Slavery in India - Possible British Colonial Reconstruction of Dependency Relations Into Slavery and Debt Bondage

Possible British Colonial Reconstruction of Dependency Relations Into Slavery and Debt Bondage

Gyan Prakash, is of the opinion that the abolition of slavery in India in 1843 constructed the British government as a force of reason and progress, while it actually refashioned slavery and turned it into debt-bondage. In form of a detailed case study, he has studied the changing fate of the kamias, a group of agricultural labourers, who were largely members of a larger outcaste Bhuniya community in the Gaya district of south Bihar. These kamias had long-term relations to landlords (maliks), who mostly belonged to upper castes. In fact, this kamia-malik tie was shaped like a patron-client relationship as is evident for example through the institution of kamiauti, a transaction of grain, money and a plot of land given to the kamia by the landlord if the former’s son married -"these relations were structured as dependent ties that represented the landlord as a munificent patron and the labourer as his dependent subject".

In their pledge to uphold Indian traditions, the British – according to Prakash – first had to discover and invent these traditions by alleging that slavery had a base in indigenous laws. Recognition of slavery started with a declaration in 1774 of the Provincial Council at Patna, stating that slavery should not be hereditary but lifelong, and that a particular form of slavery was "almost as if no bondage existed." With this, slavery was put under the category of "unfreedom" with the only antonym as "bondage". Further recognition of slavery was the Orientalist interpretation of classical texts, such as H.T. Colebrooke's Digest of Hindu Law on Contracts and Successions (1801), which allowed the British to assume inherent classifications of polluted and non-polluted labour to certain groups, with corresponding categories for unfree and free. In 1808, a Magistrate from Bundelkhand sent a letter to the court in Calcutta in which he denounced the existence of slavery in India, leading to a series of questions being made to pundits and muftis attached to the court whose replies were interpreted as support for the indigenous existence of slavery.

Slavery was reconstituted – in the case of kamias – as "voluntarily entered" bondage. The meaning of kamiauti changed notion with changing agrarian relations as a result of the 1843 Abolition Act, and was now seen as a "loan" but no longer an advance given by the malik to the kamia. After the abolition of slavery in 1843, the kamias had to sign contracts for the raising of loans in which they pleaded to pay back a given sum or remain in bondage until they had done so. With these contracts essentially establishing a debtor-creditor relation, landlords could proceed to the court in case the labourer did not fulfill his plea and demand their right, leading to debt-bondage. The previous dependent-patron transaction of kamiauti was recasting as "voluntary" contracts of otherwise free persons. According to Prakash, "the beginning of kamiauti’s documentation in the early nineteenth century initiated its objectification in a body of records that (...) revealed the history of kamia-malik relations in terms of transactions of things."

In this case, he points to the Surveys undertaken by Francis Buchanan in south Bihar from 1809 to 1812 in which Buchanan stated regional and also structural variations in the actual process of kamiauti. It furthermore suggested that the money given to kamias had varied effects. However, these variations of kamiauti were not included into The Report from the India Law Commissioners in 1841. Rather than acknowledging these variations, the Commissioners’ ignored the inconsistencies in the debt-bondage view and saw variation only in terms of the length of servitude. After slavery had been abolished in 1843, all kamia-malik disputes were brought to district courts as violations of creditor-debtor contracts, with the positions of kamias significantly worsened compared to pre-colonial times.

Only recognizing in the beginning of the 20th century that kamias were actually treated as debt-serfs and their condition similar to slavery, the government tried to reverse the process in the Bihar and Orissa Kamiauti Agreement Act issued in 1920, which stated that the labour of one year was sufficient to repay the advance plus interest on it, thus making bondage exceeding this duration illegal. The law did not achieve its purpose and reinforced the view of bondage being "so deeply rooted in Indian otherness that no law could change it." With the failing of these laws, it was concluded that kamias "lacked the desire for freedom."

The colonial bondage system absorbed larger parts of society as well as territory. Thus it was possible even for low-caste rich peasants to hire kamias indicating a separation of labour relations from traditional ritual hierarchy. Further more groups were subjugated into debt-bondage and the system expanded into other areas of south Bihar and Chota Nagpur. Additionally, the unleashing of the bondage system led to the fact that agricultural production increasingly relied on intensifying labour exploitation.