For centuries, Africans were shipped to the Indian subcontinent and sold as slaves to regional rulers. Rosie Llewellyn-Jones tells the story of those who went to Lucknow to serve the Nawab of Oudh and who joined the Indian Mutiny when he was deposed by the British. For this allegiance their descendants, whom she has traced, still pay a price.

During the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58, the British were faced by highly professional opponents in the city of Lucknow. Soldiers were repeatedly picked off by a sniper who was positioned up a tree. When finally dislodged, the sniper was discovered to be not Indian but African and a woman at that. Moreover, she was one of several female African soldiers counted among the dead after the siege. All had been loyal to their slave-owning Indian master.

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 along the west coast at Janjira and Sachin, 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. The slaves of Lucknow were to enjoy a short period of prosperity before sinking into poverty during the British Raj.

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 (also spelt Awadh'), the last princely state to be annexed by the East India Company, which lies in today's Uttar Pradesh. The two events, annexation in 1856 followed by mutiny, 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, had signally failed to appreciate when he ordered Oudh to be annexed on the grounds of misrule.

Some of the fiercest fighting took place in its capital, Lucknow, where the Nawab had recently created a huge palace, the Qaisarbagh, said to be larger than that of Versailles. Lucknow was also home to the East India Company's agent, the newly appointed Chief Commissioner, who was himself besieged in the British Residency during the summer of 1857. Together with British officers, their wives and children, Anglo-Indian families, loyal Indian soldiers and servants, more than 2,000 people held out for over four months until the siege was lifted by the Scots of the 93rd Highland Regiment and the Company's 4th Punjab Rifles.

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. One man in particular, strategically placed at the upper window of a house overlooking the Residency, was nicknamed with grim humour 'Bob the Nailer' by the British troops because of the number of victims he shot and killed. The female African sniper had been perched in the branches of a large tree overlooking the Sikanderbagh, a walled garden containing a small house and mosque built by the Nawab for one of his wives, where hundreds were killed during the advance on the Residency. The sniper and other 'African negresses' among the dead at the Sikanderbagh were armed with superior rifles, unlike the Indian rebel fighters who carried old-fashioned muskets. Moreover n the words of a British officer who was an eyewit­ness, 'they fought like wild cats, and it was not till after hey were killed that their sex was even suspected'. Nhy these men and women supported their former master, the slave-owning Wajid Ali Shah, rather than the British who had prohibited slavery, can be answered from British government records in the Delhi National Archives.

On Wajid Ali Shah's accession in February 1847 he began enthusiastically to increase the size of his army. He raised new infantry battalions and several compa­nies of cavalry. With almost unlimited funds, the Nawab spent lavishly on new uniforms and arms for his soldiers. He inspected them daily, drilled with them and awarded prizes and honorific titles to the most skilled. A year later the Nawab's army was estimated at 4,000 cavalry and 44,000 infantry, which led the British resident, Sir William Sleeman, best known for the sup­pression of the criminal gangs known as Thugs, to complain bitterly about 'ruinous expenditure'. Among the new regiments was the Habshiyan Risala, the African Cavalry Regiment, under the nominal com­mand of the chief minister, Ali Naqi Khan. (Habshi, plural habshiyan, is the Urdu word for people from Africa, though its complicated etymology is disputed.)

There are fragmentary accounts of Africans in Lucknow brought in by earlier rulers. Wajid Ali Shah's great-grandfather, Nawab Saadat Ali Khan, a keen horseman, had employed habshi boys' as jockeys at the turn of the 19th century. A great uncle, Nawab Nasir­ud-din Haider, had ordered and bought 18 slaves who arrived at Bombay in an Arab ship and who were brought overland in covered carriages. Their circuitous route from the coast was through the independent desert kingdoms of Rajputana (now Rajasthan), where the East India Company had little jurisdiction. When the Arab traders were stopped and questioned by Company officials it was clear that they were fulfilling an order placed from Lucknow for the slaves and not just travelling through northern India on the off-chance of selling them. A further group arrived two years later by the same route. Wajid Ali Shah's own father, the Nawab Amjad Ali Shah, ordered 200 swords for his African troops. So the custom of employing Africans and an overland slave-trading route had been established by the time the Habshiyan Risala was formed. 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, particularly in the southern state of Hyderabad, the Nawabs of Oudh seem unique in importing women as well as men. The reasons for this are con­nected with Nawab Wajid Ali Shah's peculiar lifestyle. An incorrigible romantic who was to enter into 'con­tract marriages' with more than 300 women as well as the four wives allowed him by Islam, the Nawab had established a training school in one of the palaces for attractive young women singers and dancers. It was called the Pari Khana, the Fairy House, and any `fairies' who caught the Nawab's eye were likely to find themselves in the royal bedchamber before too long. The guardians of the Fairy House were African women, trained to head off trouble among the 'fairies', some of whom were light-fingered, or inclined to fall in love and escape with their lovers. Wajid Ali Shah, a man who clearly liked being surrounded by women, also had a personal bodyguard of female African sol­diers described by the British as 'Amazons' after the mythical warrior race. They wore short pleated skirts over loose, jodhpur-like trousers that allowed them to ride astride their horses. By their own admission, the slaves were well treat­ed. They got 'suitable maintenance from the royal treasury, according to their respective ranks and posi­tions' as well as clothing and gifts of food on the birth

of a child 'as a matter of privilege' Some held responsi­ble positions, like Haji Ulea Shireef who was an army commander. The best-known African was the eunuch Dianat-ud-daula, who was in charge of the Fairy House and commander of two of the Nawab's regi­ments. He had become a favourite of Wajid Ali Shah and a wealthy man too, a property owner and builder of the Kerbala Dianatud-daula, a Shi'a religious shrine copied from an original at Karbala, then in Turkish Arabia. But the good times were not to last.

Shortly after the annexation of Oudh by the British in February 1856, Wajid Ali Shah left for Calcutta, to seek an interview with the Governor General. Among those who travelled with him in his retinue were 50 Africans, leaving about 1,200 behind in Lucknow. Before his departure the Nawab met Sir James Outram, the first Chief Commissioner of Oudh, and agreed to put the African soldiers in charge of the 'Royal Jewelleries and other valuable articles of the Royal Household' until the Nawab's expected return. The men were to receive 10 rupees a month. It was an acknowledgement of the high regard in which the slaves were held and they carried out their guard duties faith­fully for over a year. Unfortunately, on the outbreak of the Mutiny, the new Chief Commissioner, Sir Henry Lawrence, decided to remove all the Nawab's treasures into the British Residency. The African guards, con­fronted at the palace by a British regiment armed with cannon, had to submit to a superior force and were only slightly consoled by Lawrence's promise that they would continue to receive their salaries. This was a promise which was not fulfilled in the tumult that fol­lowed and this seems to have decided the African men and women to join the rebellion.

The so-called 'rebel queen, Begam Hazrat Mahal, one of the Nawab's ex-wives, led the resistance against the British and her young son, Birjis Qadr, became a token king. The queen was supported by the inhabi­tants of Oudh and many of the Nawab's disbanded army, including the African Regiment and the female bodyguard. After the Mutiny had been suppressed by the British, the surviving Africans explained, in justification of their actions, that 'having been the slaves of the Oudh Kings, they could not separate themselves from their masters when the rebels placed the Begam [Hazrat Mahal] and Birjis Qadr on the throne of Oudh.

Futile appeals

In 1860, with the British firmly back in control and the East India Company abolished, 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. In 1865 there was a total of 735 Africans, down from 1,200 ten years earlier. Of these, there were 324 males, 393 females and 18 eunuchs. More than 100 of them were under 20 years of age and the youngest had been born after the Mutiny. There is no doubt that their situation was now pitiful and that the majority were in 'starving and extreme distressful circumstances'. A ragged procession had actually car­ried the corpses of some starvation victims to the Chief Commissioner's office in 1869, claiming that they were entirely penniless and unable to meet the funeral expenses. Tiny sums of one or two rupees a month were subsequently allocated from a local chari­table fund to a few men and women, but this was far too little to survive on.

The problem of the Africans, the poorest among the poor, was brought before the Governor General in Calcutta in January 1871 in the form of two 'humble petitions' signed by Sheedi Sultan, Sheedi Mohamed Hosain (sheedi being the term for Indian people of African ancestry), Maulvi Mobaruk and others. The petitioners argued with justification that when the British government annexed Oudh it also took on the liabilities of the Nawab's government and that the Africans had therefore become Britain's responsibility. They were 'entitled to be supported by the British Government in fact they have a stronger title than servants, being the bondsmen of the King and now of his successors'. But the Chief Commissioner coun­tered that on annexation `the Africans obtained their liberty and then found as free men they must support themselves. This they do not like, but that seems to be no reason why they should be kept by the Government in idleness.' He disputed that their num­bers were diminishing, claiming that `notwithstanding! their aversion to labour they have managed to exist and their number steadily increase...' Sir Henry Marion Durand, lieutenant governor of the North West Provinces, into which Oudh had been incorpo­rated, chimed in with the observation that 'the men have not much to complain of. Their own African laziness seems to be the chief bar to their prosperity.' The petition was duly rejected.

This was a remarkably unsympathetic response to the problems of freed slaves in a country where an ear­lier Governor General, Lord Cornwallis, had issued a proclamation against slavery in 1789. Liberated slaves in British India were treated humanely and in Bombay an African Asylum' was established in 1856. Its first inmates were seven children who had been imported into Karachi 'in a state of slavery' and shipped to Bombay. The Arab trader who hoped to sell them was fined 1,500 rupees. This money was then paid to the asylum to provide for the children. Three years later 51 freed child slaves were being educated there, their maintenance met by the British government. Six rupees a month covered their food and clothing. Pupils remained until the age of 15, when they were expected to provide for themselves unless specialised training for an occupation was needed, for which the asylum paid.

The care and financial support given by the 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. There was no education here for the children born since 1857, when their parents had lost their jobs and, in some cases, their lives. 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 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!

It was Muir who annotated a new petition from the Africans which was sent up that year to Governor General Lord Northbrook, who requested a report from the lieutenant governor about the petitioners and suggestions 'for giving them useful employment as agriculturalists or otherwise. It was revealed that when the inspector general of police offered to find the men jobs 'only a few, however, were found to be fit for service in the police force and those few were unwilling to serve on Rs 6 per mensem ... a few are in the service of Government. One man earns his liveli­hood as a woodseller, another as a petition writer' The report concluded: 'It is very difficult to find any employment for illiterate persons who are averse to hard labour yet want high wages' The unsympathetic Chief Commissioner felt the Africans were 'fit for pri­vate service only, and noted that many of them were already so employed in Muhammedan families' A follow-up report a year later found that 34 men had appeared as candidates for jail warders and watchmen and of these 29 were physically fit for such work. Their names were passed to the inspector general of prisons.

So what happened to the remaining Africans living in Lucknow in the 1870s? The Chief Commissioner's observation that many of them found work in Muslim families was correct and it was through these families that I was able to trace their present-day descendants.

The former slaves had adopted the Shi'a beliefs of their master, Wajid Ali Shah and with it the intense mourning rituals of Moharram when men flagellate themselves with chains and songs of martyrdom are recited. The sheedis, as they call themselves, keep such a low profile today that they are almost invisible. The mostly Hindu population in Lucknow are frankly incredulous to learn that sheedis live in their city. Estimates of their current numbers range from a few hundred to a handful of families who live in the Muslim areas around religious buildings or former palaces. Although the male and female slaves brought to Lucknow did intermarry, they also 'married out' (exogamy). Anecdotal evidence showed that their partners were Indian Muslims, not Hindus or Christians. By marrying out for generations, it was hoped in time to blend in with the local population and thus escape overt discrimination on the grounds of colour and culture. This policy has been so success­ful that within a couple of generations more of the sheedis are likely to lose their distinctive identity. Unlike the groups of African descendants on India's west coast, the Lucknow sheedi population is too sma and disparate to be recognised as a 'backward class, the official Indian category that would automatically give them job reservations in government service.

The Lucknow sheedis today have no oral history o their ancestors' heroic fight against the British, or the long years of poverty that followed, but they do have one folk hero, the late Kabban Mirza, son of a sheedi mother. Significantly his success came after he left Lucknow and moved to cosmopolitan Mumbai, whe he became a singer, a minor film-star (playing the rol of a slave) and an announcer for All India Radio. Music and religion are the common themes that run through the later history of the sheedis. Until about 41 years ago, a group of six sheedi women would visit Muslim households to sing at family ceremonies. Thi also performed some of the Moharram ceremonies that mark the deaths of Husain and Hasan, the granc sons of the Prophet Mohammed, when matam (mourning) songs are chanted. The female sheedis were particularly welcome in homes where the ladies of the house were in purdah and could not therefore participate in public worship. Sheedi Associations were set up to coordinate their part in these religious cere­monies, which included the recitation of the namaz (prayers) during Moharram and accompanying the taziya, the symbolic mausoleum, which is processed through the streets of Lucknow once a year.

Connections with the past

Forty-eight year old Sheedi lsrar Hussein works as a messenger at the Darab Ali Khan Imambara in Golaganj, one of the poorest and most densely popu­lated areas of old Lucknow. The constitution of the imambara (a Muslim religious building) states that one Sheedi must always be employed among its staff and this is the role that Hussein fulfils today. In an interview he said his great-great-grandfather, Sheedi Wazir Ali, had come from Africa to become a com­mander in Wajid Ali Shah's army. Hussein named six generations of his male ancestors, all of whom had the title of Sheedi. Both he and his wife Saleha Bano are illiterate and poor people with little hope of improv­ing their present living conditions.

Akhtar Jahan Hussein is a lively old lady of 78, whose father, a sheedi, married out. His name, or nickname, was Wali Daku and he was, according to local legend, a kind of Indian Robin Hood and daku' does mean dacoit (outlaw). Akhtar says that her family came to Lucknow seven generations ago from Africa. If we reckon about four generations to one century, this places her ancestors' arrival around 1850 at the time when the Nawab was enlarging his army. Like Sheedi Israr Hussein, Akhtar does not know which part of Africa her ancestors came from and has no memory of the language they spoke when they arrived in India. Her family have fared better. Her forefathers were kite-string makers, a curious but important pro­fession in Lucknow where annual kite festivals are still held. Kite-strings dipped in gum and powdered glass, are designed to cut through the strings of rival kite-flyers. Akhtar's daughter, Asmat Ara, who lives nearher mother, is an Urdu calligrapher and a poet. Two of her sons have jobs, one as an animal trainer, another in the gold embroidery business, but both had to leave Lucknow to find work.

A small pedestal bust stands at the Sikanderbagh, the site of the African woman's last stand against the British during the Mutiny. When it was first erected in the 1970s, its inscription commemorated 'an unknown woman soldier' and the bust was that of an Indian woman in a sari. Over the last 40 years a myth has been created that she was in fact a dalit, or low-caste person, whose name was Uda Devi. The inscription has been changed twice to reflect this. It is a convenient fiction. The chief minister of Uttar Pradesh Kumari Mayawati is a dalit herself and a popular pro -dalit icon. There is nothing wrong in emphasising that the men and women who opposed British rule during 1857 came from all classes of Indian society, including those now known as dalits. But, to be historically accurate, a bust of an unknown African woman fight­ing with Indians against the British would be more appropriate. 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, on foreign soil, and have been paying the price ever since.

Rosie Llewellyn-Jones is the author of The Great Uprising in India, 1857-58: Untold Stories, Indian and British (Boydell, 2007). She is Honorary Secretary of the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia.

Further Reading Kenneth X. Robbins & John McLeod (eds), African Elites in India (Mapin Publishing, 2006); Indrani Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India (OUP)  Delhi, 1999); Joseph Earl Harris, The African Presence in Asia:

Consequences of the East African Slave Trade (Northwestern University Press, 1971).

For further articles on this subject, visit: www.historytoday.com/india