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7 Slavery, Society, and the State in Western India, 1700–1800 Sumit Guha Introduction: Enslavement and Compulsion in Eighteenth-Century India In the 1970s Miers and Kopytoff sought to remedy deficiencies in the comparative data on slavery as well as the social sciences’lack of general theory of that institution with a path-breaking volume on the African continent . Its editorial introduction warned against taking Atlantic plantation ideologies of slavery and freedom as the norm against which other societies and practices could be calibrated. Miers and Kopytoff called, instead,for histories of slave practices that assessed them on their own terms and in their own historical and social contexts.1 Nothing comparable to Miers and Kopytoff’s work has yet appeared for the Indian subcontinent, and the present volume seeks to remedy and understand this silence as well as to fill out and correct the models developed elsewhere. My chapter will examine the institution and practices of slavery in western and central India from the mid-seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. This region witnessed the crumbling of Mughal imperial power at the turn of the eighteenth century, and it was replaced by a loosely united confederacy of Maratha rulers who gradually extended their power into northern and southern India before succumbing to British colonialism in 1818.2 This is a region and period for which abundant documentation has survived, documentation that enables us to recover the names, lives, and fates of many among the least fortunate in that society.3 In order to clarify the distinctions between slavery and other forms of coercion and labor in the region at the time, it is useful to begin with Or- lando Patterson’s ambitious comparative study of slavery in world history. Patterson’s study characterized the institution as one type of power relation in society.“All human relationships are structured and defined by the relative power of the interacting persons.” Slavery in Patterson’s view forms a limiting case in which the power imbalance approaches its maximum, and is also distinguished by the qualities of coercion that bring the master-slave relationship into being and subsequently sustain it.4 Western India in the early modern period was familiar with many varieties of coercion, as H. K. Fukazawa showed in his analysis of eighteenth-century documents.5 The exaction of forced labor (veth-begar) by the powerful was a common incident of rural life, both before and after the onset of colonial rule. Thus documents from the eighteenth century often specify the number of bundles of grassfodder that specific villages had to cut and supply.6 The baggage of traveling dignitaries had to be carried by the residents of one village to the next one, where under normal circumstances it would be the responsibility of the unprivileged residents of that village.7 Brahmans, officials, and local worthies were usually exempt from these demands.8 It therefore appears that either village jurisdictions and borders, or higher authorities, restricted the labor services due from each village, or groups within each. On one occasion, the peshva (chief minister) was moved to issue a general order stipulating that village Mahars (members of a lower jati, or caste) were not required to do more than fifteen days’ work annually, and they were to be fed while performing this duty.9 Men could trade on their proximity to the powerful to make unprecedented demands. Yet, when hangers-on of the peshva’s court who frequently made such demands on the villagers of Ambodi (west of Pune) did so one time too many, the villagers protested to the government. They secured an order authorizing them to arrest anyone who exacted forced labor without a written order from the court.10 Within such a structure, all dependents could be maltreated alike, but retained some ability to protest. Impressed laborers could be coerced by beating and abuse, but they could flee. For example, 250 laborers conscripted by the peshva’s government in 1785 to carry an English envoy’s baggage to Pune dropped their loads half-way and fled.11 The movements of British officials and armies in the early colonial era enlarged demands for this kind of forced labor; some British officials then reinvented what they imagined was “tradition” in order to have these demands met. S. J. Thackeray , principal collector of Dharwar in the early years of the British regime, wrote in 1824, As very few coolies are to be found here, and...

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