Malik Ambar (1549–1626) was a general and prime minister of the Ahmadnagar Sultanate in India. Born in Ethiopia, he rose from the status of slave to Prime Minister and regent, successfully resisting the Mughal Empire’s invasions, one of the most powerful empires in the world at the time.
Born in a Muslim region of Ethiopia around the mid-16th century, Malik Ambar was given by his parents as a slave to Arabs who took him to Baghdad. There, he was raised like a child by his master, who provided him an education in Arabic. His next master took him to central India, where he entered the service of Ahmadnagar’s Prime Minister, Chengiz Khan, as a slave. After Chengiz Khan’s death, he was freed by his widow, then left Ahmadnagar and joined the neighboring city of Bijapur, before returning to Ahmadnagar around 1595 at the head of troops he offered to the city’s forces against the Mughal Empire’s invasion.
Facing the power of the Mughal troops, Ahmadnagar and its dynasty gradually lost territory and authority. In this difficult resistance, Malik Ambar used his military skills, leadership, and cunning to seize political and military power in the Ahmadnagar Sultanate, marrying his daughter—herself of African origin—to the sultan, then too young to rule. As the sultan grew older, and following insulting remarks by his Persian co-wife toward Ambar’s daughter, Ambar had the sultan and the Persian wife killed and replaced them with the child, also too young to rule.
Malik Ambar also eliminated his main rival in Ahmadnagar, Raju Dakhni, by defeating him militarily. Through remarkable guerrilla tactics and an army that included thousands of Africans of servile origin, Ambar repeatedly thwarted the much more powerful Mughal army, driving his direct rival, Mughal Emperor Jahangir, into obsession. Jahangir mentioned Ambar repeatedly in his writings with insulting epithets and even commissioned a painting depicting him as the victim killed while walking on the globe, symbolizing that Ambar was his only rival in the world—a rival Jahangir would never truly subdue politically or militarily.
Ambar died in 1626, leaving a legacy as a military genius and excellent administrator who indelibly marked Indian history as one of its great figures, though this recognition sometimes obscured his African origins in the eyes of the Indian public.
For more: A Social History of the Deccan, 1300–1761: Eight Indian Lives by Richard M. Eaton
