Malik Ambar

Mark Zebrowski calls Malik Ambar the most extraordinary nobleman of Ahmadnagar: a former African slave who as a child had been sold to an Arab merchant in Baghdad. When the Mughals took Ahmadnagar fort in 1600 but could not secure the whole state, he harassed their army with guerrilla tactics and won the support of the Marathas. ¹

He set up a Nizam Shahi ruler, Murtaza II (1600–10), made himself prime minister, married the young king to his daughter, and reconquered most of the kingdom; by 1620 he had retaken the capital, besieged Burhanpur, the Mughal base in the northern Deccan, and penetrated deep into Malwa. The author records that he had his first royal protégé poisoned in 1610 and replaced by a minor prince, Burhan III. He died suddenly in 1626, a year before Jahangir, when poised to expel the Mughals from the Deccan. Contemporary histories call him a generous patron of the arts; he founded and embellished Kirki, which became the Mughal capital Aurangabad. ¹

The author takes Malik Ambar to be the likeliest patron of the nine paintings given to Ahmadnagar between 1600 and 1626, eight of them of Africans. Which portraits show him is disputed: Coomaraswamy and Stchoukine took the short, stout African to be Malik Ambar and the tall one with an aquiline nose his son Fath Khan; Khandalavala disagreed. Zebrowski holds that the short African is Malik Ambar, since two Mughal portraits by Hashim follow this type and one, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, bears an inscription, probably in Jahangir's hand, naming him. ^{1 2 3}