Ali Anooshahr, "Slavery in the Early Mughal World: The Life and Thoughts of Jawhar Aftabachi (1520s–1580s)" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Summary

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New Books Network – Podcast Summary

Episode Title: Ali Anooshahr, "Slavery in the Early Mughal World: The Life and Thoughts of Jawhar Aftabachi (1520s–1580s)" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Host: Mortaza Hajizadeh
Guest: Dr. Ali Anooshahr (Professor of History, UC Davis)
Date: December 5, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the overlooked subject of slavery in early Mughal India through Dr. Ali Anooshahr’s new book, focusing on the life and writings of Johar Aftabchi, an enslaved court servant from the mid-16th century. The discussion covers the historiographical gaps in studies of Indian Ocean slavery, the value of microhistory, the lived realities and mobility of enslaved persons, and the nuances of social transformation in the Mughal Empire. Anooshahr provides methodological and historical insights while illuminating the personal dimensions of court slavery.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Case for Studying Indian Ocean Slavery

• Topic Introduction ([02:28]):
  Dr. Anooshahr emphasizes the literature’s focus on transatlantic slavery, noting how Indian Ocean slavery—especially in Mughal India—remains understudied.
• Methodological Approach – Microhistory ([06:20]):
  “If you take the life of a single person who wrote a text, Johar, and you follow his life, you’re going to see connections that you may not necessarily see in the macro discussions...”
  Johar’s story reveals global patterns otherwise invisible in large-scale histories.

2. Slavery, Movement, and Mobility in the Early Mughal World

• Johar’s Origins and Trajectory ([14:50–18:23]):
  Dr. Anooshahr reconstructs Johar's likely trajectory:
  • Born in early 1520s North Black Sea region (today’s Ukraine/Russia), probably from a peasant background.
  • Likely enslaved in Crimean Tatar raids, sold to Ottomans, and eventually purchased by Ottoman admiral Salman Rais.
  • Travels with Rais to Indian Ocean/Red Sea theaters, after which he is taken to Gujarat in India post-mutiny.
  • Captured by Mughals, becomes a court slave under Emperor Humayun, accompanying him to Iran and back.
  • “He was probably one of these people… brought to some kind of slave market as a child…” ([15:47])

3. Slavery Transformed: From 'Bande' to 'Chela'

• Renaming and Moralization of Status ([10:04–14:11]):
  Under Akbar, court slaves were no longer called ‘bande’ (slave) but ‘chela’ (disciple).
  • “There’s a kind of moment… where the emperor says these people who are court slaves should not be called slaves, they should be called disciples.” ([11:00])
  • This repackages dependency as spiritual discipleship, creating intimacy via personal service.
  • Johar’s text shows self-elevation: “His own status as an author, as a witness… is now elevated in a kind of mystical way.”

4. Training, Promotion, and Everyday Life at Court

• Training and Pedagogical Structures ([23:45–27:45]):

  • Court slaves like Johar were trained not only as soldiers (in gunpowder artillery, musketry) but also in Persian/Turkish literature.
  • “There was this ladder… if you start from shaget piche (trainee) to become a mihtar (higher rank).” ([24:33])

• Education as Socialization ([21:03–23:33]):

  • Slaves memorized poetry (Hafez, Jami, Attar) as both language training and moral instruction.
  • “Most of these… if you follow the verse that he quotes… there’s always a kind of a slave story in there, which makes me think that these were probably texts that were given to slaves…” ([22:07–22:50])

5. Johar Aftabchi as Author: Voice, Agency & Alienation

• Deuteragonist and Narrative Structure ([28:51–31:21]):

  • Johar’s “autobiography” is actually a biography of Emperor Humayun.
  • Johar positions himself as a secondary character (deuteragonist), witnessing and recording (much like Dr. Watson to Sherlock Holmes).
  • “There is agency… because if you’re a slave, you get to create yourself and the emperor as characters in a story.” ([31:21])

• Alienation and Marginalization ([31:51–34:47]):

  • After Akbar’s accession, Johar’s influence wanes; he lacks intimacy with the new emperor.
  • Attempts to remain visible (e.g., having his memoir rewritten by a courtier) fail, reinforcing personal and institutional alienation.
  • “When Akbar is emperor, Johar will be marginalized. …There’s nothing we know about his whereabouts until this text is written again in the 1580s.” ([34:47])

6. Persianate Hospitality, Politics, and Memoir

• Changing Social Bonds ([37:12–40:12]):
  • Pre-modern Persianate hospitality was not about nationhood but obligations between individuals and lineages.
  • New state structures (Safavids) begin to prioritize raison d’état over personal/familial obligations—a transition reflected in Johar’s writing and life.
  • “It’s a cultural character… hospitality is done… between people, individual people. So one person may show hospitality to somebody else, but this creates mutual bonds…” ([37:25])

7. Subaltern Lives & Bureaucracy in the Mughal State

• Rise of Marginalized Voices ([41:04–46:51]):
  • Johar’s memoir fits into a pattern with texts by Datu Sarwani, Bayazid Bayat, etc.
  • These writers show the breaking down of lineage-based states and the rise of alienated individuals who seek new forms of belonging (e.g., seeing the Emperor as a mystical patriarch).
  • “It’s the rise of the individual, but it’s not a sort of triumphant… thing. It’s individualization as alienation, as separation…” ([45:55])
  • Mughal bureaucracy, recruitment, and merit-based promotion create new routes for social mobility—but also new forms of dependence and exclusion.

8. Slavery in Indian Ocean vs. Transatlantic Worlds

• Comparative Approaches & Moral Complexity ([47:21–53:25]):
  • Dr. Anooshahr warns against “competition of suffering,” emphasizing vast differences of context, function, and degree of violence.
  • Indian Ocean slavery was not less cruel in principle: violence, family separation, castration, concubinage, and labor exploitation existed.
  • Mughal India was not a capitalist society, so forms of labor exploitation (e.g., plantation slavery) differ. Yet, violence and alienation remain central to both systems.
  • “We don’t want to set up a kind of a competition of suffering… we don't know how people experienced suffering…” ([48:10])
  • Calls for historicizing moral debates: “...the best way is to look at the time itself and see what kind of moral criticisms… were being presented against slavery.” ([50:26])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Microhistory:
  “Once you move down to the level of the individual… you also get to see things that you didn’t necessarily see before.” – Anooshahr ([06:20])

• On Slavery and Discipleship:
  “It’s a kind of a repackaging, a sublimation of this obviously very unequal relationship of dependency.” – Anooshahr ([12:57])

• On Agency in Slavery:
  “If you’re a slave, you get to create yourself and the emperor as characters in a story.” – Anooshahr ([31:21])

• On Competition of Suffering:
  “We don’t want to set up a kind of a competition of suffering… who suffered less, and therefore it was better.” – Anooshahr ([48:10])

• On Alienation and the Individual:
  “It’s the rise of the individual, but it's not a sort of triumphant… thing. It’s individualization as alienation, as separation.” – Anooshahr ([45:55])

• On Moral Judgment:
  “I think the baseline I would expect most people now who are writing about this would be opposed to slavery as a bad thing, you know…” – Anooshahr ([53:13])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:31] – Podcast Intro (content begins)
• [02:28] – Intro & Motivation for the Book
• [06:20] – Methodology: Microhistory and Global Connectivity
• [10:04] – Servitude as Discipleship
• [14:50–18:23] – Reconstructing Johar’s Life
• [21:03–23:33] – Persian Literary Training
• [23:45–27:45] – Court Slave Training and Ranks
• [28:30–31:21] – Johar’s Memoir and Deuteragonist Status
• [31:51–34:47] – Marginalization and Alienation
• [37:04–40:12] – Hospitality, Exile, and State Formation
• [41:04–46:51] – Subaltern Memoirs and the New Bureaucracy
• [47:21–53:25] – Comparing Slave Systems & Moral Implications

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Flow & Tone

The tone is reflective, intellectually curious, and sensitive to both historiographical and ethical dimensions. Dr. Anooshahr’s responses are nuanced and insightful, emphasizing complexity rather than polemic. The conversation unwinds patiently, allowing for deep dives into both the personal story of Johar Aftabchi and the larger questions of methodology, state formation, and slavery studies.

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Conclusion

This episode provides an engaging, multi-faceted exploration of slavery in early Mughal India, offering both historical depth and methodological innovation. Dr. Anooshahr’s research re-centers the study of slavery on lesser-known geographies and individuals, moving beyond macro-histories to recover the lives, voices, and writings of the marginalized in early modern South Asia.

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Transcript

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Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Mortaza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today I'm honored to be speaking with Dr. Ali Anushar about a recent book that he has published with Oxford University Press. And it's a very understudied and fascinating topic. The book is called Slavery in the Early Mughal the Life and Thoughts of Jawahir of Topchi, 1520-1580s. Dr. Ali Anusha is a historian of Mughal India as well as Persian at world during the early modern era. He received his BA from the University of Texas at Austin in 1998, his MA in 2002, and his PhD in 2005 from UCLA. He's a professor of history at the University of California, Davis. Ali, welcome to New Books Network.

[Dr. Ali Anushar]

Thank you for having me, Morteza. I appreciate it.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

Like I said, it's a kind of an understudied topic because when it comes to slavery, most of the literature is usually dominated by transatlantic slavery, but not so much about slavery in the Indian Ocean. But before we get to talk about this book, can you just very briefly introduce yourself and talk about your field of expertise and then tell us how did the idea of this book came to you?

[Dr. Ali Anushar]

Sure. Well, as you said, my name is Ali Anushar. I'm a professor at UC Davis and I work on Indo Persian history, Iranian history, but most of my publication is on South Asia during the Mughal period, sometimes a little bit earlier. I also work on the Ghaznavids and so on. So basically like the Indo Persian culture, but with more of a focus on the Mughal empire. So that's what I work on. In terms of the book.

I don't know if your audience knows, but the sort of Persian language heritage of India is very rich to the point that it's almost ironic to call it Persianate, right? In the sense of as if it's derivative in many ways in terms of sheer number of manuscripts and texts. India is the hub of Persian language culture in terms of number of works produced. So I was reading a number of early Persian texts from the time of the Mughal Empire, early 16th century. A number of people who were participants were writing their memoirs later on. And I had read some of the other stuff. And then there was this one text by Johar, and I presented a paper on it at the University of Pennsylvania in 2019. And I wanted to start just by sort of understanding who Johar was, because we didn't know much about him. And he made a few self references in his text. And I thought, well, let's see what these are. And you know, he was saying that he was a slave. People were calling him a slave.

Or bande. And then he also gave a date when he was participating in the blinding of the emperor, whom he served, the emperor's brother. There's a date. And then he says, well, I've been in service for 19 years. And early on he says, I've been in the emperor's service as a child. And so I just subtracted 19 lunar years from that date. And it coincided with a big Mughal campaign in Gujarat, which is in Western India, where they do mention slaves. So from what I was reading, it looked like he was taken as a child slave in say, 1535 or so. And so then I wondered, well, how did he get there? And the specific slaves that are discussed are usually called Abyssinian or Ottoman Rumi slaves, Rumi Vahavashi. And so I thought, well, how did these Ottomans or Abyssinians get there? So that's kind of how the book started me, trying to trace where he came from and how he got there.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

It's fascinating in sort of a micro history. And I'm particularly interested in this topic because when you focus, in your case, you're focusing on one enslaved court servant, Johar Avtabci. And it's a kind of a micro history. And in your book you talk about this global micro history. You position your work being sort of a, I mean, methodologically speaking, is a global microhistory. It's like an engine to read this Jawahir's text. Can you tell us what, how from this approach, what does it tell us about. About the history of slavery in a way that, you know, macro history misses or macro history doesn't tell us?

[Dr. Ali Anushar]

Yeah, I mean, first of all, his name is Johar, sorry, singular. So if you take the life of a single person who wrote a text, Johar, and you follow his life, you're going to see connections that you may not necessarily see in the macro discussions or it seems really marginal. And the macro discussions are there is the sort of Western Indian kingdoms. There is a Mughal empire. You know, the Portuguese show up in the Indian Ocean, the Ottomans come and fight the Portuguese. So when the focus is on the state, then you have a kind of a perspective of the big actors. Once you move down to the level of the individual, not only you get the perspective of the person experiencing all these, but you also get to see things that you didn't necessarily see before. So slavery, just to talk about that topic, was not seen to be a big historical issue in the 16th century Mughal Empire. And the common explanations are that there was slavery before in the Delhi Sultanate in the Middle Ages, but because of the rise of a substantial peasant population from, say the 13th to the know, 16th centuries. And these peasants can, in their off season work as mercenaries. The combination of these mercenary peasant armies and immigration from Iran or Central Asia meant that there was a freely, like, readily available labor market for state builders available. So there was no need for enslavement. But if you look at Johar, it actually shows that there was a time, there was a kind of a transitional phase from say the early 16th century to the later 16th century where slaves are important, there's a kind of experimentation with slavery and which we didn't really know about. So that's in terms of presenting the history of slavery. This is a kind of connection appearance in North India that we didn't really know about. There was few references to it, but Johar really gives us a lot more information to be able to analyze it. People can question how big it was or the exact number of people in service. That is fair. But I would say nobody would really think about this period as a kind of a slave soldier period at all. The early Mughal Empire. So Johar helps with that. And then movements. We knew that the Ottomans or the Portuguese are engaged in slavery in the Black Sea region or the Indian Ocean region. There was slavery before, and here's an interesting case of the sort of the world of the Black Sea in the Mediterranean crashing into the Indian Ocean in terms of people getting moved, people as commodities. So these were new. And then when we look at histories of slavery in the Indian Ocean, usually we talk about people of East African or Indian descent being moved around the Indian Ocean, often by European powers. But here we have somebody apparently, or most likely from north Black Sea region, Russia, Ukraine, you know, into these maps, ending up in India. So this was all like, you know, these are things that we don't necessarily think about when we look at the macro level and when we bring it down to the micro level, we get to see these connections that didn't really leave much of a trace.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

Fascinating. I have another question as well before we get to talk about the nitty and gritty of the book. In your introduction, you sort of conceptualize, or let's reframe that Mogul servitude as discipleship. And then you show how in 1582, with Akbar's decree, they replaced.

Which means a slave, with chela, which means chela, if I'm pronouncing it correctly, decital.

So this change or this framing, let's say, how does it. Let's say.

What does it show about the way they try to moralize. What does it show about, let's say, the workings of power, intimacy and ethics.

In the court of Mobile? Court.

[Dr. Ali Anushar]

Yeah, you know, exactly.

There's a kind of moment under the reign of Akbar where the emperor says these people who are court slaves should not be called slaves, they should be called disciples. Right. So I think that the structure, though, was already there under Humayun, the previous emperor, where we find Johar serving and other people. So the structure was already kind of there. It just seems to be. It gets crystallized and solidified under that term of discipleship in the 1580s. But the structure is very much there in the sense of, like, the slave is. First of all, this is not a capitalist society. So the slave. There's slaves in all registers of society, but here we're talking about specifically court slaves. They often perform personal service for the emperor or at court, and if they can show that they're trustworthy, they would get promoted and they couldn't, you know, would be in, especially given gunpowder weapons, and they would perform military service and labor. So this idea that they're, you know, slaves a little bit different. But, yeah, the Connection and the intimacy is built from what I can see in Johar's account, from performing menial tasks for the emperor. So he carries the emperor's washing water, somebody carries the drinking water, somebody carries the bedding. You know what I mean? So people have these sort of functions, and then if they can, they're growing up with the emperor, they're close to him, he supervises them. They're almost like an extension of his bodily needs. Right. And so this creates the setup to treat the emperor not just as your owner, but as your sort of father, as your master, as your spiritual leader, so to speak. Johar especially does that, where he treats the emperor as a kind of saint, the emperor that he had saved. And so it's a kind of a repackaging, a sublimation of this obviously very unequal relationship of dependency. And so it kind of, I don't know, mollifies it, mystifies it a little bit to try to make it more palatable, I presume, both for the slave and for the master, certainly for the slave. Because Johar can actually tap into this structure and.

See himself not just as a menial or a slave, but actually as a disciple, a witness to a great master, so that his own status as an author, as a witness, as a person who was loyal to his master and served him is now elevated in a kind of a mystical way, the path of mystical union, perhaps, or discipleship, at least. And so it's a different version of slavery than other societies. Some societies turn slavery into a kind of a fictional family, so to speak. Some societies treat slaves as just pure labor, but here you have a setup where slavery is packaged as. Yeah, like you said, spiritual discipleship.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

Before. I do want to ask you some other questions around Johar of Tafti, but can you maybe, in a nutshell, just tell us what we know about him? He was a child slave. I know it's a terribly broad question. How did he find his way into the retinue of Ottoman Admiral Selma? Race, I guess. I mean, if you could just tell us broadly about his life trajectory. Like I said, I know it's a terribly broad question. In three or four minutes, because then I'm going to ask you about the references to him in Persian literature. So I guess it's good to put it into perspective, who he was and what we know about him.

[Dr. Ali Anushar]

Yeah, sure. So this is all. I mean, this is not a straightforward. He doesn't give you autobiography as such. So I had to do a kind of reconstruction of what was the most likely path that he would have taken through deduction, eliminating other possibilities or less likely possibilities. Right. But I'll tell it backwards. So if you want to see how I arrived at this life story, most of it would be in chapter one and two of the book. But basically I think he was probably from somewhere in the North Black Sea region, what's today Ukraine or Russia, and he presumably from a peasant population, I guess, based on the number of years that he was giving, that he was probably born in the very early 1520s.

In the early 1520s in that region. The biggest, there are some cases of Ottoman enslavement in the Balkans, but the biggest one happens a few years later when Suleiman the Magnificent invades Hungary. And there's one kind of big raid in Belgrade. But we know what happens to those slaves. Most of them are taken into the city of Istanbul. So in that sort of timeframe between, say around. I don't have the exact date right now, I think it's around 1519 or 1520 for Belgrade and then the Battle of Mahoch, which is 1526. I think there is a lot of slavery in the Black Sea, Ukraine, sort of Russia region, today's regions by the Crimean Khanate. The Crimean Tatars were kind of a subsidiary state of the Ottoman Empire, kind of a client state. And they would conduct these raids into as far as Moscow and even Poland and Lithuania, and they would bring their slaves back and sell them to the Ottomans. So I think that he's probably one of these people he's brought to some kind of slave market as a child, perhaps with his mother, perhaps not. And then we also know that he.

Was probably purchased by this Ottoman admiral, Salman Rais. He was already active in the Indian Ocean, but then he goes back to Istanbul for a few years and then returns. So I think he was probably purchased at that point. So the Ottoman admirals would have their own personal slaves, but they would also have galley slaves. So I think Johar here, because he was age, would have been a personal slave. And Salman Reis has a fleet. He's fighting the Portuguese and he's in the Red Sea. He wanted to go to India, but his sailors don't want to go. So there is a mutiny where they kill him and most of them go back. But we are told by both Portuguese and Arabic texts that his nephew, Mustafa Bayram, keeps the personal slaves and three ships and some of the loyal janissaries. And then he goes, ends up going to India. So that's how I think he got there, to Gujarat and then at that point then we can kind of follow him a little bit more easily. He's picked up or the Mughals when they invade Gujarat and then he's attached to the Emperor Humayun and then he, you know, travels around with the emperor, goes as far as Iran and comes back again.

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[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

And you extract a lot of deals from his life from references to him in Persian literature, which in Taskia, in Persian literary tradition, which I guess means sort of like a mini literary criticism or literary biography of poets.

And there are references to him in Persian literature. Can you talk about some of these references to him and what you extracted from those references and what are some of those texts that, you know, refer to him?

[Dr. Ali Anushar]

Yeah, well, Johar is not mentioned in Persian texts. I think he's only mentioned in two other Mughal texts. But we know that he's reading Persian literature and apparently some Turkish literature. So the way it worked in the Ottoman Empire, we have good evidence of this, is the way that the slaves would be brought in and they would be educated, and then they would be taught Turkish language and Islam. And this was partially. They would be released into these villages.

And then once they were raised, they would be sent back to the emperor. These are the imperial slaves, but I would guess that other people were also raised in the same way, so through exposure to texts, sort of folk religion. So he seems kind of aware of certain popular Turkish literatures, like Hamza Naameh or the Story of Imam Hussein or Battalnameh, texts like that. These are sort of a popular Turkish text of the 15th century. And then he also.

References Persian poetry. In his text. You find references to Hafiz, Jami, Attar Nizami to some extent. And most of these, not all, but most of these, if you follow the verse that he quotes, say, from Hafiz or from Jami, and you go find it in the relevant book, there's always a kind of a slave story in there, which makes me think that these were probably texts that were given to slaves to teach in Persian. But it also had a moral lesson, and we have a sense of how this would happen. We have a letter from a Mughal nobleman to his brother, and he says that he has this young slave. He says he's a real clever rascal, and he's memorized two lines or five lines from Ann Verri's poem, and I gave him a silver coin for it. And now he wants to memorize 10 a day for a silver coin each. So that's kind of. So you get taught things, but you also get rewarded by your owner's masters by memorizing these texts. So that's the kind of range of literature that he seems aware of. Sort of standard Persian texts. Probably not read the whole thing, but selections that were given to him as part of his education as a court slave that was expected to be able to speak Persian, maybe read and write.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

And this is, I guess.

A kind of a different, or let's say an interesting part of that. Slavery in the ocean, in the Indian Ocean.

Sorry. The slaves were also trained. They were trained to read and write, and they were trained in different skills. I'll come back to this towards the end of the interview, maybe. But just on that, you do kind of reconstruct a. A resurgence, let's say, of military court slavery under Humayun. In that part of the book where you talk about how these slaves were trained in gunpowder skills. Some of them were promoted in ranks, some of them were taught literacy. And I think there was this ladder. I mean, if you start from shaget piche, which sort of means a trainee to become a mittar. And I don't know if it's a Persian word or an Indian word, but I guess it means a higher rank.

When you consider this. What does it tell us about labor in Mughal court in terms of the training and promotion.

That these slaves went through?

[Dr. Ali Anushar]

Yeah. So, you know, these are. So these are. So we can start with the functions that these people are supposed to have. You know, these are court slaves, and they were expected to perform usually personal and or military service. Right. So presumably, if you're going to be in the presence of the emperor at the court itself, you need to learn etiquette, you need to learn how to behave. I'm assuming you need to know how to carry yourself in a certain way and be able to understand and maybe even if asked, say a thing or two in an acceptable, kind of a courteous, polite way.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

Right.

[Dr. Ali Anushar]

So.

I think that's where the training of, you know, being able, you know, being sort of taught literature, that training comes from that. So, I mean, and of course, if you. If you think about how people learn Persian.

As of very recently, you know, people would learn Persian from memorizing the Golestan of Sa'di. You know, you would have, like, you would go to Maktab and learn your, you know, Alphabet and then memorize texts. And I knew people had friends from Iraq. There were Iranians who were expelled from Iraq. And he would say, yeah, that's how my dad learned, you know, his Persian. Somebody gave him the Golestan and say, memorize it, you know, and same as in India. So this sort of style of teaching is actually common to many people, not just the slave. Right. Now, in terms of the specific training, the shogir pishe and the mihtar mehtar is a Persian word. It just means, like A greater person instead of a higher up. And so the structure is that you start especially this is used for military slaves.

You are initially trained as a, you know, use the word page or apprentice.

And then, you know, if you show yourself capable, then you're promoted and you become a Mehtar, like a commander of these. And we have a number of these Mehtars and they do, we do hear them commanding, like artillery, artillery unit or slave of slaves or a, you know, musket bearing a sort of gun holding unit of slaves. And it's also used for Johar. So I don't know, because he does perform some kind of military service, but also administrative service. So it seems to be just a rank designation. And so it strikes me as a method of promotion from apprentice to sort of a full member or a higher up kind of slave. And it's noteworthy that they don't use words like ustad. Right? Ustad is a master of a craft. But that is not used for slaves. They use Mithar.

And mihtar has a range of meanings in, you know, in some cases, mihtar is used as an honorific for like prophets, you know, Mihtar Yusef in some older texts, you know, and it's also used for a servant. The way the, the word kind of develops over time, which I think is kind of interesting, at least in indic languages, it retains the sort of both religious and the servile connotation of those words, which may be related to this idea of slavery as sort of spiritual discipleship. Does that answer your question? Yes.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

Yeah, it does. Thanks. And another part of the book that I was interested in was when you study the.

You kind of read the memoir as a double portrait of Jawahir, sorry, Johar. It portrays him as a, you know, as the protagonist of this story. He's a guy who loyal, you know, to Omayun, but at the same time he's a witnessing servant. And you use the term Deuteronist there.

[Dr. Ali Anushar]

Yeah.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

So how, when you call his Persona Deuteronomy, how does that choice, let's say, reframe his agency as a servant, his authorship in the court, what does it tell us about the idea of agency and authorship of a slave?

[Dr. Ali Anushar]

Yeah, you know, he writes. What he writes is not an autobiography. He writes a biography of the emperor. You know, it's called Tasker, but it's based on what happened to Emperor Humayun. And it says in the preface, he wants to dedicate this book to his son Akbar. And he knows that there is an interest At Akbar's court about history. There's a number of historical texts that are being commissioned. So he brings his memoirs of what he knew about Humayl to the court, or that's what he wants to do. He wants to write a text so he can bring it and get some money for it, maybe a pension of some kind, because he's already older by the time he writes this.

He shows up in the text, but he's not the main character. The book is not mainly about him. But he kind of shows up. Right. In various episodes. Oh, I was also there. And the emperor said that. Or the emperor wanted this. So he told me, hey, slave, go get that. You know, something like that. Or, you know, the emperor went to court and came back and told me this. So he's not the main character, but he kind of inserts himself in some of these episodes. And so I wouldn't say that he's the protagonist. Humayun, the emperor, is the protagonist of the story. So the term that I use is the Deuteragonus. It's taken from Greek tragedy. So it was a sort of secondary character. And.

Kind of strikes me of a text, perhaps, if you think about in literature, you know, in Sherlock Holmes, like Dr. Watson, of course, that's a fictitious book, but Watson is a storyteller who. But Holmes is the protagonist. You know what I mean? So that's a kind of role, much smaller than Watson, because he's not quite. Johar is not quite the sidekick of the emperor as Watson is a sidekick of Sherlock Holmes. But essentially he is writing about the emperor and he puts himself in there. So there is agency, but I think there's also agency in doing that, because if you're a slave, you get to create yourself and the emperor as characters in a story. And so you both have a shared humanity as.

Individuals in a text. Obviously, Humayun's ranked much higher. And so he gets to assign himself, Johar does, a kind of a recognition of both the emperor and his own humanity that would have been probably denied in his own life. I don't think Humayung probably paid much attention to him or gave much thought to him.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

Right.

[Dr. Ali Anushar]

But in the text now, Johar gets to be somebody. He gets to be the witness, as you said, of the emperor's great achievements and intimate. So that's how that works.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

Fascinating. And I think that Sherlock Holmes comparison kind of puts it into perspective, makes it clear. Yeah. How much do we know about the later stages of his life? And also getting. In the book, you talk about that the memoir ends in a way, in alienation. So we have Akbar's accession and he doesn't have that level of, let's say, connectedness or closeness, you know, to the. To the master or to the king. There, that lack of intimacy, let's say. How, how, how, how is it? And there's a plea for recognition, probably. How, how does. It's a memoir shows this.

[Dr. Ali Anushar]

Yeah. I mean, so we know about him towards the end from the little that he writes in the preface and the conclusion. And we also know that Johar didn't feel like what he wrote was up to par in terms of sophistication of language. So he took his text to another person who was more learned and could write a better Persian, and asked this person, his name is Al Adad Faizi.

Asks him to write a better. A sort of more polished version. And so El Attad actually also mentions Johar, came to him and asked him this. And there is.

I've looked. The two manuscripts that I've looked at don't have this. But there is another manuscript, I believe it's at the Bodleian at Oxford, and the Indian scholar Attar Ali wrote about this. And he says that in that manuscript there is an additional fact that says that when Elodad rewrote the text for Johar and gave it to him and Johar took it to court, they figured out that Dhar could not have written this. And so they asked him who wrote this, and Johar has to tell them who it is. And then it's El Akhdar that gets the promotion after all, you know, so it doesn't quite work out, you know, it's further alienation. But as you say, the alienation begins. We could see it in the book that he's written in the sort of the original version, he's Humayun's personal servant and Akbar just doesn't feel comfortable with him. There's a scene where Akbar is a child and Humayun tells Johar to go give him a bath. But Akbar doesn't want to do that and Johar has to go get somebody else to do it. And so this lack of connection to the master means that when Akbar is emperor, Johar will be marginalized. So we don't know what happens to him when Akbar becomes emperor. So Johar is in his 30s at that point in 1556. And we have. I don't know. As far as I know, we have no idea what he does for the next almost 30 years, until the 1580s, the next 24 years.

He might have gotten married for all we know. Maybe he had children, for all we know. Maybe he got a job somewhere. But there's nothing we know about his whereabouts until this text is written again in the 1580s. So there's a big gap in terms of what happened to him. I mean, it seems very likely that he was simply marginalized and he was not at court. And when he's writing, he's just living in Delhi, you know, he's not part of the imperial retinue who had been traveling, you know.

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[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

And he also writes about, I mean, Johart's portrayal of romance, Exile. It's. Yeah, he writes about that. How, how. What does it show about the idea of Persian as hospitality?

Is it. How does it. Is it a romanticized notion of that Persian hospitality, or does it complicate that vision? That, that. That portrayal?

[Dr. Ali Anushar]

Yeah, you know, so, you know, today we talk about that as a national character, right? Yeah, that's Right, but we're talking about a time where there is no nation yet. So.

It'S a cultural character, but who possesses it and what is it like? From what we're reading, the expectation is, which is it goes back much older, that hospitality is done not between nations but between people, individual people. So one person may show hospitality to somebody else, but then this creates mutual bonds.

Of sort of interdependence and obligation. And these bonds are then devolved down the generations of that family. So it's not based on one nation or another. It's person X comes and receives hospitality from person B. And of course person B does that because he also expects that at some point he might need to evoke this obligation from his present host and that if he doesn't live to do it, his children are entitled to it. So that's the world of hospitality that we live in.

Let's say up until, you know, as we get into the 16th century, if you read the text, every actor in the text has this expectation. The one exception is the king himself, Shahtahmas, the king of Iran at this time. And he is trying to violate or you know, he wants to violate the obligations of hospitality to Humayun in favor of the reason of the state. In other words, the Safavid state now is seems to be more than just a lineage. You know, kind of a pre modern state is very much kinship based. It's a family affair of an extended family. But here the behavior is different. And Chathamos talks about like, you know, it talks about religion because you know, Shiism has become a kind of state religion. And so what I do with Humayun, he's a Sunni, you know, he's thinking about like relationship with the neighbors. And this happens again when an Ottoman prince comes to Iran when Shah Tahmasp is king and even though he takes refuge with the Shah, Shah Tahmasp actually turns him over to the Ottoman ambassador and kills who kills the prince. And when people in Iran, his courtiers tell him he shouldn't have done that, Shayata says I know this was a bad thing to do, but I had to think about the peace that I've made with the Ottomans and the well being of thousands of our subjects who if we did not turn this prince over would then be endangered. So the king is now not acting as a member of a lineage but is acting as sort of like the head of the state that has a subject population. And these concerns then override the norms of hospitality as this mute as sort of bonds of mutual Obligation between families.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

Interesting. I'm reading another book now which is about the idea of.

Persian at hospitality, let's say, in Elizabethan theater. I've just started reading it, but that idea of hospitality, I was interested when I came across that in your book as well.

[Dr. Ali Anushar]

Yeah, what's the title?

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

Persian Paradigms in Early Modern English Drama Hospitable Globalities. Yeah, I've just started reading it, like I said. But to me it's interesting that the idea of hospitality, Persian at hospitality, let's say, is taken.

As a paradigm to study Elizabethan drama. Drums.

[Dr. Ali Anushar]

Okay, thanks for that. I'll go read it.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

Cool. I've got just a couple of more questions. When we look at Jawah's memoirs.

You argue that it fits in the broader pattern of subaltern narratives in early modern South Asia.

[Dr. Ali Anushar]

And.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

How does placing Jawahar alongside figures like Bayazid Bayat, who wrote that home, ions task error help us or change, let's say, our understanding of why margin on our voices are important? And what does it tell us about the rise of marginalized voices like Jo has in, in the rise of bureaucracy, in the rise of, let's say, Mogul State and empire?

[Dr. Ali Anushar]

Yeah, there is a, you know, I, I listed some people in that last chapter of mine who in my mind are writing similar kind of text. Some of them are probably closer to Johar, some of them are higher up, the lowest two that precede Johar. One of them is Datu Sarwani and the other one is Bayezid Bayat, as you state. And Datu writes his text in the 1530s. Bayezid writes it, you know, after whom, after johar. So like 1580s or whatever. The. I think it's the mid-1580s. And they're interesting because I think they reflect a broader pattern. And the broader pattern again is this creation of states that are different than the kinship based polities that preceded it. So if you look at Datu Sarwani, for example, he grows up in North India during the Afghan period, the Lodi kingdom or empire, if you want to call it the Lodis, were essentially that state in North India was, you know, seven or eight major extended families with the king, you know, being just one of those families. The Nohani and the Pharmali and the Sarwani and so on, and the Lodis. And so they're all major Afghan sort of extended lineages. These people lift, you know, often they grow up together, they train together. When it comes to military, when people go to war, you hear, oh, such and such is a Khan Sahwan he showed up at the battle with like 300 of his sons and kinsmen and 200 other attaches of whatever kind. So these 300 that have grown together, they are actual brothers and cousins, and they know each other on the day of battle, like they are positioned in the same wing of the army. And then when they perform service, they get land for the whole extended family. So the Sarones get a big chunk of land and then they divide it up among these very people who had fought. And Datu talks about specifically fighting alongside his brother at some battle. And he's really stressed when he can't find his brother after the battle. So his whole being is tied to being part of this lineage. And he even doesn't want to go in one instance to go administer the village that's given to him because he doesn't want to get separated from his extended family. So if you read his text, it's a, you know, this is breaking down. When the Mughals come, the sort of Lodi kingdom breaks down. It started before when the Lodi king Ibrahim Lodi tries to centralize power at the expense of other nobles. So some of that is already happening. Then the Mughals come and deal a major defeat to the Afghans. So they kind of get scattered. And then you have this figure of Shere Khan, or Sher Shah Sur, who is an Afghan, and he creates a kind of Afghan state in response to the Mughals. But if it's not based on kinship now, it's based on recruitment and promotion, usually merit based. And there's a very telling scene where Shirsha wants to recruit the Afghans into this new army that he's making, and he sends eunuchs to bring the Afghans to suppress, gangs of eunuchs to conscript the Afghans. And it says if they don't come, then dishonor their family and burn their houses. So even if this new Afghan resurgence is being formed against the idea of the lineage that used to exist before, so to me, this leads to this idea of alienation. And they use the word fardi, like being by yourself, individualization. So it's the rise of the individual, but it's not a sort of triumphant, right, ego driven thing. It's almost unwanted, right? It's individualization as alienation, as separation, right. As isolation. So this is. And then if you read Datu's text, he's writing as memoirs as part of the hagiography, that is the biography of his saintly mentor, who he calls a kind of a fatherly figure. So essentially, these people are getting alienated and they're looking for somebody.

Some structure to replace that lost family structure. And similar things are happening with Bayazid. He doesn't seem close to his children. He's separated from his brother. So the emperor becomes this thing, right. Kind of a fake father figure. And I think you see that in Johar as well, where the emperor becomes kind of a paternalistic, saintly master. Here, there is no other family for Johar. So I think what's happening is that as the state gets formed, I'm not saying this is like cutting up and down every part of society in South Asia, but the transition from the Lodi to Mughal to soar back to the Mughals means that Adhari's lineages are weakened. And then the state at the end of this phase presents itself as the kind of mystical patriarchy where the emperor is a kind of a pseudo, you know, pater, familia, so to speak, but people aren't actually his family.

The Mughal emperor has to kill his own brother, blind his own brother, one of the other brothers dies. So then people kind of become the extended family of the emperor, the sort of fake extended family through. Well, there are various institutions, but that's the setup, essentially.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

As a final question, I. I did say at the beginning that this is an area that is usually understudied slavery in the Muslim world or in the Persian world.

But it's a topic that is gaining more attention. But oftentimes, you know, slavery.

The practice of slavery in the Indian Ocean is compared with the transatlantic one. And people on both sides, whether they are from the west or from the east, use it as a. More As a way to kind of.

Not maybe justified, but, you know, use it as an identity thing. That slavery in the Indian Indian Ocean wasn't really as bad as it was in the transatlantic one. And I know that it's a terribly politically charged question anyhow, but when we put these two next to one another, what are some of the features? I don't mean really comparison, but what are the. Some of the features or differences that really stand out in terms of the practice of slavery in the Indian Ocean and transatlantic slavery?

[Dr. Ali Anushar]

Right. Well, I think there's an. You know, I've mentioned some of this stuff in the preface, but there's a lot of people who've given this a lot of thought. Right. One is that, as Hannah Barker has said this, we don't want to set up a kind of a competition of suffering, you know, who's, you know, who suffered Less, and therefore it was better. So we don't know how people experience suffering. So, okay, if you're getting, you know, if you're in the plantation and you've been worked to death, that's obviously suffering. But to be a soldier being thrown into battle as a slave, that's, you know, that's also a kind of suffering. There's a lot of violence in that. Johan himself mentions being beaten. He mentions slaves. Of especially seems like the view of slavery with the Central Asia, the moguls, was harsher. He mentions people getting their ears or nose cut off. You know, that's suffering too. So even though they were getting trade, the violence is there. You know, in that sense, you could say that sort of Orlando Patterson. Some of the features of Orlando Patterson's ideas would also apply here in terms of like, you know, alienation or the violence that is involved. So that's one thing. Second is you can also look at it historically and say, look, the. The Atlantic slavery that is known to be more, perhaps cruel in some ways was the exception up until that point. It became perhaps more common due to the rise of capitalism, which, you know, these societies that I'm speaking of were not capitalist societies. So they don't need labor production in the way that a plantation in North America or Jamaica needs. Right. So that's obviously a different type of economic regime that doesn't exist in Mughal India. There is all sorts of slavery. But again, you know, we talk about slaves becoming eunuchs. Well, that's violence. Castration is a violence that I'm sure the person experiencing it did not want to undergo. You know, concubine. It's sexual slavery. So all these things kind of have to be kept in mind. So I don't want to. I think it's misguided perhaps to say, if you use that term, to say what was better.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

Right.

[Dr. Ali Anushar]

Because we can't quantify suffering like that, human suffering like that. The question is then, are we making a moral decision? Are we projecting morality? And I think the best way to look at that is to look at the time itself and see what kind of moral criticisms of the time were being presented against slavery. The sort of ideal of how a person should be treated versus reality, so that we're not projecting our own values. Right. And of course, in the 19th century, you have this abolitionist movement in North America that is clearly discussing the evils of slavery. And in the at least the specific case that I'm talking about, you do have a description of the sort of ideal of how a slave should be treated humanely by this Muhammad IBN Fazel, Meskin, Saman, Gandhi. And it seems really nice and kind, you know, but again, that's just an ideal. So we don't, as I said, if you look at some of the examples, there are people who are cruelly treated. And Persian texts mention this quite a lot, you know, so the ideal, you know, so that you can kind of say that, you know, this relationship is seen as harsh or evil even by the standard of its own time. Of course, having said that, yes, there is opportunities for education, for training, for some form of promotion that existed in the case that I'm talking about. Other people have also written and said we can't really even generalize a thing called Indian Ocean slavery. That what's happening in Sri Lanka, you know, is different than what's happening, say, in like, you know, Delhi or Gujarat. And also even then, depends on who you are. If you are a peasant, you know, and your family's starving and you're selling some of your children, we don't know what the fate of that individual is. If you're being turned into a eunuch, you know, there's losses and gains, right. But if you're being taken into court like Johar, there's definitely comforts and opportunities. You will have power and privileges that most people in that society wouldn't have. So that sounds like a really long, complicated answer, perhaps, but I think I just don't want to get. I just don't think it's. Because what we're doing is we're looking, when people kind of compare like that to see what was better, what was worse. It's very obvious that there's shame involved from our perspective and attempt to attempt at some level of justification. And I don't think that's necessarily historical. We don't want to say, well, you know, when it happened here, it was better, when it happened there, it was worse.

I think the baseline I would expect most people now who are writing about this would be opposed to slavery as a bad thing, you know, So I don't know if I answered your question clearly.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

You did, and it comes to perfect answer. You're absolutely right. I wasn't really comfortable myself posing the question because I didn't want to get trapped into that idea that, look, we did a better job at slavery. You said it's a shameful, disgusting thing. There's absolutely no way you can justify it doesn't matter. Even if you take a slave, educate him, like, right, some of the slaves in Iran, you know, they were domestic laborers. They were freed, even. But that doesn't really mean much when you take someone and at a very, very young age, you take them away from their family. That idea of whole displacement, alienation and the suffering they go through, which we don't really know about, we don't really have any. We have, I think, just one autobiography which has recently been published. We don't really know the pains and suffering of these people. So just to say, look, slaves had it better in the Mughal Empire or Iran. I just find it morally reprehensible.

But I'm more interested in, let's say, the structure of labor. Of labor?

Slaves, labor in the Transatlantic ocean and Indian Ocean. And that's why I pose a question. But there's no way we can use either of them as an example of, let's say we were better than you, we treated them better, which doesn't make any sense at all. So I think your response was, I'm going to listen to it again. I memorize it just in case someone else asks.

Yeah.

You know.

Dr. Aliand Sher, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us. It's a fascinating book. Slavery in the Early Mughal the Life and Thoughts of Johar Aftabji. Really appreciate the time to speak about the book with us.

[Dr. Ali Anushar]

Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.