Tamil Brahmins and SriLankan Tamils

[Bharatvarsh2]

Hey EmKay, if it wasn't for the "not so true" Tamil Shivaji it may be the case that you wouldn't be a tambram today and instead be a Boer (as the Dutch carried many slaves from South India to South Africa) and some of the slave women were taken as concubines by the Boers.

A final example of the intimate connection of Shivaji’s ideologies to his practices, or of the nigh impossibility to separate the two, is the following passage from his qaul granted to VOC ambassador Herbert de Jager in 1677. In it Shivaji puts his proscription of the slave trade discussed above in the context of a radical (and ideological) break with the past:



In the days of the Moorish government it was allowed for you to buy male slaves and female slaves here [the Karnatak], and to transport the same, without anyone preventing that. But now you may not, as long as I am master of these lands, buy male or female slaves, nor transport them. And in case you were to do the same, and would want to bring [slaves]aboard, my men will oppose that and prevent it in all ways and also not allow that they be brought back in your house; this you must as such observe and comply with.92



Even if Shivaji’s measure was motivated, as Herbert de Jager suggests, by a concern about revenues (which would be less if there were fewer inhabitants) rather than a concern for the welfare of the potential slaves, it is quite impossible to distinguish in this passage the practical measure from the patriotic appeal conveyed by it, directed as it is against Muslim rulers allowing the slave trade and Europeans carrying slaves off to foreign parts, unless one would want to argue that Shivaji was not planning to enforce the measure despite his assurance that his men would do so “in all ways.”



92 Contemporary Dutch translation of qaul Shivaji to VOC 26.6 accounting year 1078 (i.e.

1088 A.H.)/26.8.1677, VOC 1339: 1010; a copy of this translation (with two minor errors)

from the Amsterdam Contractboek is published in Heeres, Corpus, 3: 61-5. A somewhat different version is found in the Zeeland Contractboek. Since many of the local terms differ

between these translations, it is possible that Shivaji’s qaul was issued in two languages (which was not unusual), possibly Persian or Marathi and a language common in the area, either Telugu or Tamil, and that the translations are based on different language versions. Where “Amsterdam” has diwan and kotwal, “Zeeland” has hawaldar and talaiyari respectively. The latter would seem to be the local language version as the last term is of Tamil origin (see Yule and Burnell, Hobson-Jobson s.v. Taliar) and hawaldar a Persian term that had come into general usage along the northern Coromandel coast in the Qutb Shahi period. It is also possible that when the translation was copied into the Zeeland Contractboek around 1773, the terms were updated, although this seems far-fetched. The Zeeland Contractboek has for the above passage: “Before now this land has been among the Moorish dominions [onder 't Moors gebied] and then you were free to buy and sell male and female slaves, but such shall no longer be allowed as my people have orders to prevent the same. If you would, however, still want to do it they will also not allow that you will bring the same [slaves] in your house or ship, but they will take them take them from you and set them free [op vrije voeten stellen].”

https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/bitstre...l+file.pdf