Contemporary African Indians arrived to the subcontinent as early as the seventeenth century as part of trading routes across the Arabian and Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, led by Muslim Arabs and English, Dutch and Portuguese. The later have reportedly brought them to India as slaves, especially in the Portuguese colonies of Goa, Daman and Diu, where they named them derogatory as Caffre, Abyssinian and Habshi. In India, they are known as Sidi/Siddi or Habshi. To some scholars the term “sidi” is a corruption of “sayyad”, therefore implying that the Sidis were in the service of the Muslim rulers of India. Indeed, in the past, some Sidis rose to important positions, to an extent that, in Ahmedabad, Siddi Saiyad built a sophisticated mosque, one of which threes windows, carved in stone (galiyo), became the symbol of the city, if not the state. In Gujarat the Sidis have Gujarati as their mother tongue and they are Suni Muslims, with the cult of the pir and the dargah. However, in some areas they have been classified as Scheduled Tribes (SC, animist groups that enjoy government support) and have been kept away from the political arena and social development. This paper aims at understanding what means socially and ritually to be an African Indian (a small social minority of about forty thousand in a country with a population of over one billion people), both at the level of self-perception and of negotiation with other SC and the dominant Hindu caste system.

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India,Africa in India,Indian Ocean,Social segregation,Scheduled Tribes (ST)