This book studies the life and thoughts of a sixteenth-century slave in India named Jawhar Aftabachi (d. after 1587), who served as the water-carrier for the Mughal Emperor Humayun (d. 1556), and chronicled his reign in a Persian text. It reconstructs his biography as a child slave who was captured by the Ottomans or its client state the Crimean Khanate in the Black Sea region and was brought to India during the Ottoman–Portuguese wars of the early sixteenth century. Jawhar’s writing lifts the veil on a hitherto unknown fact: the presence of slavery as a major social institution in early Mughal India. It also provides a rare glimpse into the rise of the early modern world from a slave’s perspective.