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Sub-Saharan Africans have a longstanding and distinguished presence in India, where they are most commonly known as Habshis or Sidis. Habshi is the Arabic for an Abyssinian or Ethiopian, and Sidi is apparently derived from the Arabic sayyidi, "my lord". In the last decade there has been a veritable explosion of scholarship on Habshis and Sidis in India.
This book is a contribution to this growing field, but with a difference. Rather than the groups hitherto studied, its focus is on the elite of Sub-Saharan African-Indian merchants, soldiers, nobles, statesmen, and rulers who attained prominence in various parts of India between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, and on Africans who served at the courts of Indian monarchs as servants, slaves, eunuchs, or concubines.
This book is a series of snapshots, in the form of essays by specialists in the history, numismatics, architecture, the art history of South Asia, and of colour and black-and-white illustrations. John McLeod is chair of the Department of History at the University of Louisville. A specialist in South Asian history, he is the author of Sovereignty, Power, Control: Politics in the States of Western India, 1916-1947 (1999), The History of India (2002), and various articles and reviews. Kenneth X. Robbins, a psychiatrist, has published more than forty articles on Indian history and art and he has curated nine exhibitions. With contributions from Bob Alderman, Fitzroy Andre Baptiste, Shailendra Bhandare, Richard M. Eaton, Stan Goron, B.N. Goswamy, Faaeza Jasdanwalla, Nawabzadi Fatma Begum A. Jasdanwalla of Janjira, Shihan De Silva Jayasuriya, Omar Khalidi, His Highness Nawab Dr Sidi Nasrullah Khan, Nawab Nasrut Jung Bahadur, Mubaruz-ud-Daula, Nawab of Sachin, Lalit Kumar, Klaus Rotzer and Mehrdad Shokoohy. 81-88204-73-0
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