Indian Slave Trade

[Guest]

I've been reading alot of articles about islamic adventures in India, and theres seems to be a general pattern of murder of older male civilians and enslaving of the women and younger men, when islamic armies enter a non-muslim cities. I did a bit of reading about Islam to discover why this pattern kept repeating and I found that slavery was tolerated by muslims. I was wondering if there is any estimates at how many slaves were created from India. There are estimates at how many slaves were created because of the African slave trade, but I never have found any figures for India. Why is this? If there are any estimates, please post them.

Also, I hope this thread covers the topic of right hand possessions. They were non-muslim women captured by muslim soldiers forced into sexual slavery. I've read that the sex ratio of slaves taken by muslims from Africa and Europe was heavily biased towards women. This was because these women would serve as concubines to the muslims. I was wondering if theres any proof to show the same in India.

Another topic that can be covered is Ghazw raids. These were raids made by muslims into non-muslim lands to obtain slaves, booty, or just generally the killing of non-believers. How many of these raids were conducted in India? Is there any way to know? Has there been books written on this?

I'm really shocked that it is so difficult to find information on this. Theres thousands of web sites about the Western slaver but almost nothing when dealing with islamic slavery.

So to sum up:
1. How many slaves were produced from India?
2. What factor did sex play in it? i.e. muslims capturing non-muslim women for use as concubines.
3. How were these slaves obtained?

Other people can add to the topic if they see fit. Maybe we could open up another thread discussing only right hand possessions.

Heres some links about some of the terms covered that some people might not be familiar with. If you have any links to share, please suggest some.

Right Hand Possessions.
http://www.islam.org.au/articles/19/tafseer.htm (will have to scroll down a bit)
http://www.islam.tc/ask-imam/view.php?q=1928
http://www.muslimwakeup.com/main/archives/...ditionalist.php
http://www.paklinks.com/gs/showthread.php?t=181033 (You might enjoy reading this! Its really depressing)

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

Is anyone else interested in this topic? I find it fascinating.

[Hauma Hamiddha]

There was a study done by Scott Levi on this topic. By studying the meticulous records of he Qazis in Central Asia he found that 1000s upon 1000s of Hindu slaves were transported and sold in the Moslem states there. I am not sure if Levi's paper is available on line but you must try to get it.

The famous Khawarizm sultan Jalal-ad-din Mangubidri who fought unto death against Chingiz Kha'khan was the son of one such originally Hindu Indian girl who was sold to the harem of Sultan Mohammad by the Ghorids.

A Hindu slave also involved in the assasination of the Hashishin Imam Rokn'din when he was having sex with a sheep.

[Bharatvarsh]

Gabru I am not surprised you didn't find anything, again this aspect of history has been heavily whitewashed not just in India but everywhere to promote the myth that Islam is egalitarian and other such nonsense, here is an online book by the great historian K.S Lal titled "Muslim Slave System in Medieval India", you can read it online here:

http://voi.org/books/mssmi/

Infact I urge every Hindu to read all the Voice of India books and books by people like Arun Shourie to know the real history of India, another thing I want to highlight is that African slavery did not start with Europeans, there was a flourishing East African slave trade centuries before under Muslims and many black slaves were captured and sold by their own people and Arab traders to white people, infact Muslim majority counties were some of the last to ban slavery and even today slavery is widely practiced in Sudan by the Muslim majority against the Southern Sudanese (mainly xtians and native religion followers).

[shamu]

Slightly off topic. Did slave trade exist in ancient India?

If I remember the story of Raja Harishchandra correctly (ofcourse I learnt it through Amar Chitra Katha during my childhood) he, his wife and son were traded as slaves before he became a chandala.

Any explanation for this?

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->If I remember the story of Raja Harishchandra correctly (ofcourse I learnt it through Amar Chitra Katha during my childhood) he, his wife and son were traded as slaves before he became a chandala.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

Raja Harishchandra traded himself as a slave in market place despite being mocked by the towns people. Nobody forced him to sell himself or his family.

[shamu]

<!--QuoteBegin-mitradena+Jan 8 2006, 08:13 AM-->QUOTE(mitradena @ Jan 8 2006, 08:13 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin--><!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->If I remember the story of Raja Harishchandra correctly (ofcourse I learnt it through Amar Chitra Katha during my childhood) he, his wife and son were traded as slaves before he became a chandala.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

Raja Harishchandra traded himself as a slave in market place despite being mocked by the towns people. Nobody forced him to sell himself or his family.
[right][snapback]44452[/snapback][/right]
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->

Question is not whether Raja Harishchandra traded himself or not. The question is did such a slave trade system exist in India which helped him trade himself?

[Guest]

I have not found any evidence of Slavery existing in India.
Certainly not to the extent of the Islamic world or the Roman empire.

[G.Subramaniam]

India had and still has a system of bonded labor
in which a person agrees to work for some years in exchange for money

Harischandra if read right looks more like bonded labor

This is more like serfdom
In hindu culture there is no slave trade

While a Dalit may be harassed in a hindu village
he will not be sold into slavery

There is a book called
White Gold
which calculates that in slave raids, in the 18th century,
muslims took 1 million white slaves from Europe

I remember reading in an encyclopedia that the main source of wealth
for Mohd Ghazni was sale of hindu slaves

[agnivayu]

Let's also not forget that when Eurotrash brought slaves to the new world, it was done with Christian justification.

Non White's were the son's of Ham or whatever, so Non-White's were the devils children. White dude's then were part of God's people. (God is an old white fella with a big beard, kinda like Santa Clause, and other subordinate clauses)

During X'mas slaves were even given as presents

Although now some of them would say that the devil made them do it.

[Guest]

Was There an Islamic "Genocide" of Hindus? Dr Koenraad Elst <!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Apart from actual killing, millions of Hindus disappeared by way of enslavement. <b>After every conquest by a Muslim invader, slave markets in Bagdad and Samarkand were flooded with Hindus. </b>Slaves were likely to die of hardship, e.g. the mountain range Hindu Koh, "Indian mountain", was renamed Hindu Kush, "Hindu-killer", when one cold night in the reign of Timur Lenk (1398-99), a hundred thousand Hindu slaves died there while on transport to Central Asia. Though Timur conquered Delhi from another Muslim ruler, he recorded in his journal that he made sure his pillaging soldiers spared the Muslim quarter, while in the Hindu areas, they took "twenty slaves each". <b>Hindu slaves were converted to Islam, and when their descendants gained their freedom, they swelled the numbers of the Muslim community. It is a cruel twist of history that the Muslims who forced Partition on India were partly the progeny of Hindus enslaved by Islam</b>.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Hindus too experienced this treatment at the hands of Islamic conquerors, e.g. when Mohammed bin Qasim conquered the lower Indus basin in 712 CE. Thus, in Multan, according to the Chach-Nama, "six thousand warriors were put to death, and all their relations and dependents were taken as slaves". This is why Rajput women committed mass suicide to save their honour in the face of the imminent entry of victorious Muslim armies, e.g. 8,000 women immolated themselves during Akbar's capture of Chittorgarh in 1568 (where this most enlightened ruler also killed 30,000 non-combatants). During the Partition pogroms and the East Bengali genocide, mass rape of Hindu women after the slaughter of their fathers and husbands was a frequent event.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--> Rajput women commiting Jauhor (death by fire, self-immolation in anticipation of an impending Islamic victory). Very brave women.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->...the Christian c.q. Islamic contempt for Pagans made them rather careless with the lives of Native Americans, Africans or Hindus, so that millions of them were killed, and yet this was not deliberate genocide. Of course they wanted to annihilate Pagan religions like Hinduism, but in principle, the missionary religions wished to convert the unbelievers, and preferred not to kill them unless this was necessary for establishing the power of the True Faith.

That is why the mass killing of Hindus by Muslims rarely took place in peacetime, but typically in the fervour immediately following military victories, e.g. the fall of the metropolis of Vijayanagar in 1565 was "celebrated" with a general massacre and arson. Once Muslim power was established, Muslim rulers sought to exploit and humiliate rather than kill the Hindus, and discourage rebellion by making some sort of compromise. Not that peacetime was all that peaceful, for as Fernand Braudel wrote in A History of Civilizations (Penguin 1988/1963, p.232-236), Islamic rule in India as a "colonial experiment" was "extremely violent", and "the Muslims could not rule the country except by systematic terror. Cruelty was the norm -- burnings, summary executions, crucifixions or impalements, inventive tortures. Hindu temples were destroyed to make way for mosques. On occasion there were forced conversions. If ever there were an uprising, it was instantly and savagely repressed: houses were burned, the countryside was laid waste, men were slaughtered and women were taken as slaves." <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

This is unrelated to the topic of Islam and Indian slaves, but I wanted to draw attention to the following shocking piece of information on the same page:<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->A third type of genocide consists in preventing procreation among a targeted population. <b>Till recently, it was US policy to promote sterilization among Native American women</b>, even applying it secretly during postnatal care or other operations. <b>The Tibetans too have been subjected to this treatment</b>. <b>In the Muslim world, male slaves were often castrated, which partly explains why Iraq has no Black population even though it once had hundreds of thousands of Black slaves.</b> The practice <b>also existed in India on a smaller scale</b>, though the much-maligned Moghul emperor Aurangzeb tried to put an end to it, mainly because eunuchs brought endless corruption in the court. The hijra community is a left-over of this Islamic institution (in ancient India, harems were tended by old men or naturally napunsak/impotent men, tested by having to spend the night with a prostitute without showing signs of virile excitement).<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--> My God, Africans have been through hell. Ironically, they're among those of the world's people who've hurt others the least. And the unfortunate Native Americans and Tibetans. If there's one lesson we can learn from history it's that human cruelty knows no bounds.

Other interesting points: <!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->During the Islamic conquests in India, it was a typical policy to single out the Brahmins for slaughter, <b>after</b> the Hindu warrior class had been bled on the battlefield. Even the Portuguese in Malabar and Goa followed this policy in the 16th century, as can be deduced from Hindu-Portuguese treaty clauses prohibiting the Portuguese from killing Brahmins.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->I'm certain that if there were still large numbers of Kshatriya communities in India, then the Muslims, Marxists and Missionaries (and probably the anti-Hindu/anti-India interests in the West) would be making them out to be the scapegoat. Much like the Samurai were around 1900 by the Americans who forcefully intruded into Japan.

More interesting information (although this is not unforeseen): <!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->While India-watchers wax indignant about communal riots in India killing up to 20,000 people since 1948, allegedly in a proportion of three Muslims to one Hindu, the best-kept secret of the post-Independence Hindu-Muslim conflict is that in the subcontinent as a whole, the overwhelming majority of the victims have been Hindus. Even apart from the 1971 genocide, "ordinary" pogroms in East Pakistan in 1950 alone killed more Hindus than the total number of riot victims in India since 1948.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Something we Indians already know, but no one else (cares to) know:<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Hindus suffered such attempted extermination in East Bengal in 1971, when the Pakistani Army killed 1 to 3 million people, with Hindus as their most wanted target. This fact is strictly ignored in most writing about Hindu-Muslim relations, in spite (or rather because) of its serious implication that even the lowest estimate of the Hindu death toll in 1971 makes Hindus by far the most numerous victims of Hindu-Muslim violence in the post-colonial period. It is significant that no serious count or religion-wise breakdown of the death toll has been attempted: the Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi ruling classes all agree that this would feed Hindu grievances against Muslims.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--> At least we have not forgotten them.

Agnivayu,
please don't use words like "Eurotrash" (even if that's a term invented in western countries. I've heard Americans and Australians use it for Europeans! Quite shocking) But we shouldn't label entire groups. How would we like to be called Hindutrash or Indiantrash by people who don't know us at all?

However, it is certain that most Europeans during the centuries of slavery did nothing to oppose the practice of slavery and actively encouraged it. I agree that their religion was the reason (which they themselves often cited as such) for it having taken place at all.

[acharya]

Explain it better.
Draupati episode is a game played between two parties. It was agreed upon before the game started.