The Centre de Sciences Humaines is pleased to invite you to the CSH Seminar on:
Slavery in the early Mughal world. The Life and Thoughts of Jawhar Aftabchi, 1520s-1580s
Speaker: Ali Anooshahr ( Professor of History, University of California, Davis)
Discussant: Anubhuti Maurya (Shiv Nadar University) & Shounak Ghosh, (Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Manchester)
Register to attend at CSH Delhi
Register to attend online via Zoom
CSH Seminars are in hybrid mode. Please pre-register for offline and online registration before Monday, 12 October, 2:00 p.m. IST.
About the Talk:
Jawhar Aftabachi was enslaved as a child by the Ottomans in the Black Sea region in the early sixteenth century. He was then sold to the Ottoman admiral Selman Reis, who took him with his fleet to Egypt and Yemen during his wars with the Portuguese; carried, after the admiral’s death, by the admiral’s nephew Mustafa Bayram to Gujarat on the western coast of India; and finally, when the Mughal army invaded Gujarat in 1534, taken into imperial service along with thousands of Eurasian and Abyssinian slaves. Here he rose to the position of water-carrier for the Mughal Emperor Humayun and chronicled this experience in a remarkable, Persian text called Tazkirah-i Vaqi`at or “memoir of events”.
In his talk, Ali Anooshahr will use Jawhar’s life and memoirs as a unique window into slavery, selfhood, and the rise of the early modern Indian Ocean world. Bringing a micro-historical study to a “subaltern Mughal author” offers the opportunity to reassess the history of slavery in South Asia from an original perspective and to reframe the connected history of the early modern world. Jawhar’s life shows in vivid detail the eruption of the Mediterranean and Black Sea cultural regions into the Indian Ocean world, shedding light onto the collapse of older bonds of interdependency in the face of impersonal structures of new centralized states, and bearing witness to the process of individualization of people which was experienced not as a triumphalist “rise of the self” but as alienation.
About the Speaker:
Ali Anooshahr is a Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. His publications include 1) The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam (Routledge, 2009), 2) Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian Empires: A Study of Politics and Invented Traditions (Oxford, 2018), 3) The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shah Jahan: Art, Architecture, Politics, Law and Literature ((Ed. with Ebba Koch, The Marg Foundation, March 2019), and 4) Slavery in the Early Mughal World (Oxford 2025).
He is the co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Mughal Studies and is on the editorial board of the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Hellman Foundations, among others.
For more info contact:
Corinne Lefevre: co[dot]lefevre[at]csh-delhi[dot]com
David Singh: david[dot]singh[at]csh-delhi[dot]com
