Place · African Cavalry lines · India
A.C. Guards
Also known as African Cavalry Guards, Siddi Risala, AC Guards, Habshi Guards, A.C. Guards — the African Cavalry Guards
A locality in western Hyderabad that is named after a cavalry regiment and nothing else. The sixth Nizam, Mahbub Ali Khan, heard in the nineteenth century of Africans serving another Indian nobleman, asked for a batch, and a group of some three hundred young men came — most accounts say voluntarily. Their quarters were built here, and the African Cavalry Guards became the household troops the seventh Nizam trusted with his family. Their descendants, Siddis, still live in the lines their grandfathers were housed in, beside Masab Tank and Khairtabad.
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered
- Location
- 17.397, 78.457
Worth knowing
The abbreviation is all that survives in common use: most of Hyderabad reads A.C. Guards as a place name with no content, and does not know that the A and the C stand for African Cavalry.
Whether the first recruits arrived freely or through the East African slave trade is not settled; the standard accounts say voluntarily, and the Indian Ocean traffic of the period makes a mixed picture likely.
Connections (5)
- In the same set asBarkas
Two foreign regiments of the same army, housed at opposite ends of the same city and routinely confused for one another. The Chaush of Barkas were Hadhrami Arabs from southern Yemen; the African Cavalry Guards were Siddis recruited from East Africa, and their lines are about ten kilometres away across Hyderabad. They were hired on the same principle — the Nizams, surrounded by rival Deccan powers and then by a paramount British resident, wanted household troops with no local loyalties available to defect into — but they were distinct communities, with distinct languages, and neither was the other.
- PrecursorMalik Ambar
African soldiering in the Deccan is much older than the Nizams, and Malik Ambar is its high point. Sold out of Ethiopia as a boy, he reached Ahmadnagar by way of Baghdad, rose through its service, and as regent from 1600 held the Mughals out of the Deccan for two decades with light cavalry and scorched earth. The sultanates' habit of recruiting Habshi troops — for the same reason the Nizams later gave, that outsiders could not defect to a neighbouring court — is what the African Cavalry Guards are the last instalment of, three centuries on.
- AnalogueMurud-Janjira
The two ends of what African arrival in India could become. At Janjira the Siddis took the fort and then the state, ruling a Konkan principality in their own name and keeping it against the Marathas, the Mughals, the Portuguese and the English until 1947. At A.C. Guards the Siddis remained a regiment — trusted, housed, salaried and never sovereign. Same origin, same ocean, and the difference is simply whether the community acquired a territory or a barracks.
- AnalogueManghopir, Karachi
The two surviving African-descended communities of the subcontinent that still hold institutions of their own, on opposite coasts. At Manghopir on Karachi's edge the Sheedi keep the annual mela at the crocodile shrine, with drumming that is the clearest African-descended ritual music left on these shores. At A.C. Guards the Siddis of Hyderabad keep the lines, the hockey club and the name of a regiment. Both are small, both descend from the Indian Ocean traffic in people, and neither is much noticed by the cities around them.
- Site withinHyderabad
A.C. Guards lies within Hyderabad — the two sites sit about 4 km apart, well inside the city's historical boundary and part of the same urban or peri-urban landscape. A.C. Guards is one of the specific sites that give Hyderabad its layered character, and reads differently when seen as a stop within the larger city rather than as an isolated monument on an open map. The surrounding neighbourhoods, roads and other heritage ensembles belong to the same single urban fabric.
Sources
Wikipedia, “A. C. Guards”. Ababu Minda Yimene, An African Indian Community in Hyderabad: Siddi Identity, Its Maintenance and Change (2004); Nizam's Contingent service records.
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