Well, at least some Indians are… a few weeks ago, I confessed up to thinking as a kid that Indians were Black. And a few of my Indian/Bangladeshi friends gave me e-props for it (what up?!). One of them, Wafi, passed on this HuffPo article by Rita Banerji from 2015 that goes into fascinating detail about how there is indeed a strong genetic link between Indians and Africa:
Growing up in India, I never met or heard about Indians with African lineages. Then in 2005 I watched a dance performance by the Sidi Goma, a group of musicians from the African Indian community, the Siddi, and I was astonished and mesmerised. Since then I’ve discovered that India’s African roots are much older than the Siddis, and are not only evident in numerous other communities, but percolate through direct descent in the blood of at least 600 million Indians.
The Siddis who arrived in India, over a thousand years ago, between 700 and 900 AD, are perhaps the “youngest” African immigrant community here. They were brought on ships by Arab merchants who sold them as slaves to Indian rulers. Known to be powerful warriors, the Siddis were often used as soldiers and played important roles in the armies and in political warfare. One of the most famous Siddi military commanders, Malik Ambar, was revered as the “military guru,” of the Maratha kings. He was equally feared and detested by the Mughal emperor, Jahangir (Richard M. Eaton, 2005, A Social History of the Deccan). In fact, where most other Hindu kingdoms were overpowered by the Mughals, the Marathas remained indomitable partly due to the war tactics introduce by Malik Ambar. One of these was guerrilla warfare, often used in Africa, but unknown to traditional Indian battles, which, as depicted in the epic Mahabharata, involved armies confronting head-on on an open battlefield. Soldiers of the Nawab of Hyderabad’s elite African Cavalry Guards were held in high social esteem. Even later during the 1857 Indian mutiny against British rule, many of the soldiers who died fighting for the Nawab of Oudh were Siddi soldiers, including women (Llewellyn-Jones, 2011, “The Colonial response to African Slaves in British India”, African and Asian Studies 10(1):59-70).
Many Siddis either bought their freedom, or escaped to the forests to form independent communities. They would eke a livelihood by performing as street musicians, animal entertainers or as mystical seers. In Bombay, many of the Siddis were Sufis and were honoured by all communities as spiritual healers. Other Siddis fought and usurped the thrones from rulers, as in Bengal, while still others established their own kingdoms. Among these kingdom provinces were Janjira and Jaffrabad established around 12 AD. Khadki, later to be Aurangabad, was founded by Malik Ambar. Janjira which was a well fortressed, meticulously planned and constructed, self-contained, island kingdom under successive Siddi kings, lasted 300 years as it successfully warded off frequent attacks. After India’s independence from the British, in 1948, it voluntarily seceded to the Indian Union (Great Britain India Office, The Imperial Gazetteer of India, 1908).
There are only about 55,000 Siddis in India today. They live in small, insular communities in Karnataka, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal and Gujarat. Unfortunately, in the span of a thousand years in India, the Siddis lost track of their origins, histories and cultures. One of the young Siddi musicians at the concert I attended talked about how as children they’d be subject to racist jibes of “Habshi”, or told to go back to Africa. Once, their troupe was held up by airport officials in India who assumed they were illegal African immigrants. He said the odd thing was that like most Siddis he had never even heard of Africa. Their food, clothes, and language are completely adapted to the local cultures of whichever part of India a particular Siddi community lives in.
Yet, traces of the Siddis’ African roots still echo in their dance and music traditions. They are evident in the animal representations in the dance movements and 