Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Glossary
- Some Prominent Figures in the British Parliament, the Abolitionist Movement and the East India Company
- Part I Other Slaveries
- Part II European Slaveries
- Part III Indian Slaveries
- Part IV Imagined Slaveries
- Introduction: Evangelical Connections
- 7 ‘Satan's Wretched Slaves’: Indian Society and the Evangelical Imagination
- 8 ‘The Produce of the East by Free Men’: Indian Sugar and Indian Slavery in British Abolitionist Debates, 1793–1833
- Conclusion: ‘Do Justice to India’: Abolitionists and Indian Slavery, 1839–1843
- Select Bibliography
- Index
7 - ‘Satan's Wretched Slaves’: Indian Society and the Evangelical Imagination
from Part IV - Imagined Slaveries
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Glossary
- Some Prominent Figures in the British Parliament, the Abolitionist Movement and the East India Company
- Part I Other Slaveries
- Part II European Slaveries
- Part III Indian Slaveries
- Part IV Imagined Slaveries
- Introduction: Evangelical Connections
- 7 ‘Satan's Wretched Slaves’: Indian Society and the Evangelical Imagination
- 8 ‘The Produce of the East by Free Men’: Indian Sugar and Indian Slavery in British Abolitionist Debates, 1793–1833
- Conclusion: ‘Do Justice to India’: Abolitionists and Indian Slavery, 1839–1843
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In laying the varied but momentous topics contained in this volume before a British public, the author's avowed intention is, to awaken our national sympathies on behalf of the victims and devotees of superstition, whose cause he pleads. Some years since, a few powerful voices roused the slumbering energies of Britain to survey the horrors of the slave trade. In favour of the injured Africans, petitions assailed the legislature from every quarter and, in the memorable year of 1807; the death warrant of this abominable traffic was signed. The shriek of the Hindoo widow from the burning pile, the imploring groans of the afflicted about to be plunged into the Ganges, and the expiring sighs of the miserable victims perishing beneath the wheels of Juggernaut, though uttered in India, are heard in Britain, and solicit the generous aid which Africa experienced at her hands. The cause which the author advocates has a claim upon British humanity and justice scarcely inferior to that which Wilberforce pleaded in the senate, Granville Sharp in our courts of justice, and Clarkson before a sympathizing public, and if followed up with the same spirit of serious perseverance, there can be little doubt that it will ultimately be crowned with similar success.
Imperial Magazine 11 (1829), p. 460So wrote an anonymous reviewer in the Imperial Magazine of James Peggs' India's Cries to British Humanity, on its first publication in 1829. In this substantial volume, Peggs, who had served as a Baptist missionary in Cuttack, Orissa, in the early 1820s, gave a detailed and critical account of a range of Hindu customs, including sati, ‘ghaut’ murders (the exposure of the sick and dying on the banks of the Ganges) and the festival of Juggernath. Critiquing EIC tolerance of these practices, he encouraged evangelical supporters of the missionary project to put pressure on India's British rulers to end these ‘heathen’ rites and promote a more Christian form of government there. In a second edition of this work, published a year later in 1830, he added substantial sections on infanticide and Indian slavery, the latter providing a detailed overview of that institution based on material from the recently published Parliamentary Papers.
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- Slavery, Abolitionism and Empire in India, 1772–1843 , pp. 246 - 292Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012