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12. Slavery, Semantics, and the Sound of Silence
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12 Slavery, Semantics, and the Sound of Silence Indrani Chatterjee Despite the considerable advances in conceptualizing slavery in global histories , studies of the same phenomenon in South Asian pasts cause profound unease among modern scholars.Avril Powell suggests a history of this sensibility . This essay provides another history for contemporary ambivalence by analyzing imperial censorship of local terms for“slavery.” The indigenous terms that invited imperial censure were initially registered as gendered nouns by a polyglot assistant surgeon—as bay-pa and baynu for the slave-boy and slave-girl respectively.1 During 1894–97, the first Christian missionaries to the Indo-Burmese borderlands of the Lushai Hills (see map 4) wrote the word down as boih or boi, so that the gendered noun was either boih-pa or boih-nu.2 The missionaries used the Roman script for writing down the sounds they heard. Since Tibeto-Burman language groups relied on tonality to distinguish different meanings for identical arrangements of consonants and vowels,3 the choice of script then resulted in a distinct new orthography. The Roman script could not incorporate tonality except by drawing out, adding, or shortening vowels. British military and colonial officers thus transcribed the sound‘o’ as“aw,”so that the word previously written boih became bawi in the early twentieth century.4 Pronounced with a broad vowel, the word becomes indistinguishable from the English euphemism for a male slave, and in the later nineteenth century for an apprentice—“boy.”Yet British officers and missionaries used the word to refer to individuals of both sexes as well as to their condition. Boi or bawi came to mean both “slave” and “slavery.” English speakers failed to specify the gender of the slave. They also failed to identify the owner or master of the slave in describing the condition of bawi-hood. Such innovations must have struck local audiences whose grammar included prefixes indicative of the age and gender of slaves.5 This essay analyzes the ways in which colonized populations manipulated such new vocabularies against their dispossessors. In their attempt to reclaim meaning for themselves, local people too engaged in cultural translations and symbolic reappropriations. In doing so, they foregrounded a particular experience of the past as the basis of an alternative authority to the one forwarded by colonial administrators. The latter’s response was complex: a round of semantic manipulations aimed at silencing the very human beings engaged in the struggle to name themselves, followed by other kinds of repressions. Yet these strategies were not unfamiliar to local populations either. Indeed, it was the familiarity of these semantic feints that led some among them to recognize the intent embodied therein. However, their ultimate failures left the bodies of women and young children vulnerable to multiple projects of control and “invisibilization,” while simultaneously leaving the meanings of many words unsettled. War, Labor, and Local Societies The people among whom the Duhlien languages were spoken lived across the contemporary borderlands of western Myanmar (Burma), eastern Chittagong (Bangladesh), and southern Manipur (India) (see map 4). One of the commonest features of this region between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries was warfare. Histories of Manipur, Tripura, Cachar,and Assam suggest a decentralization of military power in these centuries and its mustering under specific conditions by“royal”order.6 This decentralization of soldiering brought local households and peripheral regions into regular relationships with the kings and courts, and shaped the nature of social structures. Labor was wealth to be accumulated in warfare between the Burman,Arakanese,Ahom, Manipuri, Tripuri, and Tai-Shan polities between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries.7 Captives counted.8 In the seventeenth century, a Manipuri ruler who had captured a thousand “Kachari ”soldiers“appointed them to work as bugler, drummer, dhobi, mahout of elephant, syces for horses and other works according to their respective qualities.”9 A neighboring ruler of Tripura resettled captives from the coastal Arakanese (Magh) populations in the highlands, where they were to clear forests for cultivation.10 This acquisition of labor power through warfare continued in the nineteenth century.11 Chronicles also outlined the exchange values of such war booty. The Tripura Rajamala records that the wages of sixteenth-century military levies were based on monetized values of plunder. Verses give four annas as the value of each cow, two annas for each goat, and sixteen annas (or a full rupee of silver) as the value of each human captured. Military levies from Syl288 | INDRANI CHATTERJEE...