A BBC photo journal showcases a community of Africans in India: “Compared to the fate of Africans taken as slaves to the New World, the history of Africans in India is still largely unknown.”

Slave trade seem the most plausiple explanation. The BBC states in another publication:

“Although they came at first as slaves, they were so successful as fighters that they at times usurped power from the rulers they were supposed to be serving.”

However there are strong indications that “several Africans also visited India as free people – as merchants and ambassadors from East African states. Africans are called Habshi or Habashi in India. Habashi is the Arabic word for “Ethiopian”. Numerous Habshis achieved political and military success in South Asia.”

Runoko Rashidi, a historian and writer gives an historical overview:

“In Greater India, more than a thousand years before the foundations of Greece and Rome, proud and industrious Black men and women known as Dravidians erected a powerful civilization. We are referring here to the Indus Valley civilization- -India’s earliest high-culture, with major cities spread out along the course of the Indus River…The decline and fall of the Indus Valley civilization has been linked to several factors, the most important of which were the increasingly frequent incursions of the White people known in history as Aryans–violent Indo-European tribes initially from central Eurasia and later Iran.”

The siddis – as the tens of thousands of people of African descent are known in India today are seen as the descendants of a group of “African freedmen” who converted into Islam worked as sailors, “and established kingdoms in Western India as early as 1100 AD. They functioned as security forces for the Muslim fleets in West India and were famed for their bravery as “guarantors of safety on the Indian Ocean.”

Today, the Siddis are ghosts of their past, impoverished, outcast, and “struggling at the margins of Indian society.” And the only “remnant they retain of their African lineage is their music and dance.”

Some Links:

The African Presence in India: http://www.cwo.com/~lucumi/india.html

Habshis and Siddis – Africans and African descendants in South Asia: http://www.colorq.org/MeltingPot/article.aspx?d=Asia&x=Habshi

The Lost Africans of Indian: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1035389.stm

The African connection: http://www.kamat.com/kalranga/people/afro-indians/index.htm

The Siddi Community: http://www.kamat.com/kalranga/people/siddi.htm

Siddi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siddi

Photo: An Indian of African Origin From a Deccan Miniature Painting