Even in his own telling, the story of Jawhar Aftabachi’s life in India during the 16th century is incomplete. For nearly two decades, he served Humayun, the second Mughal emperor and had an intimate knowledge of what took place both at court and on battlefields across India.
Historian Ali Anooshahr was preparing to give a talk on the Mughal Empire at the University of Pennsylvania when he realized that beyond his service to Humayun, almost nothing about Aftabachi was known. Where was he born? As an enslaved person, how much freedom did he really have at court?
Anooshahr began with the date 1553, which was when Aftabachi mentioned having served Humayun for 19 lunar years. This would mean he was first enslaved as a child in 1535. This question led to others. Like any good mystery, Anooshahr could not resist following the clues.
Anooshahr’s new book Slavery in the Early Mughal World: The Life and Thoughts of Jawhar Aftabachi (1520s–1580s) upends conventional thinking about the extent of slavery in the Mughal Empire. It also charts the rise of individualism in India, an idea previously considered exclusive to Western civilization.
“Following Jawhar’s life story was basically unwinding the spool, and it kept going and going,” said Anooshahr, a professor of history in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis.
An empire from the bottom up
Anooshahr’s approach to unraveling Aftabachi’s life and times is called “micro-history.” This method starts with clues that may seem insignificant but that can lead to a much bigger understanding.
The first clue in Aftabachi’s story was mention of the year 1535. The 16th century as a whole was a turning point in world history, when vastly different societies began to clash at a level that had never been seen. The Mughal Empire was expanding west to the shores of the Indian Ocean. The Ottomans were spreading north and west to the region of today’s countries in Eastern Europe, and it was there that Aftabachi was likely born.
When Aftabachi initially arrived at the Mughal imperial court in India, he was first given the task of carrying the emperor’s washing water. As he grew up, he took part in a hunt and helped set up a military camp before battle, and he included those details in his life story.
He was also present when the emperor had his own rebellious brother blinded at court. The gruesome act proved to be too traumatic for Aftabachi, so he was moved to an administrative position and put in charge of a village. When he did a good job, he was put in charge of the treasury. Soon he had other roles. In the military he fought in battles and received promotions.
But even with more power than people outside of the imperial court, his life was tenuous. He lived at the emperor’s pleasure. He wasn’t free.
Upending the history of the Mughal Empire and Western individualism
Historians have argued that slavery had largely ended in India long before the emergence of the Mughal Empire. The Deli Sultanate of the late 14th century ruled northern India with as many as 180,000 enslaved people serving in a variety of roles, from soldiers to administrators to concubines until it was defeated by Central Asian king Timur in 1398.
With Aftabachi’s story, Anooshahr pieced together new details. In their own stories, Aftabachi and others cited administrative muster rolls counting roughly 90,000 soldiers, as many of 40,000 of them enslaved. This number does not include enslaved people serving in roles outside of the military.
“There is a phase in the sixteenth century when slavery became significant,” said Anooshahr. “We knew that there was mention of this, but we wouldn't have really understood it had it not been for Jawhar’s text.”
This period also marks the end of a medieval society that depended primarily on bonds of kinship. What followed came the rise of the idea of the state that was more abstract and administrative. This shift led to even people of lower ranks hoped to show themselves worthy of promotion by their own deeds rather than their background or family bonds.
“People have looked at the rise of the individuals from the Western perspective but it's actually happening in a number of other places,” said Anooshahr. “There used to be a kind of straw-man argument that the individual is a western phenomenon, and in Indian history Indian people have a collective kind of identity. That's very simplistic, and that binary is false.”
Maintaining access to an unexpected history
Anooshahr said that one of the biggest challenges of this project was the need for translation from multiple languages. He can read Persian, Ottoman and Turkish, but there are also original texts in Portuguese and Arabic. He said that while having these language skills are vital to conducting this kind of research, university language training programs are facing cuts.
“You can't do these kinds of projects without having a program where you can teach people languages,” said Anooshahr. “Google Translate doesn't help you with this archive.”
There is also the question of why Aftabachi wrote his story at all. In a very real sense, Anooshahr said, he wrote it for the money. He wrote his life story in his 60s to answer the current Mughal emperor’s call for details from anyone who remembered the lives of the first emperors.
At the same time, Aftabachi's story glorified the emperor he served. He reframed the idea of enslavement from a system that strips free will to a kind of spiritual duty to a saintly figure.
“Jawar becomes a witness, a disciple and a hagiographer and that's how he gains freedom in his own narrative,” said Anooshahr, “He becomes a character that is in some ways worthy or at least benefits from that sort of aura and presence of the emperor.”
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