Africans in the Indian Mutiny
Throughout 2007, the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery, the focus was naturally on the shipment of African slaves to the West Indies, but no mention was made of the trade eastwards from Africa to the Indian subcontinent or of the Arab traders who sold slaves to wealthy Indian rulers. Although a few Africans rose to positions of power in India, some even establishing small kingdoms, most entered the country as slaves. Their descendants are found today in Gujarat and along the southern coast. But little is known about those slaves shipped in through Bombay and Karachi and taken eastwards to be sold.
Anecdotal stories of African soldiers fighting against the British during the Indian Mutiny (also known as the Indian Uprising) occur in military memoirs and particularly those from Oudh, the last princely state to be annexed by the East India Company. The two events, the annexation in 1856 followed by the mutiny of 1857–58, are closely connected. Many of the Indian troops who turned against their British officers came from Oudh. Although there was much wrong in the kingdom, presided over by its last monarch the Nawab Wajid Ali Shah (1822–87), the inhabitants preferred to be ruled by their own king, whatever his faults, rather than by the British. This was something that Lord Dalhousie, the Governor General of India, had signally failed to appreciate when he ordered Oudh to be annexed on the grounds of misrule.
Some of the fiercest Mutiny fighting took place in its capital, Lucknow, where the Nawab had recently created a huge palace. During the siege and the subsequent recapture of the city in March 1858, African men and women were involved in the thick of the street fighting. Why these men and women supported their former master, the slaveowning Wajid Ali Shah, rather than the British, who had prohibited slavery, can be answered from British Government records in the Delhi National Archives.
There are fragmentary accounts of Africans in Lucknow brought in by earlier rulers. Wajid Ali Shah’s great-grandfather, a keen horseman, had employed ‘habshi boys’ as jockeys at the turn of the 19th century. A great-uncle had ordered and bought 18 slaves, who arrived at Bombay in an Arab ship and who were brought overland in covered carriages. Wajid Ali Shah’s own father ordered 200 swords for his African troops. So the custom of employing Africans and an overland slave-trading route was already established. As many as 1,000 male and female African slaves may have arrived in Lucknow in 1847 and 1848. Although Africans were employed elsewhere in India, the Nawabs of Oudh seem unique in importing women as well as men.
In 1860, with the British firmly back in control, the remaining Africans in Lucknow petitioned the Chief Commissioner for pensions. This was not a completely futile hope because many people who had been dependent on the Nawab for their livelihood did receive small sums from the British government in compensation for losing their source of income. However, the Africans’ petition was turned down and over the next two decades their pleas became more urgent as their numbers dwindled. A large number were said to have died from starvation, while others had left the city.
The care and financial support given by the British government to slaves in Bombay contrasts starkly with the official indifference shown to the Africans in Lucknow. For backing the ‘wrong side’ during the Mutiny they were still being punished 20 years later. Only one sympathetic voice was heard in their defence. Sir William Muir, head of the Intelligence Department during the Mutiny, declared in May 1877: “The fact that they fought against us at Lucknow ought not to be brought against them – it was probably natural; the fact that they fought bravely is surely in their favour!”
African men and women came to Oudh as slaves to satisfy the whims of the last king, who then left them unprovided for when he was deposed. They fought bravely in the Mutiny, a fight which was not of their making, and have been paying the price ever since.
Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, History Today