Or, wait, is it from Africa?
Do you feel that I am setting you up with trick questions?
Yes, I am. Because, I want you to get as flummoxed as I am in learning that there is in India a community of African diaspora.
I am not referring to the overall story of human migration out of Africa. The photograph is from a collection about a group of Africans who migrated to India: the Siddis.
Every single day it is something new about India. If understanding India is so difficult for me, who was born and raised in India, with what I consider to be an above-average intelligence and curiosity, then it shouldn't be any surprise at all when even people in India, leave alone those outside the country, walk around with misconceptions about India!
It all started with this tweet in my Twitter feed (yes, Ramesh, we put Twitter to good use!):
That WSJ site had this opening paragraph:Uncovering India’s Siddi Community on.wsj.com/15G0FGT
— IndiaRealTime (@IndiaRealTime) March 24, 2013
Ketaki Sheth first encountered the Siddi in 2005 on a family holiday to the Gir forest in Gujarat. This community of African origin would become her photographic obsession.A community of African origin?
An hour later, I was still Googling and reading about this community that I had no clue about until earlier this morning.
Life sometimes seems to be about discovering how clueless and uninformed we are, and yet we act as if we know it all! Education is not about knowing as much as about finding out what we do not know. Education is one heck of a humbling experience.
The first of the Siddis may have arrived in India more than a thousand years ago as a result of India importing slaves from Africa. Seriously, India imported slaves from Africa?
I thought the caste system and the concept of untouchables were bizarre enough. Slaves? From Africa? Much before the trans-Atlantic slave trade?
[Medieval] Indian history abounds with references to Ethiopian or Abyssinian slaves serving at royal courts or in the armies of imperial/local rulers. But African presences in India testify not only to past systems of feudal power and warfare, but also to the subcontinent's place in a larger Indian Ocean world. This world was ruled by maritime and trading connections extending to East Africa as much as to Arabia, the Persian Gulf and South-East Asia. African seamen, well known for their maritime skills, served not only on the ships of traders from India, the Swahili coast and Arabia, but also on those of Portuguese, British and other European colonial trading companies.
Today, we encounter small communities of people of African origin along the western coast of India, whose predecessors may have been brought to the country as slaves, or may have been sailors who voluntarily settled in India after one of the long stays on land enforced by the monsoon. While diverse historical circumstances ranging from slavery to maritime labour displaced their forefathers from the lands of their birth, today's Sidis, as the descendants of Africans are called in India, no longer sail the ocean. In Gujarat, where one of the larger Sidi communities, numbering around 20,000, is found, they have merged with the masses of the poor, living in urban working class quarters or, though rarely, in villages.
But, of course, this being India, nothing ever is a simple story; the import of slaves into India was very different from the American experience:
In India at least, slaves were not meant for plantation work but served mainly as servants, bodyguards or soldiers and, rarely though, as agricultural labourers. Many women were personal attendants of aristocratic women. In 19th century Gujarat, for example, Sidis served in numerous small princely states. Although they arrived as slaves, once they became part of the court personnel of a ruler, they were treated as other royal servants in a patrimonial system of power. But they were still treated as part of the property of a king. To give an illustration: Sidi maids could be given as part of the dowry of a Rajput bride and had to move with her to her husband's house. In towns, Sidis were given a piece of land for housing and had rights to receive food and clothing from their patrons. There are also numerous shrines dedicated to saintly Sidi ancestors, many of which originated in a gift given by a royal patron.
Not difficult to imagine, eh, why I spent more than an hour reading up about the Siddis!
They are far removed from Africa:
She has never heard of Africa and I had never heard of her people in India.the Siddis in this village [Jambur] 470 kilometres (290 miles) southwest of Ahmedabad, the commercial capital of the western state Gujarat, say they know nothing of their origins as descendants of African slaves.
"I was born here. I got married here. My father and grandfather are also from this village. I've no idea where their ancestors came from," said Aishubehn Makwana Basurim, a 40-year-old woman who is the village head.
"I've never heard of Africa," she said, adding that the more important issues were the lack of access to good education and generally being left behind by India's economic boom.
Researchers have traced the origins of the Siddis--the later ones brought over by the Portuguese--to sub-Saharan African Bantus:
During the course of the Bantu expansion, African farmers settled in East Africa. Later, during the 15th to 17th centuries, this region was predominantly ruled by the Portuguese. They brought some Africans to India as slaves and sold them to local Nawabs and Sultans, whose descendents, admixed with neighboring populations, comprise the present-day Siddi population of IndiaThis map they include says it all:
Way too much of information on a Sunday morning. Need coffee--that wonderful elixir that originated in the African highlands of Ethiopia!
