How an Abyssinian slave came to rule the Deccan

Before the infamous trans-Atlantic slave trade began in the sixteenth century from West Africa to the Americas, there was a centuries-old thriving trade of slaves from East Africa to India. I will describe the true dimensions of this trade in a later piece. This article traces the life of Malik Ambar, an Ethiopian origin slave, who rose to become the virtual ruler of the State of Ahmadnagar in the Deccan. Similar to the struggle of Khushal Khan Khattak of Nowshera and Dullah Bhatti of Pindi Bhattian, he too defied the mighty Mughal forces till his natural death in 1633.

For this article, I have relied on A Social History of the Deccan - 1300-1761 by Richard M. Eaton, on the Tuzuk-e-Jahangiri and on Malik Ambar by JN Chowdhuri.

Malik Ambar was born as Chapu in 1548 in the Kambata region of southern Ethiopia. Kambata and the area around the Rift Valley were active hunting grounds for the Arab and the Portuguese slave traders. Chapu also became victim of this trade. According to Pieter Van den Broecke, a contemporary Dutch merchant who saw Ambar in person, Chapu was sold for equivalent of eighty Dutch guilders in the busy Yemeni coastal town of Mocha. This is the town where this particular Dutch trader became the first known European to taste coffee and described the drink as “black and hot” – the way most of the world still likes this brew. The popular ‘Mocha’ coffee is named after this town.

Chapu’s next destination is revealed by Hashim Beg Astarabadi in his book Futuhat-i-Adil Shahi. He states that Chapu was taken to Baghdad and sold to a prominent merchant, who recognised the child’s intellectual qualities and educated him under his guidance. Chapu was converted to Islam and given the name of Ambar. He was then sold to one Mir Qasim al-Baghdadi, who took him to Ahmadnagar in Deccan where Chengiz Khan, the Prime Minister of that state, purchased him. The African-origin slaves in the Deccan were called ‘Habshi’ – Ethiopian – or by the honorific of Siddi. Chengiz was himself a Siddi and had risen through the ranks to reach the top position in the Ahmadnagar court. He had purchased about 1,000 slaves to serve in his army.

Ambar was between 20 and 30 years of age on landing in Deccan in the early 1570s. This was just after the fateful Battle of Talikotla in which the five Deccan Sultanates had combined to defeat and annihilate the ancient Vijaynagar Empire of south India.

The Mughal ambassador Asad Beg, who met him in 1604, was impressed that "he offered his prayers along with the common people" and that "his charities are beyond description"

It was the time of the famous Chand Bibi, who had ruled Ahmadnagar as regent of her minor son between 1565 and 1588, and of Emperor Akbar, who had consolidated his rule in Northern India and was determined to expand to Deccan. Between 1588 and 1600, the Ahmadnagar State fell into disarray due to various claimants to throne, backed by powerful Persian and Habshi/Deccani court factions. In the ensuing anarchy, Chand Bibi was killed and the Mughals occupied Ahmadnagar city in 1599. The event launched the golden phase of Ambar’s life in statecraft and defiance of the Mughals.

Ambar’s life had taken a turn for the better when Chengiz Khan died in 1575 and following the custom, he became a free man. He acquired a freed slave girl as his wife and moved to the neighbouring Sultanate of Bijapur where the Sultan made him in-charge of a contingent of troops with the title of Malik. He moved back to Ahmadnagar with his loyal troops to join the forces of another Habshi commander named Abhang Khan.

In the year 1595, Mughal armies under Prince Murad laid siege to Ahmadnagar. Within the besieged fort, there were four factions vying for the control of the floundering state and promoting their own puppets/candidates as the Sultan. Malik Ambar was able to break out of the fort to harass the Mughal supply lines and ambush isolated troops in guerrilla warfare raids. Ambar was a bold, decisive warrior with natural leadership qualities and soon gathered a force of 3,000 troops. Although the fort fell to the Mughals in 1600 AD, their rule was limited to the vicinity of the city with the countryside remaining under the effective control of those commanders who had refused to accept the Mughals’ authority. The most daring and successful of these commanders was Ambar himself – whose force gradually grew to a formidable 7,000 armed men. He had set up his command headquarters at Parenda, 75 kilometres south west of the then Mughal-occupied Ahmadnagar.

With this strong force, Ambar now attempted to set up his own sovereign reign in Ahmadnagar. Recognising the need for a royal scion to create legitimacy, he found a young Nizam-Shahi boy (from the ruling dynasty of Ahmadnagar) living in Bijapur and proclaimed him the ruler of Ahmadnagar. Before the coronation of the youth as Murtaza Nizam Shah II in the year 1600, he married him to his own daughter to ensure his right to regency.

Malik Ambar now devoted himself to preserving the stricken Nizam-Shahi state, whose defence against Mughal aggression became a rallying point for many communities of the western Deccan. The Mughals were to ultimately bleed themselves to ruination trying to wrest control of Peninsular India. After Akbar’s death in 1605, Jahangir, too, was determined to consolidate Mughal authority in the Deccan. General after general was dispatched south to do away with Ambar and his puppet sultan, but not one of them could capture or neutralise the charismatic Ethiopian.

The year 1608 saw Malik Ambar confidently moving about the western Deccan. He also negotiated an alliance with Bijapur, his neighbour to the south, so that he could concentrate all his forces on thwarting the gathering Mughal threat from the north. His efforts paid off, for just two years later, the Mughal garrison in Ahmadnagar fell to Ambar, who was emboldened to move the Nizam-Shahi court further north to Daulatabad, the abandoned capital of the old Tughlaq Sultanate.

Despite these impressive gains on the geopolitical front, Malik Ambar now found himself faced with domestic issues. For one thing his son-in-law Sultan Murtaza II refused to play the role of docile puppet and started to assert himself over Ambar.

Then high up in the royal palace, a family quarrel broke out in 1610 between the Sultan’s Persian ‘senior wife’ and his Habshi wife, the daughter of Malik Ambar. A contemporary Dutch traveller records that the Persian wife slandered the Habshi wife as a concubine and ‘a mere slave girl’. In one of her outbursts, the Persian wife spoke against Ambar himself. When the matter could not be settled amicably, Ambar had the meddlesome sultan and his quarrelsome senior wife poisoned to death. In their palace, Ambar crowned the murdered couple’s five-year-old son as Sultan Burhan III. This made that child the second Nizam-Shahi prince installed by Malik Ambar as his puppet ruler.

The revitalised Nizam-Shahi kingdom acquired a distinctly African character under Malik Ambar, who held undisputed control over Ahmadnagar’s military and civil affairs as Peshwa – the Prime Minister. His daughter had been assimilated into the Nizam-Shahi royal household for twenty years. His family had also merged with the ruling class of neighbouring Bijapur. In 1609 Ambar married off his son, Fateh Khan, to the daughter of Yaqut Khan, a free Habshi and one of Bijapur’s most powerful nobles.

Jahangir was simply obsessed with Malik Ambar, who he couldn't beat

There are numerous reports of contemporary observers on Ambar’s glory and grace. The Mughal ambassador Asad Beg, who met him in 1604, was impressed that “he offered his prayers along with the common people” and that “his charities are beyond description.” The Dutchman Pieter Gielis van Ravesteijn, who met him while travelling across the plateau in June 1615, commented on the orderliness of Ambar’s camp in contrast to those of other Deccani sovereigns he had seen. English merchant William Finch, who was in the region in February 1610, reported that Malik Ambar’s army consisted of 10,000 men “of his own caste,” in addition to 40,000 Deccani Marathas.

Pieter Van den Broecke described Ambar as tall and strong with a stern “Roman” face and white glazed eyes, adding that, “he is very much loved and respected by everyone and keeps good government.” He also admired Malik Ambar’s policy of severely punishing highway robbers, with the result that “one may travel through his country with gold.” He also noted that Ambar would not allow anybody, on pain of corporal punishment, to bring alcoholic drinks to the army camp.

Malik Ambar’s severest critic was his bitter enemy, the Mughal emperor Jahangir, whose reign (1605-27) coincided with the height of the Ethiopian’s career as Peshwa of the revived Ahmadnagar sultanate. Jahangir was simply obsessed with the indefatigable Ambar. In his memoir, Jahangir calls him “‘Ambar the black-faced”, “the ill-starred Ambar”, “the rebel Ambar”, “‘Ambar of dark fate”, “that disastrous man”, “Ambar the black-fated one, “the rebels of black-fortune”, “the ill-starred one” and “the crafty Ambar.”

Jahangir’s mania with Ambar is most tellingly revealed in an extraordinary portrait of the two men commissioned by Jahangir that portrays him standing atop a globe resting on an ox that is standing on a fish. Jahangir is holding a bow and arrow, taking aim at the severed head of Malik Ambar, which is impaled on the tip of a spear. The painting shows the Emperor’s profound frustration with his failure to subdue the Abyssinian.

Ambar was a remarkable man. In warfare, in command, in sound judgment and in administration, he had no rival or equal in his time. He kept his State under firm control and maintained his supreme position with honour to the end of his life. He was religiously tolerant and there is not a single incident under his rule of discrimination against his Hindu subjects. History records no other instance of an Abyssinian slave attaining such eminence in South Asia.

Ambar is acknowledged as a master of guerrilla warfare. Refusing to engage in pitched battles against the Mughals’ powerful force of artillery, infantry and heavy cavalry, Ambar deployed surprise night attacks, harassed enemy supply lines, and drew Mughal forces into rugged terrain where they could be scattered by his light cavalry. His defeat of combined Mughal and Bijapur forces at Bhatvadi in 1624 was a remarkable feat of arms that will forever live in the annals of Ahmadnagar.

It is also revealing that the Mughal term for guerrilla warfare, bargi-giri, referred to units of Marathas who were trained and employed by Ambar. Light and swift, Maratha cavalrymen in Malik Ambar’s service wielded a deadly effect on the Mughals’ cumbersome armies. They sometimes pursued Mughal troops up to their imperial regional headquarters at Burhanpur on the banks of River Tapti. Under him, the units of Maratha cavalry in Ahmadnagar’s service grew from 10,000 in 1609 to 50,000 in 1624.

To this day Ambar is respectfully remembered for having surveyed much of the rural western Deccan and for placing the region’s revenue administration on a firm and just basis.

Ambar laid the foundation of a new capital named Khirki – window - adjacent to Daulatabad. When Emperor Aurangzeb occupied the city, he renamed it Aurangabad and made it his imperial capital. The town is now an abode of about 2 million people in the Indian state of Maharashtra.

A great enduring testimonial to his genius is the canal that he commissioned in 1610 as a water supply system for Khirki. Malik Ambar completed the canal, still called ‘Nehr-e-Ambar’ at an expenditure of 250,000 rupees. The canal begins at a small perennial stream 40 km away in the neighbouring hills. It is a 7-foot-deep underground canal with 140 manholes. Its complete engineering drawings were preserved and utilized for cleaning it in 1931. The canals built by Mughals served the royal gardens and households but Ambar’s canal was for the common people and continues to serve them, 408 years after its construction.

Ambar appointed Habshis to staff and command strategic forts located throughout the plateau and along the western Indian seaboard, most famously at the impregnable island fortress of Janjira situated some fifty miles down the coast from modern Mumbai. This spectacular fortress, along with the State of Sachin near Surat, remained in the hands of Habshis and their mixed-race descendants until 1947.

The days of glory for the enslaved and free Ethiopians were, however, short lived. When Malik Ambar died in 1626, his son Fateh Khan succeeded him as Ahmadnagar’s Peshwa. Lacking his father’s many skills, however, Fateh Khan buckled before a renewed siege of Daulatabad by the Mughals, to whom he surrendered the Nizam-Shahi capital in June 1633. The Mughals then carried off both him and his puppet sultan to north India. Fateh Khan was retired on a pension but the boy-sultan was imprisoned for life, bringing closure to the days of the Deccan Sultanates. Ambar’s descendants have assimilated with the local population and have lost their distinctive African features.

The Ahmadnagar sultanate under Ambar’s direction had effectively become a joint Habshi-Maratha enterprise. Malik Ambar is called the military guru of Maratha leaders, and even considered in many ways a father figure to Shivaji, who had served under him. It was his initiation, training and organisation which nourished them into a powerful nation. Marathas were thus launched on a path of two-centuries-long warfare that ended with their final submission to the British in 1806 at the end of the Second Anglo-Maratha war.

Ambar died in 1626 and lies buried in Khuldabad about 30 km north of Aurangabad. Emperor Aurangzeb and his son Azam Shah, who died in a war of succession, are also buried in the same city. Death has brought to rest in the same soil the sons of two enemy forces.

Parvez Mahmood retired as a Group Captain from PAF and is now a software engineer. He lives in Islamabad and writes on social and historical issues. He can be reached at parvezmahmood53@gmail.com