From Himal Southasian
How one Dalit woman’s courage in 1841 challenged a centuries-old system of caste-based slavery and hastened the promise of freedom for millions
In February 1841, Islamic clerics in Madras appointed by the East India Company to serve in the Faujdari Adalat – the Madras Presidency’s highest criminal court – issued a fatwa that, though forgotten by history, changed the face of slavery in Southasia. For what was possibly the first time in modern Southasian history, a legal judgment abolished an entire, oft-overlooked system of slavery: slavery predicated entirely upon caste.
The case before the clerics concerned an escaped woman, one of millions of hereditary slaves who laboured the fields of South India in accordance with a supposedly timeless caste tradition. Her name was Eesoo. She hailed from a caste that we would today call Dalit. Four months earlier, Eesoo had walked out of her master’s house in North Canara – Uttara Kannada in modern-day Karnataka – and refused to go back.
The outlook for Eesoo was not good. British courts in colonial India had a history of upholding slavery, and even ordered slave auctions themselves. Despite pressure from British Abolitionists, the East India Company was unambiguous in its desire to preserve Indian slavery. Even as Eesoo’s case was being heard, a 595-page report was being submitted before the British parliament in London recommending against abolishing slavery. But things were about to change, starting with the judgment in Eesoo’s case. The fatwa declared that Eesoo was not, and never had been, a slave. Neither was anyone else who had been enslaved on the basis of caste.
Slavery is not a word that one finds very often in histories of Southasia. If mentioned, it is usually with reference to “Islamic slavery”, and particularly the mamluks, or warrior-slaves, employed by medieval Islamic states, most famous in Southasia for founding the Delhi Sultanate. However, Muslims had not brought slavery to Southasia: it had existed here since ancient times. As enumerated in the collected volume Slavery and South Asian History, there were captive slave women in the ancient Chola courts, slave concubines and dancing girls of fifteenth-century Rajput princes, thousands of battle captives who laboured for the Maratha kingdoms, and their counterparts who cleared forests for cultivation in Manipur, Tripura and Assam. Southasian merchants long plied the slave-trading routes of the Indian Ocean. But there was another, more widespread form of slavery that even this collection omits.
When slavery is discussed in the Southasian context, it is not a word one finds often in conjunction with caste. Though caste is acknowledged these days as an unjust system of oppression, most people usually shy away from comparing it to racism or slavery – a comparison that Dalits and Adivasis have long been making. This was not always the case. When Europeans first arrived in the Subcontinent, they observed slavery in plentiful evidence everywhere. In South India, they found entire castes considered to be slaves from birth, forbidden to hold land and condemned to labour for savarna landholders.
Only a handful of scholars have examined this system of caste slavery. In the 1960s, a few historians, like Dharma Kumar and Benedicte Hjejle, wrote extensively on the topic. They were followed by Utsa Patnaik and Manjari Dingwaney in the 1980s. Then the topic was virtually forgotten in scholarship, until it was resurrected in the 2010s by Rupa Viswanath, Andrea Major and P Sanal Mohan. Only in the Indian state of Kerala is caste slavery relatively more studied and discussed, featuring significantly in recent times in discussions of local Dalit and tribal history.
But even if academia forgot, others did not. Many references can be found in the popular culture, traditional stories, contemporary writings and origin myths of South Indian Dalits and Adivasis to the centuries of adimaithanam – slavery – they endured.
Though there has recently been some new writing on caste slavery, many questions remain uninterrogated. These concern the precise nature of the relationship between caste and slavery, and what this reveals about the nature of caste in South India. Scholars like Howard Temperley have written about the history of slavery’s formal abolition in India, but the story remains one that not many are aware of. Even fewer are aware of how predominantly caste featured in the debates surrounding abolition.
It was in London, when searching through the India Office Records – a trove of colonial-era administrative papers – that I stumbled upon handwritten letters compiled by a 19th-century secretary that laid bare Eesoo’s story: the story, until now lost to history, of an escaped woman whose case played a pivotal role in the leadup to the abolition of slavery in India, and which reveals much about the importance of caste to slavery and the importance of slavery to caste.
Sreyartha Krishna is a student of history and an aspiring fiction writer from Sittilingi, Tamil Nadu. This article is the result of research done for his dissertation at SOAS, University of London.