The South Asian Studies Council presents
Ali Anooshahr,editorial board of the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient:
“Slavery in the Early Mughal World: The Life and Thoughts of Jawhar Aftabachi.”
The talk is based on a 2025 monograph of the same title. It uses a Persian history of the second Mughal Emperor Humayun (d. 1556) written by Jawhar Aftabachi who was the water-carrier of the emperor and a slave. Jawhar’s text sheds light on the briefly-resurgent institution of military slavery which was repackaged as spiritual discipleship. Jawhar also shows the breakdown of kinship bonds that had formerly constituted political states. In its place, we find the rise of impersonal administrative empires as well as individualization as alienation among the servicemen of the state.
Ali Anooshahr is a historian of Mughal India as well as the “Persianate World” during the early modern era. He received his B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1998, and his M.A. (2002) and Ph.D. (2005) from UCLA. He taught at Saint Xavier University in Chicago (2007-8) and moved to Davis in 2008. Before this, he worked for two years (2005-2007) cataloging Persian, Turkish, and Arabic manuscripts at UCLA Library’s Special Collections. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Hellman Foundations, among others.