I employ ‘agrestic servitude’ to cover both farm-slavery proper, which existed in Hausaland in 1900, but not (of course) in south-eastern Mysore, and the bonded farm-labouring system of Mysore, which had no counterpart in rural Hausaland. Nowadays, as we know, there are very few household heads in either region who are prevented, by bonds of agrestic servitude alone, from being free cultivators.

CONTRACT LABOURERS IN KARNATAKA

Defining contract labourers in south-eastern Karnataka as those not employed on the usual daily basis, but for longer periods, our first question is whether significant proportions of such labourers in earlier times were likely to have been bonded labourers proper – i.e. men tied by debt to their masters.

The literature on the history of contract labourers in south-eastern Mysore is very weak – indeed, it would be virtually non-existent were it not for Buchanan. Sources on south Indian bonded labouring, such as Hjejle, usually refer almost exclusively to the Madras Presidency, partly because Mysore, as a princely state, was backward in record keeping. Even so, I think it is significant that I could find hardly any references to contract labouring in south-eastern Mysore in the Karnataka State Archives, references to day labourers being numerous. Nor has recent fieldwork been of much help. In the Anekal villages a careful distinction is always made between daily-paid labourers (kuli) and full-time farm servants, who are very rare, but everyone seemed to have his own definition of such euphemistic Kannada words as sambalagara, jitadalu, alugalu, batigaru, all of which refer to labourers on some kind of contract basis.