Slavery and South Asian History

Indrani Chatterjee · Richard M. Eaton

Oct 2006 · Indiana University Press

About this ebook

"[W]ill be welcomed by students of comparative slavery.... [It] makes us reconsider the significance of slavery in the subcontinent." -- Edward A. Alpers, UCLA

Despite its pervasive presence in the South Asian past, slavery is largely overlooked in the region's historiography, in part because the forms of bondage in question did not always fit models based on plantation slavery in the Atlantic world. This important volume will contribute to a rethinking of slavery in world history, and even the category of slavery itself. Most slaves in South Asia were not agricultural laborers, but military or domestic workers, and the latter were overwhelmingly women and children. Individuals might become slaves at birth or through capture, sale by relatives, indenture, or as a result of accusations of criminality or inappropriate sexual behavior. For centuries, trade in slaves linked South Asia with Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. The contributors to this collection of original essays describe a wide range of sites and contexts covering more than a thousand years, foregrounding the life stories of individual slaves wherever possible.

Contributors are Daud Ali, Indrani Chatterjee, Richard M. Eaton, Michael H. Fisher, Sumit Guha, Peter Jackson, Sunil Kumar, Avril A. Powell, Ramya Sreenivasan, Sylvia Vatuk, and Timothy Walker.

Ratings and reviews

This a collection of essays that tries to extend the European concept and experience of slavery to India. It is a Procrustean effort, doing much damage to the understanding of the Indian past. Slavery in Europe was a major social enterprise from the time of ancient Greece, when 80 per cent of the so-called “democracy” of Athens was enslaved and/or without say in governance. The Spartans, among whom military preparations took up most of adult male life, all the surrounding people were enlisted in a brutal agricultural slavery. Rome began as a tribal democracy but as it grew into an empire became increasingly and predominantly a slave society. The tradition of slavery expanded intercontinentally with the first Portuguese explorations of Africa, and became transatlantic in the era when trade in plantation crops grown with slave labour came to dominate the world economy. The horrors of the transatlantic slave trade and the murderous oppression of Africans on American plantations have given the word “slave” a particularly nightmarish connotation. Nothing in the book edited by Indrani Chatterjee and Richard Eaton, both academics at American universities, justifies extending that term to India. Slaves in India were mostly the result of military conquest or economic misery: the poor in times of famine would sell their children or even themselves into servitude. It was also a practice for debtors unable to repay loans to enter into slavery. (The Pandavas constitute the most famous example of slavery resulting from a gambling debt.) The Rajputs made slave women concubines and dancing girls. The Cholas had a system of using captured women to breed soldiers, somewhat akin to the system of the Ottoman Turks who used captured European women to breed their crack fighting men, the Janizzaries. The Mughals bartered groups defeated in wars and tax defaulters (often the same) for horses from Central Asia. Some of the North Indian sultanates bought African slaves to fight in their armies and depending on their ability they could and did rise to high status, one of them even establishing the Khilji “slave dynasty.” In none of these cases was slaves and their offspring subjected to the kind of treatment colonial-era Europeans routinely meted out to those in their power. It was not only Africans who they degraded and abused but indentured Indian labourers who took up the slack after European colonial empires abolished the slave trade under pressure from the United States. The book makes interesting reading but be warned, it is not something that anyone with an Indian world-view would write.

About the author

Indrani Chatterjee is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University.

Richard M. Eaton is Professor of History at the University of Arizona.