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, discusses the life of Jawhar Aftabachi, a slave who rose to prominence in the Mughal court. He explores how Jawhar's microhistory offers a fresh perspective on slavery in South Asia and the complexities of individual identity. Anooshahr delves into the transition from slavery to the concept of discipleship within the Mughal hierarchy, highlighting the literary achievements of enslaved individuals and the societal structures that shaped their lives. The conversation sheds light on the broader implications of state formation on personal identities and interconnected histories.

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INSIGHT

Microhistory Reveals Hidden Global Links

Microhistory of a single slave reveals transregional flows invisible in macro histories.
Ali Anooshahr shows Jawhar exposes Black Sea–Indian Ocean connections and hidden slavery networks.

INSIGHT

Slavery's Role In Early Mughal Formation

Jawhar's life challenges the view that slavery was unimportant in early Mughal state formation.
The memoir reveals a transitional phase where slaves played significant military and court roles.

INSIGHT

From Slave To Disciple At Court

Akbar's renaming of holam to chela reframed court slavery as discipleship.
Anooshahr argues this repackaged unequal, intimate servitude as spiritual devotion to legitimize power.

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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.

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