Flags covered the skies, and drums thundered as they would on a tiger hunt as the army of the Arakan marched into the jungles, great ranks of infantry backed by hundreds of battle elephants. Tens of thousands of boats stood by, to help the army jump over the dense veins of rivers that separated the mountains from the plains. King Sirisudhammaraja—“the very image of virtue, and in prowess, like the morning sun,” gushed a court chronicler—was hunting for human prey.
This weekend, King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands formally apologised for the role of the Orange-Nassau dynasty in enabling the slave trade. The Dutch East India Company slave traders, the King said, had turned individuals into commodities, a kind of oppression that is “the most hurtful, the most humiliating, the most degrading.”
Earlier this year, a historical investigation commissioned by the Dutch parliament showed that the royal house had directly earned at least €500 million from the slave trade in modern currency.
Like so many painful colonial memories, the story of the Indian Ocean slave trade—which saw Indians being trafficked from Malabar, the Coromandel coast and Bengal to the Dutch East India Company outpost at Batavia, in Indonesia—has been obliterated from our memories. King Willem-Alexander’s apology should push India to honour the victims.
The Indian slave trade
Even though Emperor Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar had ordered the Mughal empire’s slaves to be set free in 1582—centuries before the United Kingdom followed suit in 1838—trafficking in humans continued. Tens of thousands of enslaved Indians continued to be purchased by the Vereenigde Nederlandsche Geoctroyeerde Oostindische Compagnie, or Dutch East India Company, kidnapped from Bengal and the Coromandel coast by pirates, mercenaries, and the Taung-gnu rulers of Arakan.
The historian Markus Vink has shown the Indian Ocean slave trade relied on three interlocking circles of trafficking—an African circuit, running from the East African coast to Madagascar and Mauritius; a middle circuit, running from Malabar to the Coromandel and Bengal; and a Southeast Asian circuit drawing on Malaysia, Indonesia, Irian Jaya, and the southern Philippines.
From the work of historian Ishrat Amin, among the few chroniclers of the Indian Ocean slave trade, we gain a sense of the savagery it involved.
After the Arakan king’s successful raid on Bengal in 1624, the Dutch East India Company had despatched the frigates Jager and Muys, along with the yacht Meden Blicque, to purchase at least 1,0000 or the 10,000 captives who were reputed to have been taken. The bulk of the slaves, though, had died in an epidemic during their forced march, and just 93 were available for sale.
In 1643, Dutch East India Company chief merchant Aren Van Del Helm obtained a licence from the Arakan king, allowing freedom to purchase gum, indigo, white cotton cloth, rice and human beings. That year, the Company bought 600 slaves, out of which 135 died of smallpox on their way to Batavia.
The same year, Dutch East India Company ships trawled the Cochin coast, looking for slaves captured in the war in Bijapur. Following devastating wars and famine in Nagapattanam in 1660, the crews of the Walvis Bay and Ulisses were able to find hundreds of enslaved people for sale.
Later in the century, rates were fixed: men aged 20 to 36 sold for 12½ rials, women from 12 to 25 for 8 rials, boys from 8 to 19 for 7½ rials, girls from 7-12 for 6 rials, and smaller children for 3½ rials. Even younger children were accepted, but without payment, because of the high mortality rates. The price of an adult male slave was about a third of that of a ton of rice.
The Indian slaves were used for cultivating mace on the island of Ai, though it lacked drinking water. In Banda, they were used to prepare fallow lands for cultivation, and in Batavia they dug canals and drainage. Each slave, Governor-General Gerard Reigent smugly observed, could do twice the work of a Dutch worker in the heat—at no cost.
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Slave-owning India
Like other colonial powers, the Dutch East India Company operated in an India where slavery was deeply embedded in economic life. Every great military campaign in medieval northern India, the historian Shadab Bano has shown, led markets to fill with slaves for sale. “No day goes,” the chronicler Shihabuddin al-Umari recorded during Alauddin Khalji’s rule from 1296-1316, “without the sale of thousands of slaves.”
“A slave girl in Delhi cost eight tankas, those fit for service as well as concubinage 15 tankas, while an adolescent slave boy went for four dirhams.”
Following the defeat of the emperor Shah Jehan’s forces at Balkh in 1646-1647, his unfortunate soldiers ended up slaves. In 1589, records show that a healthy male Indian slave had sold in Samarkand for 225 tankas, but after the defeat, the price fell as low as 84 tankas.
Emperor Zahir-ud-din Babur’s memoirs record that “down to Kabul, come every year 7,8 or 10,000 horses, and up to it, from Hindustan, come every year caravans of 10,15 or 20 thousand heads of houses, bringing slaves, white cloth, sugar candy, refined and common sugar, and aromatic roots.”
In early modern central Asia, the historian Scott Levi writes: “Virtually every affluent household included several slaves to look after its affairs and maintain the garden, and large numbers of slaves were used to cultivate the land.” In the late 1600s, for example, the nobleman Sheikh Khwaja Saeed was reported to have “1,000 slaves of Indian, Qalmaq and Russian origin.”
Few of their stories have survived: Minhaj Siraj, who in 1269 travelled from Delhi to Multan with slaves to send as a present for his sister in Afghanistan; Hindu Khan, a Mathura native purchased by the Persian merchant Fakhr-ud-Din Safahani; Sumbul, the Indian who served in the court of Constantinople.
East India Company intelligence officer Mohan Lal Kashmiri, on an undercover expedition in Bukhara, saw Indians and Jews being “ill-treated”—but “but not sold as slaves, as none bought them, regarding them as base and unpurified.”
His superior, Arthur Conolly, visited the slave market at Khulam and watched men bargain for “a very beautiful Persian girl, so beautiful that, I beg to state, I have not seen the like of her.”
“A neck a cubit long, eyes as large as a cup, her tears fell like the rain in spring, and she was altogether so lost in grief that she seemed bereft of her senses.”
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The strange amnesia
Likely, the lack of reckoning in India with the slave trade has something to do with how enmeshed the practice was with the lives of Indian élites. Following on from Emperor Akbar, Muhi-ud-din Muhammad Aurangzeb made energetic efforts to stop the export of slaves—realising it hurt the domestic labour market. From the 18th century on, the numbers of Indian slaves in central Asia dropped off, with Iranians making up the bulk of the population, along with Russians.
Inside India, though, slavery continued to be endemic. The historian Sumit Guha records the Peshwa ruler Balaji Bajirao warning an aide in 1743: “You were instructed to buy and send me two beautiful ten-year-old girls. Despite this, you have not sent them. Let this suffice as a reminder.” In another letter, Bajirao thanks a Jayappa Desai for the gift of a European musical instrument and “two women of the best quality.”
In 1801, historian Barkur Udaya tells us, British colonial administrators estimated that the southern plantations of Kanara had 52,022 slaves, out of a total population of 396,672 workers. Prices for men ranged from Rs 0.12 to Rs 0.26, for women from Rs 0.10 to Rs 0.24, and for a child, up to Rs 0.8.
Historian Mukesh Kumar has found that well into the 19th century, the districts of Bihar and Patna were home to 56,370 slaves in 1839, with children under seven selling for Rs 10 and 15-30-year-olds for Rs 50. In times of famine, though, prices dropped sharply, all the way to 12 annas, with families willing to sell their children or starving people themselves.
In a 1983 report, ThePrint’s editor-in-chief Shekhar Gupta discovered slavery remained endemic in parts of Arunachal Pradesh. Legal abolition has not succeeded in ending debt bondage in many parts of the country even today.
To accept King Willem-Alexander’s apology, Indians would have to face up to the painful truth of their own ancestors’ collaboration with, and participation in, a colossal industry of servitude. The time for that reckoning, though, is long overdue.
The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)