Chapter SEBUNDY to SEEDY of S by The Hobson Jobson Dictionary

Trained in their Exercise; the Regular Sepoys who have been Employed on that Duty are to be withdrawn.”—G. O. Feb. 23, in Suppt. to Code of Military Regs., 1799, p. 145.

1803.—“The employment of these people therefore … as sebundy is advantageous … it lessens the number of idle and discontented at the time of general invasion and confusion.”—Wellington, Desp. (ed. 1837), ii. 170.

1812.—“Sebundy, or provincial corps of native troops.”—Fifth Report, 38.

1861.—“Sliding down Mount Tendong, the summit of which, with snow lying there, we crossed, the Sebundy Sappers were employed cutting a passage for the mules; this delayed our march exceedingly.” —Report of Capt. Impey, R.E., in Gawler’s Sikhim, p. 95.

SEEDY, s. Hind. sidi; Arab. saiyid, ‘lord’ (whence the Cid of Spanish romantic history), saiyidi, ‘my lord’; and Mahr. siddhi. Properly an honorific name given in Western India to African Mahommedans, of whom many held high positions in the service of the kings of the Deccan. Of these at least one family has survived in princely position to our own day, viz. the Nawab of Jangira (see JUNGEERA), near Bombay. The young heir to this principality, Si ddhi Ahmad, after a minority of some years, was installed in the Government in Oct., 1883. But the proper application of the word in the ports and on the shipping of Western India is to negroes in general. [It “is a title still applied to holy men in Marocco and the Maghrib; on the East African coast it is assumed by negro and negroid Moslems, e.g. Sidi Mubarak Bombay; and ‘Seedy boy’ is the Anglo-Indian term for a Zanzibarman” (Burton, Ar. Nights, iv. 231).]

c. 1563.—“And among these was an Abyssinian (Abexim) called Cide Meriam, a man reckoned a great cavalier, and who entertained 500 horse at his own charges, and who greatly coveted the city of Daman to quarter himself in, or at the least the whole of its pergunnas (parganas—see PERGUNNAH) to devour.”—Couto, VII. x. 8.

[c. 1610.—“The greatest insult that can be passed upon a man is to call him Cisdy— that is to say ‘cook.’”—Pyrard de Laval, Hak. Soc. i. 173.]

1673.—“An Hobsy or African Coffery (they being preferred here to chief employments, which they enter on by the name of Siddies).”—Fryer, 147.

„ “He being from a Hobsy Caphir made a free Denizen … (who only in this Nation arrive to great Preferment, being the Frizled Woolly-pated Blacks) under the known style of Syddies. …”— Ibid. 168.

1679.—“The protection which the Siddees had given to Gingerah against the repeated attacks of Sevagi, as well as their frequent annoyance of their country, had been so much facilitated by their resort to Bombay, that Sevagi at length determined to compel the English Government to a stricter neutrality, by reprisals on their own port.”— Orme, Fragments, 78.

1690.—“As he whose Title is most Christian, encouraged him who is its principal Adversary to invade the Rights of Christendom, so did Senor Padre de Pandara, the Principal Jesuite and in an adjacent Island to Bombay, invite the Síddy to exterminate all the Protestants there.”—Ovington, 157.

1750–60.—“These (islands) were formerly in the hands of Angria and the Siddies or Moors.”—Grose, i. 58.

1759.—“The Indian seas having been infested to an intolerable degree by pirates, the Mogul appointed the Siddee, who was chief of a colony of Coffrees (Caffer), to be his Admiral. It was a colony which, having been settled at Dundee-Rajapore, carried on a considerable trade there, and had likewise many vessels of force.”—Cambridge’s Account of the War, &c., p. 216.

1800.—“I asked him what he meant by a Siddee. He said a hubshee. This is the name by which the Abyssinians are distinguished in India.”—T. Munro, in Life, i. 287.

1814.—“Among the attendants of the Cambay Nabob … are several Abyssinian and Caffree slaves, called by way of courtesy Seddees or Master.”—Forbes, Or. Mem. iii. 167; [2nd ed. ii. 225].

1832.—“I spoke of a Sindhee” (Siddhee) “or Habshee, which is the name for an Abyssinian in this country lingo.”—Mem. of Col. Mountain, 121.

1885.—“The inhabitants of this singular tract (Soopah plateau in N. Canara) were in some parts Mahrattas, and in others of Canarese race, but there was a third and less numerous section, of pure African descent called Sidhis … descendants of fugitive slaves from Portuguese settlements … the same ebony coloured, large-limbed men as are still to be found on the African coast, with broad, good-humoured, grinning faces.”—Gordon S. Forbes, Wild Life in Canara, &c., 32–33.

[1896.—

“We’ve shouted on seven-ounce nuggets,
We’ve starved on a Seedee boy’s pay.”

R. Kipling, The Seven Seas.

]