Slavery and South Asian History

Introduction

Introduction Richard M. Eaton One of the aims of this volume is to document the remarkable range of types of slavery that appeared across a thousand years of South Asian history. Some of these types appeared at isolated moments, some spanned large swaths of time and space, some occurred simultaneously with others. Thus in the seventeenth century, enslaved female performers circulated among elite Rajput houses even while Arab merchants delivered slave-soldiers from Africa to buyers on the Deccan plateau. A century later, the Maratha state was deploying for menial labor in its hill forts women who had been enslaved for their household’s failure to pay revenue. On the far eastern side of the subcontinent, meanwhile, endemic warfare between states in Manipur, Tripura, Cachar, and Assam produced enslaved captives whom those states then deployed to clear forests for cultivation. There is, then, no single story of slavery in South Asian history. There is no overarching master narrative, no tidy sequence of evolutionary “stages” of the sort that theorists like Condorcet, Marx, or Toynbee envisioned for other historical phenomena. Each instance of slavery in South Asia was shaped by a unique conjunction of contingent factors; hence each, in order to be properly understood, must be placed in its own unique context, which is what these essays endeavor to do. There are sound reasons for documenting the varieties of slavery found in South Asia’s history. For one thing, such an exercise can broaden our understanding of an institution that is commonly but mistakenly understood as a monolithic, one-size-fits-all phenomenon, characterized by features such as natal alienation, persons-as-property, coercion, or “social death.” Data from South Asia can also serve to correct the widespread tendency to view histories of slavery in teleological terms, that is, as a triumphant march from bondage to “freedom.”A prominent academic unit at Yale University, for example, is named the“Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition,” as though resistance were a natural corollary to slavery, and abolition its inevitable destiny. Postulating “freedom” as slavery ’s universal antithesis is especially problematic, if only because it subtly encourages the idea that the burden of “free”peoples is to complete a EuroAmerican project of liberating the post-1789 world from “unfreedom.”1 After all, in the late nineteenth century Europeans conquered a good part of Africa precisely in the name of “liberating”Africans from a form of capitalist slavery that Europeans themselves had introduced.2 The study of slavery thus carries an immense load of ideological baggage . What is more, scholars must contend with the overwhelming, even hegemonic, influence exerted on slavery studies by the Atlantic plantation model, instances of which appeared in the Caribbean, Brazil, and the American South. While this volume does not question the validity of that model so far as it describes one well-known form of slavery, it would reject efforts to project the Atlantic model, or any model, onto all other instances of the phenomenon, most certainly those found in the history of South Asia. Rather, we hope that the variety of forms described in this volume will contribute to expanding the conceptual range of slavery as a category of historical study. Eventually, scholars may be able to place all varieties of slavery, including the Atlantic plantation model, in broader frameworks of comparative history and even world history.3 Definitions The appearance in this volume of indigenous terms like ghulam, banda, laundi, boi, and dasa demonstrates that each of the societies herein examined identified certain of their members as occupying a position clearly distinct from those of other members. But what did such indigenous terms actually mean? What was it that persons so designated shared in common that warrants our calling them all “slaves?”And what do we mean by that term? Notably, few of the contributors to this volume cite any of the myriad definitions of slavery that exist in the literature, or venture to offer definitions of their own. This might reflect an implicit assumption that“everyone knows” what slavery is. Or perhaps it stems from a certain diffidence among South Asianists to venture onto terrain so long trod by, among others, classicists, Africanists, and historians of the antebellum United States. It nonetheless seems appropriate to consider how our contributors understand and deploy the term. Speaking very broadly, the cases examined in this volume suggest an understanding of slavery as the condition of uprooted outsiders...