Muslim Slave System in Medieval India c10.25

c10.25

The Mughal emperor Akbar, disapproved of the custom of enslaving women and children in times of war.⁴² He also prohibited enslavement and sale of women and children of the peasants who had defaulted in the payment of revenue. He knew, as Abul Fazl says, that many evil hearted and vicious men used to proceed to villages and *mahals* and sack them.⁴³ According to W.H. Moreland, it became a fashion to raid a village or group of villages without any obvious justification, and carry off the inhabitants as slaves.⁴⁴ It is appropriate to suffix this statement with the cryptic remark of Koenraad Elst that A left-over from this period is the North-Indian custom of celebrating weddings at midnight: this was a safety measure against the Islamic sport of bride catching.⁴⁵ Jahangir had ordered that a government collector or jagirdar should not without permission intermarry with the people of the *pargana* in which he might be⁴⁶, for abductions and forced marriages were common enough. But there was never an abjuration of the policy of enslavement as mainly it was not the Mughal emperors but the Mughal nobility who must have taken the lions share of enslavement, deportation and sale by the state. It was not only Jahangir, a comparatively kind hearted emperor, who used to capture poor people during his hunting expeditions and send them to Kabul in exchange for dogs and horses; all Muslim rulers and governors collected slaves and exploited them in the manner they pleased. Under Shahjahan, as seen earlier, peasants were compelled to sell their women and children to meet the revenue demand.