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

Dec 5, 2025

Ali Anooshahr, a historian specializing in Mughal India at UC Davis, dives into the extraordinary life of Jawhar Aftabachi, a slave turned chronicler. Jawhar’s journey takes him from the Ottoman Empire to the Mughal court, revealing insights into early modern slavery. Anooshahr discusses how Jawhar’s memoir provides a unique perspective on servitude framed as spiritual discipleship. He explores Jawhar's literary influences and the impact of alienation in Mughal society, while also contrasting Indian Ocean and Atlantic slavery dynamics.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

Microhistory Reveals Global Networks

A single slave's life can reveal global connections that macro histories miss.
Jawhar's memoir exposes Mediterranean and Black Sea linkages into the Indian Ocean world.

INSIGHT

Slaves In Early Mughal Military Life

Jawhar's account shows a transitional phase where slaves mattered in early Mughal military and court life.
This challenges the view that the early Mughal state relied only on free recruits and not on slave soldiers.

INSIGHT

Discipleship Repackages Slavery

The Mughal court reframed slavery as 'discipleship' to moralize unequal bonds and create intimacy.
Calling slaves chelas turned extreme dependency into a spiritualized relationship benefiting both master and slave.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

Jawhar Aftabachi was enslaved as a child by the Ottomans in the Black Sea region in the early sixteenth century. He was then sold to the Ottoman admiral Selman Reis, who took him with his fleet to Egypt and Yemen during his wars with the Portuguese; carried, after the admiral's death, by the admiral's nephew Mustafa Bayram to Gujarat on the western coast of India; and finally, when the Mughal army invaded Gujarat in 1534, taken into imperial service along with thousands of Eurasian and Abyssinian slaves. Here he rose to the position of water-carrier for the Mughal Emperor Humayun and chronicled this experience in a remarkable , Persian text called Tazkirah-i Vaqi`at or “memoir of events”.

In Slavery in the Early Mughal World: The Life and Thoughts of Jawhar Aftabachi (1520s–1580s) (Oxford UP, 2025), Ali Anooshahr uses Jawhar's life and memoirs as a unique window into slavery, selfhood, and the rise of the early modern Indian Ocean world. Bringing a micro-historical study to a "subaltern Mughal author" offers the opportunity to reassess the history of slavery in South Asia from an original perspective and to reframe the connected history of the early modern world. Jawhar's life shows in vivid detail the eruption of the Mediterranean and Black Sea cultural regions into the Indian Ocean world, shedding light onto the collapse of older bonds of interdependency in the face of impersonal structures of new centralized states, and bearing witness to the process of individualization of people which was experienced not as a triumphalist "rise of the self" but as alienation.

Ali Anooshahr is a historian of Mughal India as well as the "Persianate World" during the early modern era. He received his B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1998, and his M.A. (2002) and Ph.D. (2005) from UCLA. He is a Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. His books include The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam: A Comparative Study of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Routledge, 2009), Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian Empires: A Study of Politics and Invented Traditions (Oxford, 2018), and (edited with Ebba Koch) The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shah Jahan: Art, Architecture, Politics, Law and Literature (The Marg Foundation, March 2019). His research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Hellman Foundations, among others.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network