The Siddis: India's Real African Diaspora, and the Myth of 'Indo-Negroids'

India does have a genuine, centuries-old African diaspora. It is called the Siddi community, not “Indo-Negroids,” and it numbers in the tens of thousands to a few hundred thousand people, not the hundreds of millions sometimes claimed online.

The Siddis descend mainly from Bantu-speaking East Africans, along with people from the Ethiopian highlands, who arrived in South Asia over more than a millennium through several distinct channels. Arab and Indian traders brought East African sailors, merchants, and enslaved people to the subcontinent as early as the 7th century as part of Indian Ocean trade networks. From the 13th century onward, Indian rulers, most famously in the Deccan sultanates, imported Africans in far greater numbers as soldiers, palace guards, and administrators, a role that gave rise to the historical term “Habshi,” from the Arabic word for Abyssinian. The most consequential wave came later still, when Portuguese traders transported enslaved East Africans to Goa and other Indian Ocean ports between the 16th and 19th centuries as part of the broader Indian Ocean slave trade. Some Siddis rose to genuine power, most notably Malik Ambar, a formerly enslaved Ethiopian who became a regent and military commander in the Deccan in the early 17th century. Today, geneticists estimate the Siddi population at roughly 50,000 to 300,000 people, concentrated in Gujarat, Karnataka, and Hyderabad in India and in Pakistan’s Makran coastal region, and genetic studies have found their ancestry to be predominantly Bantu East African, mixed with South Asian and, in some populations, Portuguese ancestry, consistent with this documented history. Many Siddi communities today face real, well-documented marginalization: poverty, limited access to education and land, and a distinct racialized discrimination layered on top of India’s broader caste hierarchy.

The claim that this diaspora numbers “over 600 million” and should be understood as “Indo-Negroids” rests on a different, much shakier foundation: 18th- and 19th-century European racial taxonomy. “Negroid” was coined by European naturalists building three-way (later more) racial classification schemes that tried to sort all of humanity into a handful of biological categories, a project modern genetics has thoroughly discredited; the American Association of Biological Anthropologists has stated plainly that race is not a valid biological description of human variation. Colonial-era ethnographers who encountered South Asia’s diverse population, including groups with darker skin, tightly curled hair, or features that didn’t fit their “Caucasoid” template, sometimes labeled them “Indo-Negroid” or similar, but this was a classification exercise built on skin color and hair texture, not a claim of direct African ancestry within the historical timeframe implied by the tweets that inspired this idea. It is true that all non-African human populations, South Asians included, descend from people who left Africa in a series of migrations beginning tens of thousands of years ago, one widely cited “southern route” model puts modern humans reaching South Asia’s coastline by roughly 60,000 years ago, but that shared deep ancestry describes all of Eurasia, not a distinct, currently-identifiable “Black” population of hundreds of millions living in India today.

The ancient Greek habit of calling dark-skinned Indians “Ethiopians” is real and well attested, but it reflects Greek geography, not genealogy. Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BCE, grouped the far eastern and far western edges of the known world’s dark-skinned peoples under a single loose label, noting that some Indian tribes had “the same tint of skin” as Ethiopians; later classical writers similarly spoke of “Eastern” and “Western Ethiopians.” That is a genuinely interesting footnote in the history of how ancient Mediterranean writers perceived skin color across a world they knew only partially, and it says something about premodern conceptions of race that were far less rigid than what came later. It is not, however, evidence of a single ancient “Black” population stretching across India, and treating it that way flattens a real and specific African-Indian history, the Siddis’, into an unfounded and unfalsifiable demographic claim.