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African Rulers and Generals in India
Afro-South Asia in the Global African Diaspora
Speakers
Africans and their descendants have long migrated across the Indian Ocean as sailors, merchants, soldiers, scholars, musicians, and explorers. Some of these Africans and their descendants rose to great positions of power and received much acclaim, becoming rulers, generals, viziers, and regent ministers, as well as artists, clerics, and even saints. The lives of figures such as Malik Ambar, Begum Hazrat Mahal, and General Hoshu Mohammad Sheedi are among the many who illuminate Afro-South Asia as an integral part of the global African diaspora.
This session will have two presentations. The first one by Omar Ali is titled Africans in the ruling elites of Bijapur and Ahmednagar, which delves into the history of Africans in these two Deccani Sultanates where they held a powerful political and military presence. The second presentation by Kenneth X. Robbins and Pushkar Sohoni is titled Janjira and Sachin: African ruled states in India. This review covers the impregnable island fort, powerful naval forces, beautiful palaces, an early Muslim feminist novel, and even a movie star.
Speakers
Pushkar Sohoni
Pushkar Sohoni is Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010 for his research on the Deccan sultanates, after which he was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia. He worked at his alma mater till 2016, when he joined IISER Pune.
Omar Ali
Omar H. Ali is a historian of the global African Diaspora who serves as Dean of Lloyd International Honors College. Through archival and ethnographic research he explores how Africans and people of African descent have shaped the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Indian Ocean worlds since antiquity. Selected as The Carnegie Foundation North Carolina Professor of the Year and appointed Chevalier dans L’Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French government for his work with teachers around the world, Ali’s books include Afro-South Asia in the Global African Diaspora (3 vols.), Malik Ambar: Power and Slavery Across the Indian Ocean, Islam in the Indian Ocean World, In the Lion’s Mouth: Black Populism in the New South, as well as a new edition of In the Balance of Power: Independent Black Politics and Third-Party Movements in the United States.
Kenneth X. Robbins
Kenneth X. Robbins MD. is a psychiatrist and collector-archivist specializing in maharajas and other local and regional Indian rulers as well as Sufis and Indian minority groups, specifically Jews and African Muslims. Images of three hundred items from his Indian Princely States collections have been available from the American Committee for Southern Asian Art.
He is co-editor, with John McLeod, of the book African Elites in India: Habshi Amarat (Mapin, 2006) and co-curator, with Sylviane Diouf, of a New York Public Library Schomburg Center traveling exhibition Africans in India, which has been shown on five continents at dozens of venues, including the United Nations and UNESCO. Robbins has published many articles, organized scholarly conferences, and curated exhibits on India dealing with history, maharajas and nawabs, art, medicine, gender and women, Jews, philately, numismatics, and movies.
