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4 - ‘This Household Servitude’: Domestic Slavery and Immoral Commerce

from Part III - Indian Slaveries

Andrea Major
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
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Summary

In December 1834, in the wake of the previous year's parliamentary debates on the Emancipation Act and the EIC Charter, the Board of Control wrote to Governor-General Lord William Bentinck instructing the Government of India to turn its attention to the question of slavery in their territories. ‘This subject in India is one of great delicacy’, the Board acknowledged, ‘requiring to be treated with the utmost discretion’, adding,

There are certain kinds of restraint required, according to native ideas, for the government of families and forming, according both to law and custom, part of the rights of heads of families, Mussulman and Hindoo, which are not to be included under the title slavery. In legislating, therefore, on slavery, though it may not be easy to define the term precisely, it is necessary that the state to which your measures are meant to apply be described with due care.

Incautious action would be both impolitic and unnecessary, they warned, for the kind slavery that prevailed in India was not like that of the West Indies, being mostly domestic and ‘generally mild’. In support of this assertion, the letter outlined what the Board of Control believed to be the normative experience of domestic slaves in India:

The origin of a great part of it is in seasons of scarcity, when a parent who is unable to maintain his child sells him to some person of ample means. He is then reared as part of the family into which he is received, and feels himself on a level, but little below, and even sometimes above, that of an ordinary servant. To dissolve such a connection by forcible means would in general be to inflict an injury on the emancipated individual. The means of escape, where the colour, features and shape of the slave are not distinguished from those of other classes, and in a country of vast extent, facilitating distant removal, are so easy that the treatment of a slave cannot be worse than that of an ordinary servant, without giving him adequate motive to abscond; and the market value is so small that it is seldom worth while to be at the trouble of sending after him.

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Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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