For more than 600 years,
civilization has been forgotten in India. They are black in their skins, Indian in their hearts and African in their roots. Some of them want to go back to Africa, but is it possible to find their traces in Africa?
They are isolated, locked up, ignored, marginalized…. The „Siddis“, Indians of African origin, are holed up in small pockets of villages in the Indian states of Karnataka, Maharashtra and Gujarat, and the city of Hyderabad. There are at least 20,000 Siddis who have lived for centuries in near total darkness in India.[1]
More than two centuries after the abolition of the slave trade, there are still black slaves not mentioned in history who remain lost in some rare corners of the planet. These blacks lost their comportments after they were abandoned during the rise of the slave trade in the eighteenth century. Some slaves, however, were lucky, like those abandoned returned to the heart of Africa in a new land, still uninhabited at the time and which forms Liberia today.
Siddi is the name given to the black slaves who were transferred to India by the Portuguese and the Arabs to serve the Nawab Princes, it is also reported that these blacks came mainly from sub-Saharan Africa and played a big role in the Mughal empire in India.[2]
History and Culture
The history of the Siddis dates back to the 13th century when Prince Nawab, in an emergency to protect his empire against external invasions, asked Portuguese, English and Arab settlers for men. Archaeological sources in India still trace the latter as great warriors who were employed in the woods and in the guard of princes.[3]
Later, a population of Bantu from South-East Africa was added to the latter, who had been brought there as slaves by the Portuguese and then the English. Added to these were other free black Africans who came to India as merchants, mercenaries or slave sellers.
The abolition of slavery in the 18th and 19th century pushed these black Indian people to take refuge in the jungle to flee the persecutions, the recaptures and the tortures which were inflicted on them being considered as sub-humans.[4]
Since the abolition of the slavery the fight for the Siddis was emerged because they now lived in the concern of finding a real place in the Indian society of the time which remains dominated by well-defined castes. The castes, are made up of four large groups, the Brâhmîns, the Sûdras, the Vaisyas and the Ksatriyas.
The long struggle of the Siddis throughout history has been to find recognition in one of these castes to be officially recognized as Indian, a struggle that continues to this day.
They have lost all of the Bantu languages and customs of their ancestors, on the contrary, have given themselves a new identity, notably built around Hindu or Muslim religions, which are the majority in the Indian subcontinent. What remains of Africa, apart from their physical appearance, are dances and songs passed down from generation to generation. Despite this uprooting, some Siddis still claim to be African, or at least African descendants: they proudly celebrated the re-election of Barack Obama, with whom they claim distant blood ties.[5]
Endangered:
The Siddis, those curly-haired, flat-nosed, dark-skinned Indians; still live with racial discrimination. Even if their famous traditional African dance group has been the talk of the town for the past ten years, they remain casteless.
Another factor which strikes the Siddis is the refusal of congenital links with other castes. Marriages in India, only take place between people of the same caste, rarely are the cases of inter-caste marriages, and even if they exist, they are nevertheless a matter of great debate.[6]
According to the Indian mentality, the Siddis as a tradition only exist in imagination, because it does not appear in any caste.
In this logic of things, marriage between the Siddis and the four castes is not feasible. The Siddis are a civilization that only exists in their world.
In the city, for example, they are nicknamed the Kalus, another name attached to the Siddis which means black slave. In the Hindu tradition, black skin is synonymous with poverty, evil, to put an end to it, with the devil. Black is even attached to a Hindu god called Ravan who is featured in Hindu mythology as the god of evil. In every Autumn, in order to renew their alliance with Good, this god (Ravan) is burned in the streets of India in a Hindu festival called Dussera which symbolizes the victory of good over evil.
One can therefore imagine the misery of those who were deported to India six hundred years ago. How much this festival of good over evil symbolizes in a way an insult for them and an indignation for their past which remains to be reconstructed. Six hundred years ago, a large class of Indians were also deported to Africa by Portuguese, English and Arab settlers in a similar story to the Siddis but these have their traces lost in history. These Indians better mastered the cartography of the Indian Ocean, they were used to facilitate the travel of black slaves to Europe via the port of Mumbai.
[1] https://theculturetrip.com/asia/india/articles/meet-the-siddis-indias-lost-african-tribe/
[2] https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20160801-indias-forgotten-jungle-dwellers
[3] https://www.soulveda.com/conversations/siddis-the-story-of-a-lost-tribe/
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4SNsgwXsys
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ped-uIlw_24
[6] https://wearerestless.org/2021/11/21/siddis-schooling-indians-to-defeat-discrimination-and-inequalities/
