slave making as it had been in Greek or Roman antiquity. Consider the seventh-century tale by Banabhatta of a moon-god’s love for an earthly girl, a character called Patralekha. She is described as a prepubescent “maiden”“brought here with the other captives taken by our great king” and “reared” in the house of her captors, by the mother of the hero. The mother fostered and raised the captive as “if she were my own daughter.” Having judged that the captive maiden was “fit to be an attendant and betel-box bearer” for her son, she made a gift of her to him. Along with the gift came instructions on how to use her: “She is to be cherished like a child . . .to be looked upon as a pupil, and to be initiated into all your confidences like a friend . . . take pains by all means such that she long remains your...