From Africans in India to African Indians

Authors

  • Renata Czekalska Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland
  • Agnieszka Kuczkiewicz-Fraś Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.12797/Politeja.13.2016.42.12

Keywords:

Africans in India, Habshi, Siddi

Abstract

The first migrations of people from Africa to the Indian Subcontinent took place about fifty‑sixty thousand years ago. However, most of the Indo‑African population of India came to the Subcontinent in the last five hundred years. They became naturalized to both the Indian culture and the Indian way of life reasonably quickly, they became involved in politics and social disputes, and many of them rose to a high authority in the Indian society. The aim of the article is to show the status development of Africans in India and the change in social attitude towards them, by means of an analysis of examples chosen from the history of African settlement in India.

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Author Biographies

  • Renata Czekalska, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland

    Associate Professor at the Institute of the Middle and Far East, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland. She specializes in South Asian culture, the modern history of South Asia, and intercultural communication. Her recent publications include a hermeneutic analysis of the main thematic structures in the poetry of Ashok Vajpeyi, and a monograph dedicated to the enriching phenomenon of mutual transfer of intrinsic values in symbolic cultures.

  • Agnieszka Kuczkiewicz-Fraś, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland

    Associate Professor at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. She specialises in modern South Asian Studies. Her main field of interest are the Islamicate traditions and culture in South Asia, history and contemporaneity of Muslims in the Indian subcontinent, sociolinguistics and intercultural communication. She also translates from Hindi and Urdu into Polish (she translated, among other things, M. H. Rusvā’s Umrā’o Jān Ādā into Polish). She has published vastly on various topics related to South Asia. At present she is preparing a comprehensive study of Indo-Muslim courtesans (tawa’ if) and the socio-cultural role they played in the Islamicate society of North India.

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Published

21-04-2016

Issue

Vol. 13 No. 3 (42) (2016): African Studies

Section

Articles

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How to Cite

“From Africans in India to African Indians”. 2016. Politeja 13 (3 (42): 189-212. https://doi.org/10.12797/Politeja.13.2016.42.12.