Chanis of servitude : bondage & slavery in India

The essays in this volume bring together diverse aspects of bondedness and exploitative employer-labourer relations, particularly among the rural population.

The first section traces the historical roots of the present status of the bonded and unfree. Uma Chakravarti begins the section with a discussion of the evolution of the institution of slavery in ancient India. This is followed by an essay on slavery in medieval India, in which Salim Kidwai focuses on certain new forms of servitude domestic slavery for instance introduced after the Ghorian conquests from the twelfth century. In the last of the historical essays, Tanika Sarkar analyses slavery and debt bondage in the early colonial period, indicating the persistence of domestic slavery and a flourishing slave import market, in which the Europeans also participated.

The second section is an overview of some contemporary aspects of bondage, and consists of five area studies in agriculture and crafts, which highlight the underlying unity of the phenomenon of bondage despite very diverse regional conditions. The five case studies include one on agricultural labour and handloom weavers in South Arcot district, Tamil Nadu; on brick kiln workers in Muzaffarnagar district, Bihar; on migrant labourers in rural Punjab; on bonded tribals in Santhal Parganas; and on prostitution as bondage in Jaunsar Bawar, Dehradun District, Uttar Pradesh. All five studies point to one essential relationship that between bondage and destitution. This destitution in turn is either a legacy of the precapitalist direct relations of landlessness and subordi nation to which certain castes have been traditionally subjected by those monopolising landed property; or it is the outcome of the impoverishment of those petty producers who initially possessed some means of production, and from which they have been separated.