A little exhibit at the Schomburg Center in Harlem tracks the history of Africans who were brought to India as slaves, focusing loosely on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It’s not much of an installation: about two dozen large printed boards with texts that relate, in a matter-of-fact tone, the stories of some of the most accomplished Africans in India, illustrated with some not-so-great reproductions of paintings and photographs. But the content of the exhibit – slavery in India, the assimilation (and acceptance) of Africans into Mughal culture, the against-all-odds success stories of some brilliant men and women – is dazzling. I went to the exhibit with my parents, who were raised and educated in India, and none of us had any idea that Indians participated in the slave trade. A staff members at the Center told us that many Indian-Americans arrived excited to see the show, and then left protesting that none of it was really true. But it is.
One particular painting in the exhibit, Sultan Muhammad ‘Adil Shah and Ikhlas Khan riding an Elephant, from 1650, is particularly shaming. I know this miniature well. It was the key image of an 1985 exhibit about Indian art at the Met that my parents took me to. I bought a notecard of it which I still have and keep at the very bottom of my stationery bin, because I don’t want to part with it. It shows the two men and the beast in bold graphic profile against a thick, midnight blue sky. The Sultan, with gold robes and a halo, rides cross-legged at the top of the bedecked and bejeweled elephant. Khan, a smaller and darker man, sits in back, on the elephant’s rear, and fans the Sultan with a white towel. I’ve looked at this image about a hundred times without really seeing the second man and wondering who he is. He is, in fact, a freed Abyssinian slave, formerly named Malik Raihan Habshi, who, through ambition and hard work and at least one murder, was anointed Ikhlas Khan and rose to the position of ‘Adil Shah’s chief minister. He was a decision-maker who ran the Bijapur sultanate which 'Adil Shah, in title, led. The refusal to see this man in this painting, and in the history of India, is telling.