Situating Hābasāna: Charting the Affective Boundaries of the Sidi Kingdom in Konkan

The legacy of Africans in India continues to be presented as a checkered past with the backdrop of the slave trade for the seventeenth century rise of Afro-Indians, or communities known by the labels Sidi or Habashi, in the then political scene. Behind the veil of the political and economic movements of the period, lie the embedded histories of translocation. This article explores the cases from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries in Konkan, along the west coast of India to open the conversation on the unique socio-cultural nexus burgeoned by the local Sidi rule. The discussion presents the Sidi rulers in Konkan bringing together the religious, political, and social currents from their original African homes and localizing some along the Konkani littoral. With a brief review of extant historic data on the Sidis, archival material such as personal correspondence, and fragments of material culture in Konkan, this article seeks to chart the trajectory of destabilised Sidi presence. Amidst the waves of relocation, an idea of “Hābasāna” takes root under the auspices of the Sidi Nawabs of Janjira, where the discussion will reflect moments of memorialisation and affective histories of landscape through the lens of the displaced Sidi families in modern times.