India’s Tryst with Slavery

Did the Muslims Bring It or Did We Always Have It?

Moroccan traveler ibn Battuta visited India in the fourteenth century and wrote about Hindu slaves dying while being trafficked across the mountain wall to the subcontinent’s northwest. He named the wall Hindu Kush or “Hindu killer.” Although pockets of India had already known Islam since the days of Ali, it’s only in the thirteenth century that it came under formal Islamic rule, although not all of it. An interesting aside here, Genghis Khan and Qutb-ud-din Aibak both started their careers in the exact same year, 1206. And both rose from slavery, Khan as a prisoner of war and Aibak as a child slave. From that point on, human trafficking has been a most consistent cultural motif of the subcontinent’s politics throughout the Muslim rule that only ended with the Europeans. Every Islamic regime had institutionalized slave trade baked into its administration. These slaves were not only war captives but also civil acquisitions.

The question that arises then is, did slavery come to India with the Muslims? We know Islam institutionalizes and unambiguously endorses slavery. Muhammad himself owned a few, as did every caliph, be it Rashidun or Abbasid. But again, did Islam bring slavery to India?

A most pervasive notion, particularly among certain nationalist circles, holds that the institution of slavery was alien to ancient Indian civilization—introduced first by Muslim rulers and later perpetuated by European colonizers. This perspective situates slavery, along with other social ills, firmly outside India’s cultural boundaries, thus distancing it from Hindu traditions and institutions. Such notions serve to establish civilizational and moral superiority by creating an idealized pre-Islamic past untainted by practices now universally condemned.

The view is, of course, aggressively contested by voices from the other side of the line that are best served by an India that was at least as regressive and evil as the rest of the world at the time, if not more. Naturally, the topic comes with immense political and ideological baggage which, as is often the case with such topics, clouds academic judgment. here we attempt to take a very dispassionate view of the matter and let the records speak for themselves. in keeping with our tradition, we’ll be lending an ear to voices from both sides of the divide and scrutinize every reference, every evidence with the maximum possible skepticism and with little regard for political correctness or social sentiments. May facts and nothing but facts prevail.