Vectors of Enslavement: Poverty, Trafficking, Caste, and Debt Bondage

The networks of the Indian Ocean, as well as a variety of indigenous practices, subtended slavery in the region long before the first Portuguese ship loomed over the horizon. It did not take long for the Portuguese to insert themselves into this system. Their adoption of the practice and terminology of begār, for example, reflected labor arrangements that predated their arrival and which were then incorporated into the constitution of the early colonial state: one provision of the 1526 charter which regulated the land tenure system of the fledgling colonial state, and represented a compact between the Portuguese crown and Goa’s village communities, enjoined landholding village chiefs or gancars to supply residents as “begarins, who are workers, every year at their expense, to clean the walls and plaques [chapas] of this city of the weeds that grow on them, and other necessary and urgent services that may sometimes arise.”Footnote ⁷ Conflict over extraction of corvée labor from the communidades became a perennial theme of colonial politics.

Furthermore, the Portuguese state continued to allow the extraction of labor from communities on the basis of caste. The famed physician Garcia d’Orta, writing in 1563, described such labor extraction from communities deemed untouchable in Portuguese Bassein: “In every village, there is a people despised and abhorred by all, who do not touch others, who eat everything, even carrion [as cousas mortas]. Each village gives them its leftovers to eat, without touching them. Their concern is to cleanse the houses and streets of dirt. They are called deres or farazes. They also serve as executioners.”Footnote ⁸

Aside from these indigenous modalities of coercing labor, the Portuguese also extended their own institutions, first elaborated in Iberia, to their imperial outpost, introducing for example, the system of penal exile in Goa.Footnote ⁹ Moreover, the state had a complex system of compensating its officials in people who were assigned a variety of juridical states, but who effectively served at the pleasure of and were dependent upon the state.Footnote ¹⁰ The enslavement of individuals thus existed on a continuum of forced labor practices and dependency, within a variety of institutional contexts.

Enslavement was undergirded in part by poverty, which ensured the relative cheapness of enslaved labor. Writing from Kollam in 1550, the Jesuit Nicolò Lancilotto noted that the market in enslaved people was fueled by the phenomenon of people either selling themselves or their kin out of desperation and that the prices for slaves fluctuated with the availability of food.Footnote ¹¹ That enslaved labor was cheaper is indicated by the instructions the future saint Francis Xavier gave to the Jesuit Kaspar Berze in 1552 regarding the economic administration of their college in Goa: he advised him to “buy a pair of mainatos [members of a washermen caste], who are in charge of doing the laundry [since] it will be cheaper to buy mainatos, than give the laundry to mainatos from outside.”Footnote ¹² In other words, wage labor extracted from free people was more expensive than acquiring enslaved people from the same caste. A few decades later, the abundant supply and low prices of enslaved people in Goa was also attested by the French navigator François Pyrard, who wrote that all the slaves displayed in the auctions held on the Rua Direita were “very cheap, the dearest not being worth more than 20 or 30 pardaus.”Footnote ¹³

That the agrarian poor were particularly vulnerable to enslavement, as Lancilotto suggested, is evident in a register of people manumitted in Goa in the late seventeenth century.Footnote ¹⁴ Bearing in mind that the manumitted were more likely to be those most cheaply acquired and easily replaced, the most heavily represented caste in the register was the “curumby” (kuḍumbi/kuṇbi), an agricultural caste (103 out of a total of 724 people, or about 14 percent of the manumittees). Garcia d’Orta described this community as those who “work and sow the earth for rice and other legumes, who they call curumbins and we [call] farmers.”Footnote ¹⁵ A further twenty-five people were also described as śudra; that is, from other touchable but low-caste communities.

It is notable that there were vanishingly few manumitted subjects in the register who were explicitly listed as hailing from the community of farazes deemed untouchable. Given that the vast number of these manumitted people likely served in domestic settings in the city of Goa, it seems that slave-owners, particularly indigenous converts and their descendants, preferred to enslave people from the touchable community of kuṇbis. It is revealing, therefore, that the owner of the faraz Pascoela was listed as the casado João Pinto Ribeiro, a Portuguese resident of Rachol, and of Ilena as the noblewoman Dona Joana de Sousa, residing in Goa. For Portuguese slave-owners, the strictures of untouchability clearly did not prevent them from enslaving individual members of the faraz community. By and large, the combination of low status, economic vulnerability, and touchability seem to have made kuṇbis particularly vulnerable to enslavement: indeed, we will see that, for the neighboring Marathas, the caste name would come to serve as a synonym for “slave,” particularly for enslaved women, whose sexual exploitation was dependent on their touchability.

At the other end of the social spectrum, far fewer people from dominant castes were represented in the register of manumitted people. Nineteen manumittees were “charado,” a martial caste, and only ten hailed from the mercantile vania caste. There was also one Dorotea, described as botta, who may have had brahmin origins and was enslaved by a woman. Botto was a Portuguese borrowing for bhat, a designation for brahmin priests learned in Sanskrit. Dorotea’s gender may have made her more vulnerable to enslavement than male members of her caste.Footnote ¹⁶ Thus, even under Portuguese rule, caste status clearly played a role in structuring slavery.

Apart from poverty and, interrelatedly, caste status, slave-raiding and trafficking was crucial to the structure of the trade in people along the coast. In 1545, the vicar-general of Goa, Miguel Vaz, wrote a detailed memorial to the king in which he noted that the Portuguese were not only routinely taking enslaved boys from the Coromandel Coast and other parts, but were also selling them for profit to Muslims in Bhatkal, Dabul, and other areas outside Portuguese jurisdiction.Footnote ¹⁷

What is interesting is that contemporaneous descriptions of these ports do not seem to indicate that they were important nodes for the trade in people. Thus, an anonymous geography of roughly the same period described the brisk trade at Bhatkal in coastal products such as rice, coconuts, and palm wine or urraca from the Kanara and Malabar coasts; products from the interior hinterlands, including cotton and marble; as well as oceanic commodities, including war horses, pearls, and spices, particularly pepper.Footnote ¹⁸ Nowhere in this detailed inventory, which included estimates of the value of the trade conducted at the port, was there mention of trade in enslaved people. It may thus well have been that it was the Portuguese who introduced or at least intensified commodified slavery along such ports.Footnote ¹⁹ Nonetheless, Vaz’ memorial suggests that by the time of his writing there existed a country trade in people organized along a network of ports mediated by Portuguese slave-raiding along the subcontinent’s coast.

By 1557, the roster of the residents of the Jesuit College listed the following captive people (moços cativos de casa): the Africans (cafres) Gaspar Velho, João Pirez, Christovão Agostinho de Sousa, and Gaspar; the Javanese Bastião; the Malabari Tomé, and the Ethiopians Joane and Pedro.Footnote ²⁰ The range of points of origin is illustrative of the different networks of trafficking that brought people to the slave emporium of Goa from across the Indian Ocean.

The legalities and ethics of this phenomenon certainly troubled some observers since the prevalent practice of slave-raiding had no justification in canon law. In 1567, the Jesuit Pedro Boaventura wrote to Francisco Borges from Cochin, urging him to pass an order that, even if it could not be made law within Portuguese territories, should at least made incumbent upon Jesuits that slaves “should not be kept against their will as is done, who are certainly stolen by thieves and sold to the Portuguese.” Boaventura went on: “This is such a great abuse in this part that despite having no war (except with the Turks … and sometimes with some Malabares), there happen to be forty thousand slaves in Goa and forty in our college, of whom it is true that a twentieth part were taken against divine and human law. Despite this, we treat them worse than slaves.Footnote ²¹

As Boaventura made clear, these modes of enslavement had no theological justification within Christian doctrines of just war, and that local practice was vastly different from canonical treatises on the subject. Describing how captives walked “with very thick irons or are often well muzzled, which shuts their mouths to outsiders,” he lamented that they were unable to exercise freedom though “they never lost it.” Moreover, “it does not hinder them that there are laws in this land of Preste Juan [Ethiopia], China, and Japan that they cannot be sold (and the same reason pertains to Bengal and Cafraria [Africa], with whom we have never had war).”

Despite these concerns, enslavement and trafficking flourished and nearly forty years later little had changed: Pyrard observed that Portuguese had little scruple in carrying off children, “both small and big, and as many as they could, even if they were the children of friends, and even if there was a peace treaty by which they are forbidden to enslave them, but [despite which] they do not stop to sell and kidnap them in secret.”Footnote ²²

The trafficking networks that fed the western coast’s slave economy radiated in three directions. The first involved the hinterlands of the coast as both a target for slave-raiding, as well as a thoroughfare to interior polities, where a thriving demand for enslaved people also existed. The second vector was the country trade in people along the coast itself. Lastly, oceanic networks that radiated in multiple directions—westward into the Gulf of Arabia and toward the Horn of Africa, southwest toward Mozambique, and eastwards into the Bay of Bengal and beyond—carried enslaved people to and from the shores of the west coast.

We can glean something of the dispersal of people trafficked to or enslaved in the region through João Delgado Figueira’s Reportório geral de tres mil oito centos processos (General report of 3,800 cases), which lists the prisoners tried by the Inquisition of Goa from 1561 to 1623.Footnote ²³ The jurisdictional boundaries of the Inquisition of Goa means that this dataset does not adequately represent the full dispersal of people trafficked from the region. The records of other Inquisitorial offices, for example, reveals the presence of people born in Goa, whose trajectories of trafficking and enslavement took them outside even the vast ambit of the Goan Inquisition.Footnote ²⁴

Still, given the jurisdictional boundaries of the office, the Reportório is a useful gauge of how mobility structured the institution of slavery. Its records of both prisoners and denouncers, who were enslaved (escravos—261 people), freed (forro—twenty-two people), or described as captive (four people), comprise 224 men and sixty-three women. It is evident that enslaved people were born across the entire swathe of Asia, from Aleppo to Nagasaki. Trafficking clearly concentrated people from these far-flung corners of the Indian Ocean into important hubs on the western coast of the subcontinent, particularly Goa (see map 2).

Maps 2a and 2b.

Birthplace and residence of enslaved, captured, or freed subjects in the Reportorio. Size of location marker corresponds to the number of subjects.

Of the thirty-eight people born in the west coast, not including Gujarat, only five were known to be residing there. (This does not even capture trafficking along the coast itself: many people classified as Malabaris, for example, were living in Goa). Conversely, of the eighty-eight enslaved people living in the region, at least twenty-four were not born there (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Mobility of enslaved, captive, or freed subjects mentioned in the Reportório, from or into the west coast, excluding Gujarat. Source: Bruno Feitler, Repertorio: Uma base de dados dos processos da Inquisição de Goa (1561–1623), http://www.im.mx/reportorio/reportorio/home.html (accessed 13 Nov. 2018)

The role of trafficking in undergirding the system of enslavement is also apparent in the register of manumitted people, mentioned above. The sample recorded in this register is unlikely to be representative of the actual population of enslaved people during the period in question. One must bear in mind that the manumissions were effected in part through the intercession of religious authorities, in particular the Pai do Cristãos, which unquestionably had bearing on who was manumitted.Footnote ²⁵ For religious authorities, the sexual enslavement of women in domestic settings threatened the Christian sacrament of marriage, a fact reflected in the demographic balance of the register: over two-thirds of the manumitted people were women.Footnote ²⁶ Similarly, manumitted people were also more likely to have either outlived their usefulness or be more easily and cheaply replaceable, such that only one “Abexim” (Abyssinian or Ethiopian) is listed in the sample of 724 people. This is less a signal of the rarity of Africans in Goa than an indication perhaps of the higher cost of enslaved Africans and concomitantly the relative reluctance of slaveholders to manumit them.Footnote ²⁷ The Portuguese court chronicler António Bocarro, whose 1635 survey of Portuguese fortresses and settlements provides a range of estimates on the share of enslaved people in the population, repeatedly emphasized that the majority of the enslaved people in the city of Goa were cafres (Africans), with the rest comprising “other nations of the Indies” (outras nações da Índia).Footnote ²⁸

With these caveats in mind, the biggest group in the register, “gatuals,” accounted for half the people, or 362. The term most likely described people hailing from the mountains in the hinterland of the coast (see map 3).Footnote ²⁹

Map 3.

Abraham Ortelius, Map of Malabar, 1580.

This interpretation of “gatual,” as a way to describe people from the mountains edging the coast, is also consonant with contemporary usage: in Goa today, “ghāti” is often pejoratively used to refer to poor migrant workers hailing from the mountainous border regions. Moreover, it carries negative connotations of blackness and Scheduled Tribe origin: in 2019, the Goa Tourism Minister Manohar Ajgaonkar attempted to parry criticism of his deployment of the term against migrant workers by claiming that it is used solely to indicate geographical origin in the mountains, a claim few Goans were duped by.Footnote ³⁰

The nature of the relationship between mountain communities and coastal peoples can be garnered from a fascinating account of Jacome Ferreira’s 1603 journey from the coast to make contact with the Toda. The expedition was mediated by two key go-betweens: a guide from the mercantile chetty caste, and a Christian named Errari, who not only spoke Kannada in addition to his native tongue but was the nephew of the Sāmuthiri king and thus helped facilitate their travel across political boundaries. The cultural gulf that these go-betweens felt between the mountains and the coastal world they came from was profound: “Errari, seeing himself in those mountains, claimed God had punished him for his sins and that in ascending and descending those mountains he had cut ten years of his life. The Chetty who guided us, looking up at a mountain from below, said: ‘O my mother, who only looks from below, if you could only see my eyes,’ and at other times the Nairs said much the same in similar places.”Footnote ³¹

The Toda themselves, who Ferreira estimated to number no more than a thousand, were spread across four mountains. Two of these mountains were in present-day Kerala (one of which Ferreira visited), where around a third of the population lived, and which fell within the territory of the Sāmuthiri. Another three hundred lived in the lands of the Naiks, in present-day Karnataka, while the rest lived in the territory of another unnamed king. Their closest interactions were with the Badagas, to whom they paid tribute. The Badagas, who spoke Kannada and occupied the lower reaches of the mountains, clearly had deeper connections, through trade and warfare, with coastal peoples than the more remotely located Toda. Nonetheless, as the expedition wound through the mountains, it was clear that such coastal interlopers were viewed with suspicion, in part because they might take captives. Ferreira himself reported that, after exchanging objects like mirrors and establishing communication, he had eventually asked the Todas for two boys to take back with him, a request they naturally declined. The small expedition, dependent on their guests for survival in the mountains, may have been unable, rather than merely unwilling, to press the point. As the expedition reached the foot of the mountain on their return they passed a village of Badagas, who feared they were a warring party. (Indeed, at the start of their journey, they had been forced to change routes to avoid the conflict raging in the region.) Ferreira reported that the villagers abandoned the settlement and fled into the forest. Even when their guides shouted that they were “people of peace” and had been to see the Todas, they found the men armed with spears, while the women and children hid in the bush. A little further, when they passed a few houses, all the women with children in their laps retreated into the woods. (Given that there was also an enslaved person explicitly identified as Badaga in the dataset constructed from the Goan inquisitorial trials, these fears were absolutely justified.)

Coastal slave-raiding’s role in enslavement is also clear in the register: thirteen manumittees were from the kolī fishing caste from the northern provinces along the western coast; one was from the Fishery Coast, where the Portuguese had long maintained a client group among the Parava fishermen. A Muslim convert hailed from Masulipatnam, a key port in the Bay of Bengal, and another was identified as Bengali. Again, bear in mind that the demographic balance of the manumittees was likely not representative of the enslaved population in general, and enslaved people from more distant climes in the Bay of Bengal may well have been considered too expensive for slaveholders to manumit freely in large numbers. We do know that the Portuguese, building on the Arakanese commercial system, maintained an active slaving hub in the Bay of Bengal.Footnote ³² The Mughal chronicler Abdul Hamid Lahori (d. 1654) claimed that when the Mughals, concerned at the loss of agricultural rent caused by the trafficking of cultivators, attacked the Portuguese, they freed “nearly 10,000 inhabitants of the neighbouring country who had been kept in confinement by these tyrants.”Footnote ³³ It is thus hardly surprising that some of this huge number of enslaved Bengalis would end up in Goa. As Pyrard remarked in his account of his voyage in the region in the closing years of the sixteenth century, not only was “one of the greatest traffics” of Bengal in enslaved people, but Bengalis constituted “most of the slaves of India.”Footnote ³⁴

Outside the subcontinent, as Bocarro’s survey suggests, Africans were clearly trafficked in large numbers. Even prior to the arrival of the Portuguese, Africans were an important element of coastal society. The peculiar history of Sidi Asim is instructive here: a Muslim merchant of African descent from Surat, Sidi Asim was captured during a business trip to Pate in 1678, one of the most powerful polities of the Swahili coast, and eventually sold to a Goan Christian fisherman in Bardez. Baptized as Paulo, he recognized his own brother in January of 1683, who was serving as the headman of a boat in the company of the Mughal ambassador. Using the disorder caused by Sambhaji’s forces in the region, he fled to Surat where he married his erstwhile fiancée, Lakṣmī (whose name implies her Hindu origins), and they had a son. Emboldened perhaps by his privileged status and the passage of time, he returned to Goa and was living in the house of the Mughal ambassador when he was denounced by his former slaveholder to the Inquisition.Footnote ³⁵ Thus, a Muslim merchant and relatively well-connected subject of the Mughal Empire found himself enslaved further south by a Goan Christian, a fisherman by caste and occupation, and a subject of the Portuguese Empire.

To make sense of the jarring turns in the life and fortunes of Sidi Asim, it is necessary to understand both the long-standing nature and the vagaries of the trade in enslaved Africans in South Asia. The avid demand for Africans in the military labor markets of the subcontinent had sustained a vigorous transoceanic commerce between Ethiopia and South Asia dating to at least the first century of the common era, dominated by merchants who were Arab and South Asian, particularly Gujarati.Footnote ³⁶

The most prized people during the period when the oceanic trade centered on the Gulf of Arabia hailed from the Horn of Africa. In Ethiopia, the central Christian polity would enslave and send non-Christian captives raided from the fringes of its empire to the coast for sale to Arab brokers, who would then convert them on board. According to one mid-sixteenth-century Jesuit account, approximately ten to twelve thousand people were exported annually.Footnote ³⁷ They were dispersed to markets in the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean, so only a fraction of this number would have entered South Asia. South Asian records refer to them as Habshis (Abyssinians), Sidis (a corruption of Saiyyad), or kāfir, again indicating the mediation of Islamic merchants and their categorization of Ethiopian slaves.Footnote ³⁸

The Portuguese disruption of the Indian Ocean’s commercial world reshaped the traffic in people from Africa to South Asia. For one, the nature of the labor for which Africans were in demand expanded. What Sidi Asim’s purchase by a Goan fisherman should make clear is that the demand for enslaved Africans was not limited to their value as soldiers. When François Pyrard was captured and brought to Kochi, the bailiff who took charge of his party was accompanied by “seven or eight slaves, Christian cafres of Mozambique,” who were called pions (peão in Portuguese, or peons) and who, Pyrard wrote, always accompanied Portuguese judicial officers in significant numbers. Arriving in Goa, they were borne to the hospital by cafres, who did the work of porters and carriers in the absence of carriages. Enslaved African women were particularly prized for sexual labor: in the slave markets on Rua Direita, Pyrard reported, buyers were most attracted to the “cafre girls from Mozambique and other parts of Africa.”Footnote ³⁹ Enslaved Africans worked the galleys, where the ships vital to the Portuguese enterprise were built and repaired: in 1635, Bocarro noted that 132 Africans (cafres) were in the galleys.Footnote ⁴⁰ Given the range of occupations for which they were prized, the Portuguese were clearly bringing in large numbers of enslaved Africans: in 1564, the Jesuit Pedro Fernandes explained that the ship he was on had to spend eight or nine days in Mozambique before it could sail to Goa, “because there were many who had to buy some cafres.” On that single ship alone, the chaplain baptized ninety-one people purchased during that stay.Footnote ⁴¹

The increasing importance of the Portuguese in these oceanic networks meant that the demographic composition of Africans in South Asia changed, as more captives were taken not from the Horn of Africa but further south.Footnote ⁴² Thus, the Portuguese term cafre, itself derived from the Arabic term used to describe non-Muslim Africans, may be better indexed to people hailing from around present-day Mozambique. It is likely that the ancestors of communities such as the Christian Sidis of Haliyal tāluka in Karnataka originated in these regions of Africa.

As with the older Arab- and Gujarati-brokered networks in the Horn of Africa, captive-taking by indigenous brokers in Mozambique fed Portuguese slaving networks: as the Dutch merchant Jan Huyghen van Linschoten stated in a chapter devoted to Mozambique in his 1596 Itinerario, when captives were taken in war they were sold to the Portuguese, often in exchange for cotton linen and other South Asian wares.Footnote ⁴³ It is likely that, just as in the case of the Christian Ethiopian state, the Portuguese Estado, and the South Asian states described above, captive-taking in these areas of Africa concentrated in geographical peripheries of more centralized states.

Imputing ethnicity or geographical origin from the traces of premodern bureaucracies that were themselves implicated in the institutionalization of slavery is difficult. Thus, while the slave Domingos, brought before the Goan Inquisition in September 1581, was classified as “Mozimba,” when Antônio, born in Sena, Mozambique, was brought before the same tribunal in 1599 he was described instead as cafre. Footnote ⁴⁴ To parse these archival traces requires the kind of investment in African studies for South Asianists that has been so characteristic of and vital to recent scholarship on slavery in Brazil.

Policing Mobility

Inasmuch as trafficking was vital to slavery, unsanctioned mobility was also a severe threat to the system. Thus, maintaining slavery required the careful policing of boundaries. These boundaries were social, since manufacturing the identity of people as outsiders was crucial to the process of enslavement, and also spatial, since mobility was both a conduit into slavery and an escape from it. The enforcement of these boundaries by elite institutions, and their transgression by enslaved peoples, thus reveals much about the landscape of power in the region.

The Portuguese maritime system was built around the cartaz, or sea pass, which allowed them to tax and control access to the Indian Ocean. The fairly typical cartaz issued in January 1621 by Fernão de Albuquerque to the sultan of Ahmadnagar allowed his ship to travel to Ormuz, Mecca, and Malaka from Chaul “without taking or bringing anything, namely, Turks [a generic term for Muslims], Ethiopians [presumably, enslaved], steel, pitch, copper, lead, tin, iron, pepper, cinnamon from Sri Lanka nor cassia, solid bamboo, saltpetre, sulphur … nor carry any Portuguese, nor rare horses without license.” The ship could carry “male and female slaves from your nation only,” and if there was any suspicion that any of them were Christians, or children of Christians, then an examination in accordance with the guidelines of the Catholic Provincial Council of Goa would be undertaken. Before the ship could sail, it would be examined by the Portuguese and a bond would have to be given “for the treasury of His Majesty to ensure that the ship returns directly to the said port.”Footnote ⁴⁵

As the cartaz tells us, the Portuguese were intent on controlling the flow of people, particularly those who were enslaved, as much as of goods. Threats to this system were stringently punished, including through enslavement: when Marakkar navy men, deemed to be corsairs and pirates by the Portuguese, were captured in war, they “would remain all their life as forced laborers in the galleys of the king, whom none could redeem,” while any individual who took a Marakkar prisoner would be granted ten pardaus from the Crown and the right to enslave him for life. Yet, when hostilities on sea would cease, the same Marakkars sought and were granted cartazes to alight safely and trade their loot in the Portuguese ports of Goa and Kochi.Footnote ⁴⁶

It is important to note, however, that the presence of mobile enslaved people was vital to the maintenance of the Estado: enslaved women, in particular could cross the border into Goa in order to bring goods to market for the price of 8 leals.Footnote ⁴⁷ Overland routes came to be monitored carefully.Footnote ⁴⁸ This system of surveillance was designed to protect an important stream of revenue from taxing merchandise and passage on overland routes, but also to prevent people, including enslaved subjects and Portuguese renegades who might seek employment with rival sultans, from escaping the reach of Portuguese law.

Surveillance extended also to the many rivers that watered the Konkan. In 1618, the Senate of the city of Goa ordered boatmen to post a bond to the municipal clerk because of the many slaves who had crossed over to non-Portuguese territory in the past with money, stolen objects, and even weapons.Footnote ⁴⁹

Yet, despite the best efforts of state authorities, the peculiar historical geography of the coast meant that it was a hybrid zone of sovereignty, and mobility between coastal polities was hard to curtail.Footnote ⁵⁰ Thus, the very fragmentation of political authority on the coast created the conditions for escape. From the very beginning, the Portuguese attempted to coordinate with neighboring powers to curtail the mobility of enslaved subjects. Thus, in the treaty the Portuguese effected with the sultan of Gujarat recognizing their right to several key ports, including Daman and Mangalore, one clause ensured that any enslaved people escaping into neighboring territory would be resold, with the proceeds of the sale being given to the slaveholders from whom they had fled.Footnote ⁵¹ Later treaties showed a special concern with the religious status of the enslaved subject: thus, a treaty concluded with the Nizam Shah in 1539 granted enslaved escapees who converted to Islam in sultanate territory or Christianity in Portuguese territory their freedom, while those who chose not to convert were to be handed back.Footnote ⁵² This short-lived loophole quickly began to close as religious authorities put greater pressure on the state: the treaty with Ahmadnagar of 1548 provided that converted slaves would be resold, with the proceeds going to their previous slaveholders, while those who chose not to convert would be handed back to those they had escaped from.Footnote ⁵³

These treaties tell us that enslaved subjects fled in both directions between the Portuguese state and indigenous polities. News had reached the ears of those living in other polities of Portuguese laws which afforded Christian converts the status of freedmen, erasing the social boundaries and strictures which held there: in 1555, the Jesuit Vice Provincial Balthasar Dias wrote that this provision had allowed them to bring many into the fold of the Catholic Church.Footnote ⁵⁴ Thus, even though the legal provision promising emancipation to slaves after baptism was formally rescinded in 1559, escapees continued to come to Portuguese India.Footnote ⁵⁵ The Jesuit Gomez Vaz, for example, in the annual report of 1567, reported that a brahmin living in the terra de mouros (land of the Moors) and a former low-caste servant of the temple came to Portuguese-held Salcete in order to marry.Footnote ⁵⁶ At the other end of the social spectrum from this brahmin, we have the example of a figure like “Gabriel.” Likely born into the Beta Israel community on the Agaw-speaking fringes of the central Christian polity in Ethiopia, he was captured by Christians and sold to Arab slavers as a boy. He was converted to Islam on the journey to the Sultanate port of Chaul, whence he was taken into the interior. During his inquisitorial interrogation, he revealed that he had come to Portuguese territory in the company of his master’s Christian slave, Mixa, with whom he had fallen in love. For enslaved people, too, an unsanctioned relationship of this sort could well pose grave dangers. Yet, escape brought no relief: the Christian Ethiopians in whose home the newly converted Gabriel was placed pressured him to abandon his lover and marry a more “honorable” woman, suggesting the disdain they felt for the enslaved Mixa. Gabriel would thus pass once again into “the land of the Moors,” until, discovered by a Portuguese captain, he found himself in the clutches of the Inquisition.Footnote ⁵⁷ Thus, escape entailed not only evading the spatial boundaries erected by states to keep people in confinement; it also meant circumventing the social boundaries that maintained regimes of hierarchy, including caste, which subtended slavery.

Nonetheless, we must be cautious in reading mobility uncritically as an index of the resistance of enslaved people. As mentioned, unaccompanied enslaved people could cross the border of the Estado in order to sell goods on behalf of their masters in the mainland. By the same token, upper-caste attempts to evade the authority of the Portuguese may well have entailed another layer of the trafficking of people dependent upon their masters. Beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, as religious institutions expanded in the city of Goa and wielded greater influence, a series of measures taken by the Portuguese state curtailed the economic and social rights of those who chose not to convert. These measures prompted the migration of a section of the Hindu community southward along the coast, taking with them their servants and their gods, spreading all the way to the kingdom of Kochi in Kerala.Footnote ⁵⁸ The viceroy Francisco Coutinho observed an alarming rate of depopulation that left “villages ruined,” which led him to reverse course and declare that the property would be returned if the escapees returned within six months.Footnote ⁵⁹

In Kochi, the Jesuit Amator Correia wrote to his confreres in Portugal on 20 January 1564 about the upheaval caused in the city by the new arrivals, “who came from Goa to rob this city.” Among their crimes was encouraging enslaved people to thieve and to sell their masters’ goods to the Konkani migrants, an exchange perhaps facilitated by a shared language.Footnote ⁶⁰ Despite the missionaries’ efforts over the past six years, Correia lamented that the Konkani-speaking community had proved impossible to dislodge “due to the interest that came from some of the city’s regiments.” Over time, the brahmins, in particular, parlayed their network of connections across the coast to pivot to trade, becoming as important a community of merchants as the mercantile vaiśya caste. They were also crucial as go-betweens for various states, serving as procurators and diplomats in courts across the region, including on behalf of the Portuguese and the Dutch.Footnote ⁶¹

While Portuguese, Dutch and Kochi records are full of the doings of the upper-caste Konkani-speaking communities, the lower castes are relatively invisible. Yet, evidence suggests that enslaved people were enmeshed in and vital to the connections maintained by the Konkani community across the coast, including Portuguese Goa. Thus, for example, the brahmin Malopa, a member of the state-licensed group of physicians known as the Thirty, petitioned the Portuguese to travel to Cochin in 1600 in order to settle the property of his deceased slave with his heir.Footnote ⁶²

That lower-caste communities migrated too is apparent in the presence of Kuḍumbi community in the city today, who have retained the caste name so visible in the Portuguese records related to enslavement.Footnote ⁶³ It is notable that communities considered untouchable are not represented among the microcosm of Konkani-speaking castes in Kochi today.Footnote ⁶⁴ Considering our evidence that indigenous slaveholders in the Portuguese Estado clearly preferred to enslave members of touchable communities in general, and Kuḍumbis in particular, it is likely that many of the ancestors of the present-day Kuḍumbi community were trafficked by their migrating masters to Kochi. (Elderly upper-caste members of the Konkani community remembered Kuḍumbi servants working in their homes in Kochi at least as far back as the 1940s.) Moreover, given the evidence we have in Goa of the trafficking of people from other parts of coastal South Asia to that entrepot, it is entirely possible that traffickers were bringing members of that community to Kochi’s markets too. Nonetheless, for members of the community today, the memory of enslavement has been completely erased.Footnote ⁶⁵ Like other communities harmed historically by slavery, the Kuḍumbi are economically and socially marginalized. Given that the community is excluded from both Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe status by dint of touchability and their history of migration, respectively, their predicament shows the need for the expansion of the meagre mechanisms of distributive justice in India to account for the history of slavery.

The Estado as Slave Society

Given the number of people captured by his survey, Bocarro provides an important and systematic view into the demographics of the coast, bearing in mind the presence of large swathes of non-Portuguese territories. Even without taking into account other forms of forced labor, the sheer ubiquity of individuals legally and socially defined as slaves along the coast in Bocarro’s survey is astonishing. What is striking is the presence of enslaved people regardless of the size of the settlement. For instance, the village located by the fortress of Tarapur on the Maharashtrian coast had some fifty Portuguese casados and some two hundred non-European Christians, with a total of one hundred enslaved people held by the two groups combined.

Even in the absence of plantations, larger ports and towns were home to huge numbers of slaves. As one Jesuit reported, in larger coastal entrepots like Daman the melting pot of slavery brought together “Blacks of a thousand types and nations.”Footnote ⁶⁶

The scale of slaveholding in the capital was of a completely different order again, according to Bocarro’s estimates (see Table 2). Furthermore, as a trading entrepot, Goa also saw the temporary presence of large numbers of enslaved people before they were trafficked to other ports: little wonder then, that Pyrard had observed about the enslaved people of the city, “They are of infinite number and of all the Indian nations, and a very great traffic is done in them [for] they are exported to Portugal, and to all places under the Portuguese dominion.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Table 2.

Enslaved population resident in Christian lay homes (excluding religious houses) of the city of Goa in 1635. Source: António Bocarro, Livro das plantas de todas as fortelezas, cidades e povoações do Estado da India Oriental (1635), 77–78v, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal

While Bocarro excludes religious houses from his account, these institutions were major slaveholders: the Convent of Santa Mónica in Old Goa complained that their hundred and twenty slaves were insufficient on the basis that even individual slaveholders in the community “could have fifteen or twenty female slaves, or twenty-six women and girls, while a juiz ordinario or a desembargador held eighty-five female slaves … and some rich ladies over three hundred.”Footnote ⁶⁸

As the Convent’s complaint indicates, women were ubiquitous slaveholders. In the register of 724 people manumitted in Goa in the late seventeenth century, over 16 percent had female slaveholders, a number of whom clearly enslaved many people.Footnote ⁶⁹ Moreover, indigenous slaveholders abound in the archive. The baptismal and married records of Loutulim and Chorão described below, showed indigenous gancares held enslaved people. In the city of Goa itself, in 1682, Luis Borges, a charado, manumitted João, known as Quima prior to his conversion.Footnote ⁷⁰ Later records from the eighteenth century reveal that indigenous women, too, held enslaved people.

We can take from Pyrard’s vivid description of the central market of the city that enslaved people were vital to every aspect of economic and social life in the city, as market vendors, porters, sex workers, go-betweens, and artisans.Footnote ⁷¹ Indeed, the dependence on enslaved labor may well have hindered the development of the city: enslaved people carried water from a spring in the surrounding hills to sell in town, thus preventing investment in an aqueduct system as slave-owners enriched themselves through the private trade in water.Footnote ⁷² Given that this state of affairs may well have fueled the devastating water-borne epidemics that periodically hit the city, the dependence on enslaved labor had severe costs.Footnote ⁷³

The public presence and relative autonomy of urban slaves also worried authorities. In 1618, describing the slaves as “roving menaces,” the Senate of the city of Goa passed a series of market ordinances to bring them to heel, banning the sale of alcohol to them, and forbidding masters from allowing them to run shops in the city unsupervised.Footnote ⁷⁴

Bocarro’s survey largely focuses on Portuguese fortresses and coastal enclaves with a significant presence of Portuguese casados, where it is clear the reliance on enslaved labor at every scale of settlement was enormous. Unfortunately, Bocarro provides little insight into the indigenous comunidades which comprised the majority of the population of the Estado, or even the four thousand non-Christians, including the Konkani and Gujarati merchants whose trade in staples sustained the city of Goa.Footnote ⁷⁵ Bocarro estimated that the island of Goa had 3,062 Christian gāunkārs, or village headmen, capable of bearing arms, while Salcete’s indigenous Christian population included some 13,844 men capable of bearing arms, a number that comprised over half of the total militarily able-bodied men of 22,840 men from the core territories of Goa and its surrounding areas of Chorão, Divar and Jua, Bardez, and Salcete. Therefore, to omit such communities from consideration would represent a serious lacuna in our understanding of slavery.

Some insight can be gained, however, from village level records maintained by parish priests. It is impossible to speculate on the nature of precolonial slavery in these communities on the basis of such records. Conquest, we know, transformed village communities, eliminating Muslims and replacing the temple with the church in their ritual economy, thus displacing a class of ritual specialists who previously enjoyed lands given to village servants.Footnote ⁷⁶ Bearing these structural changes in mind, village records must be read with particular care in order to understand the dynamics of enslavement in the comunidades, and speculation on how they may illuminate precolonial forms of enslavement must be duly tempered.

The earliest extant baptismal records are from the village of Loutulim in Salcete.Footnote ⁷⁷ In general, relatively few people were described as enslaved or freed in such records, particularly when compared to Bocarro’s estimates for the ratio of enslaved people in Portuguese settlements. This may well have been a function not so much of the rarity of enslavement in these communities than of the imperfect ways in which Portuguese modalities of classifying enslaved people captured social arrangements of forced labor and dependence with precolonial antecedents. We have seen that arrangements of labor under obligation, such as the begãr system, and of labor extracted through practices of untouchability, continued in the Estado, although they were without doubt transformed under the auspices of the colonial state. Still, it does indicate the rarity at this stage in the evolution of the Estado of individual enslavement consonant with Portuguese systems of enslavement in these village communities.

Gāunkārs, the landed village chiefs recognized as the original settlers of the village by the Portuguese state, were exempt from enslavement. It is clear that they, as much as local representatives of the Portuguese state and the church, enslaved others. Many enslaved people were classified as śudra, whose touchable status must have made them desirable as domestic slaves. At least some, such as the enslaved Malabari Francisca, baptized on 27 July 1617, were trafficked from further afield. The long tendrils of trafficking networks were visible even in a small agricultural village like Loutulim.

These records also reveal the ways in which enslaved people were integrated, albeit liminally, into village life. Unlike the caste and class hierarchies that governed kinship based on marriage, the introduction of the Catholic practice of godparenthood allowed new ways to form relationships that cut across these boundaries. Not only were slaves included among the baptized, but they also served as godparents for free people, albeit mostly for those belonging to the śudra caste. For example, Martinho, the son of the śudra Aire Saldanha and Isabel, was baptized on 2 January 1618, with Juliana, enslaved by one Luis de Freitas, serving as his godmother. Similarly, Luzia, the daughter of the śudra Antonio Anu and Domingas, was baptized on 21 April 1652, with Bastião, enslaved by Francisco Colaco, and Luzia, wife of the śudra Antonio Porugo, serving as her godparents.

The intimate violence of slavery in a village is hinted at by the presence of the children of enslaved women with unknown fathers, whose baptisms were sponsored by powerful village elites. Thus Estevão, born to Anna, enslaved by the bailiff Pedro de Quadros, was baptized on 2 January 1618, with the official translator (lingua) Antonio de Sá serving as his godfather, while Sabina, daughter of Luzia, enslaved by Thomas Xavier, was baptized on 21 June 1670, with the gāunkār Pero de Quadros and Maria, widow of the śudra Thomé, serving as godparents. More direct evidence of the terrible kinds of sexual exploitation to which enslaved people were vulnerable can be found in the Inquisition trials of enslaved children as young as eight, charged with sexual crimes, namely being the passive partner of an act of sodomy.Footnote ⁷⁸

Indeed, for formally enslaved people, when they outlived their usefulness as labor, the cruelty of slaveholders was no less horrific than the worst forms of chattel slavery familiar to us from the Atlantic world. The Jesuit Luís Froís described a chilling practice prevalent in Goa: “There is a custom in this land of great cruelty and inhumanity and that is that some rich men who have many slaves, or better to say who lack charity and love of God, if their slaves sicken and have a prolonged illness, and cause expense or disgust in the house, are left outside, to die abandoned on these dunghills.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Despite the intervention of missionaries intent on stopping the practice, it apparently continued unabated: in a report dated 1663 to the Congregazione di Propaganda Fide, a Theatine missionary described similar practices of sick enslaved people being left to die like beasts.Footnote ⁸⁰

Enslavement may also have made people vulnerable to coercive conversion: on 3 November 1676, Ignacio, a toddler described as freed (forro) and living in the house of Sebastião Mascarenhas, was baptized with the apparent consent of his mother Raulem, whom the parish priest described as a gentile and who apparently did not convert with her son. It is possible that his freedom had been made conditional upon allowing him to become a catechumen.

The earliest marriage records still extant are from the village of São Bartolomeu on the island of Chorão. Of the roughly four hundred marriages conducted from 1605 to 1622, only fifteen involved people described as either currently or formerly enslaved.Footnote ⁸¹ Again, it appears that Portuguese modalities of classification were inadequate to capture the nature of enslavement in these settings. In several mixed-status marriages, it was recorded that the bride had agreed to the marriage knowing the enslaved status of the groom, thus entering into a state of dependence herself. For example, in September 1605, Madalena, the daughter of a poor freed woman (pobre forra) and a father unknown, agreed to marry Lucas, enslaved by the widow Isabel de Andrade. Andrade promised on the occasion to manumit the groom, in exchange for the nominally free Madalena promising to serve her for a period of time. These records suggest that the lines between poverty, low-caste status, formal enslavement, and other forms of dependency, including orphanhood, were often blurred in such communities. What degree of freedom, as we might understand it, was enjoyed by the orphan Ana, who married Lourenço Faraz in April 1618 while both were residing in the house reserved for farazes beside the church, is unclear. That the couple were living in caste-segregated quarters demonstrates that conversion itself was no panacea for the practices of untouchability.Footnote ⁸²

These records also indicate the prevalence of many kinds of mixed marriages across caste and ethnic lines, made possible in part by the diverse groups of people brought together along the coast through the institution of slavery. More interestingly, it signals that the policing of endogamy was far less stringent outside the elite echelons of society. Other evidence also bears this observation out. The register of inquisitorial trials shows that the mobility which undergirded the trafficking and enslavement led to all kinds of intermarriages. For instance, the freed woman Domingas, described as a “mulata,” was born in Goa to an African man of unspecified ethnicity (“cafre”) and a woman from the Bago region of present-day Myanmar (“pegúa”).Footnote ⁸³

Slavery along the Eighteenth-Century West Coast

If Bocarro’s survey provides us with a snapshot of enslavement in the seventeenth century, a remarkable census carried out in the old conquest provinces of Ilhas, Salcete, and Bardes in 1720 gives us a useful benchmark for comparison. The census was collated through the reports sent in by individual parishes of the number of people in their jurisdiction. The share of the population that was non-Catholic (including Muslims) had fallen since Bocarro’s day to about 9 percent, or about nineteen thousand people out of a total population of 208,000.Footnote ⁸⁴

The granularity of the data differed from parish to parish, making comparison within the sample complicated. Thus, only for the village of Neura does the priest recording the information acknowledge the continuing existence of caste among converts, noting that the Christians native to the land comprised brahmins and śudras (bragmenes e sudros). The progressive Christianization of old comunidades meant that this census provided more data than Bocarro’s survey in certain cases. Take the island of Chorão, the census of which reports a total of 6,968 residents, a precipitous fall since Bocarro’s day, where he reported fourteen thousand people living there, mostly fishermen and some farmers and soldiers. Of these, 195 were gentiles, 389 were enslaved people of African or other origin, seven were Chinese women, fifty-five were white, and 6,308 were Christians native to the land. Thus, about 5 percent of the population was formally enslaved. We also have other evidence of the deeper penetration of oceanic networks of trafficking into village communities. For instance, of the 2,882 people living in the village of Loutulim, discussed above, twenty-one were listed as captive Africans.Footnote ⁸⁵

Of the 8,386 people resident in the city of Goa,Footnote ⁸⁶ 377 were whites born either in Portugal or India, 2,991 were Christians native to the land (naturais da terra), thirty were Muslims, and 2,702 were Hindus (gentios). There were sixteen Gujaratis, whose religion was unlisted but may have been Jain, all residing in the parish of Nossa Senhora da Luz. Fifty-one Chinese people were in city, with another fifteen people in the parish of Santo Aleixo described as mestiços and chinas, though it is impossible to disaggregate this number. A group of fourteen native-born and cafre men were described as being casados in the parish of Nossa Senhora do Rosario. Though there is no way to disaggregate this data, it does indicate that Africans were establishing themselves as privileged subjects of the city by this period.Footnote ⁸⁷ Across the parishes in question, a total of 1,765 people, representing 20 percent of the population of the city, were described as being captive, enslaved, freed, or in servitude, and they were listed as being of African, Bengali, Timorese, Chinese, or Malabari origins. Focusing solely on Christian households, this would suggest a decline in the ratio of enslaved people in the city from the seventeenth century.

It is apparent, however, that the census was not necessarily able to capture who was enslaved within the non-Christian community. For all of Ilhas, only 203 people were reported as being enslaved by gentiles or Muslims, which would represent a ratio of only two enslaved people for every hundred non-Christians. This more likely indicates the limited insights the census-takers, as Catholic priests, had into the non-Christian population, as well as the proliferation of other forms of dependence beyond formal enslavement in such households that the census did not capture.Footnote ⁸⁸

By the eighteenth century, the fortunes of the Portuguese had changed considerably, as had the contours of their territorial holding along the coast. The key port of Kochi had fallen to the Dutch. Over the following decades, the northern provinces would fall to the Marathas. Still, two centuries of the Portuguese presence, and the ensuing transformation of the trade in people in the region had had an effect on indigenous society. That indigenous communities were now relying heavily on enslaved labor is suggested by the records of the Maratha archives. The same continuum of forced labor practices found in the Estado also existed in indigenous polities. In the Maratha lands, the use of bonded labor (vēṭh) existed alongside slavery and free wage labor. Moreover, these forms of coerced labor were heavily mediated by the state, which could thus also provide relief. The villages of Rajpur district around 1743, for instance, were ordered to compensate the state in lieu of the bonded labor that the māhārs of the area had traditionally been forced to provide, effectively freeing them from this form of bondage.

As Hiroshi Fukazawa’s prescient work on slavery in the Deccan put it, slavery in the Maratha kingdom, far from being confined to private use, “was also recognized, supported and made use of by the government,” which directly enslaved and sold people. Thus, the Maratha state used both bonded and enslaved labor routinely to reward its officers, or to compensate them in lieu of salary, and bought and sold slaves directly.Footnote ⁸⁹ Around 1750–1751, Hari Bhikaji, a servant of the Maratha government, was given the use of twenty people under obligation (asāmi) for eight days in order to build a house in Pali in the Konkan.Footnote ⁹⁰ In the same period, when the absconding female slave (baṭīk, a word that also connotes sex work) of Mahadeo Bhat Bapat Puranik was found in a cavalry camp and resold by the state to someone else, it was ordered that a meek (garīb) and guileless (sāḷsūd) woman should be selected among the state’s female slaves (kuṇbini, literally female members of the agricultural caste) and given to Mahadeo Bhat to reside in his house in the Konkan.Footnote ⁹¹

Just as in Portuguese territory, poverty, too, likely played a role in these regions in fueling enslavement.Footnote ⁹² Similarly, trafficking was crucial to slavery in areas under indigenous authority. Thus, a Sawantwadi functionary wrote to officials in Portuguese Goa that the wife of the slave (bandechi baiko) of one Bhojulinga Dahlvi was kidnapped by Suryaji Kinekar and sold for 31 rupees to Rangana Kalawant of Dicholim. Upon official inquiry, she was found in the house of one Kalawant Majadkar, who claimed she purchased the girl without knowing the full circumstances but would return her if restitution for the sale was made. Visaji Mahadev accordingly requested that an order to the effect be made for the commander of Dicholim to make the payment and return the girl. The letter not only indicated the role of indigenous women as slaveholders, but showed how enslaved subjects might be protected through institutions like marriage and through elite patronage networks from trafficking.

If trafficking across political boundaries was common, escape beyond territorial jurisdiction was also rife. Indigenous states coordinated with the Portuguese to monitor and curtail the mobility of enslaved people. In a not atypical missive sent from the neighboring Sawantwadi court to the Portuguese secretary of state, the vakīl requested that two kuṇbi women (kuṇbini) who had escaped to Panaji, to live with a Christian woman of the same caste, Paula Kuṇbi, be returned to their owner Ramchandra Nilkantha Araondekar.Footnote ⁹³ Thus, caste solidarities may well have transcended confessional boundaries in providing networks of safety.

By the same token, the Portuguese state received the cooperation of indigenous authorities in their attempts to curtail the movement of its enslaved subjects. On 17 December 1747, Jñanlingaye Navaru, the Sarsubhedar or head administrator of Ponda under the Sunda kings, wrote in Marathi to the Portuguese Secretary of State regarding a demand to hand over two runaway Black slaves (khāpri). When they were found, they argued that they were owned by one Francis who, having boarded a ship, gave them a paper allowing them to find a job “to fill their stomachs” wherever they could. Nonetheless, the Sunda official handed them over as soon as the Portuguese secretary’s letter arrived.Footnote ⁹⁴

As this letter indicates, Africans trafficked by Europeans were ending up in the territory of indigenous polities. Enslaved Africans may even have been specifically coveted as symbols of status by indigenous kings: the Kochi king, Rama Varma IX (1751–1805), was so acquisitive of Africans that he strong-armed the incoming Dutch governor Johannes van Angelbeeck into gifting him five of his own slaves despite the governor’s protestations of the affection his household felt for them. Of the enslaved Africans in the king’s court, we know of at least one eleven-year-old African boy, whom he purchased from one Antonio Francisco Fernandes for 200 rupias.Footnote ⁹⁵

Caste, Race, and Blackness

In Marathi letters as much as in the Portuguese records, we must be careful not to impute modern notions of racial identity upon the classification systems of premodern elites. This is particularly important when considering the category of blackness. Recall that the Portuguese applied the descriptor of negro or preto to enslaved South Asians. If it is possible, even likely, that the term khāpri, when used to describe enslaved people escaping from Portuguese territory, signified African descent, blackness in Maratha usage was likewise a quality ascribed to enslaved people of South Asian origin. In a letter to Krisnaji Viswanath, then deputed in Khandesh, the Maratha government made known its need (prayojana) of some worthy kuṇbinis, “black” (kāḷyā), tall, and strong, and ordered him to purchase ten such women.Footnote ⁹⁶ Not only is the caste name used as a synonym for slave in this request, the attribution of blackness clearly does not imply African descent. The slipperiness between low-caste status, blackness, and race requires us to leave aside typological views of such categories and instead see them as part of a dynamic process by which people were enslaved. Blackness then is best read as a category of labor in this context.

This points to the need to investigate the different, if connected, genealogies of the ideologies of caste, race, and anti-blackness. If anything, in Portuguese Goa, the globalized process by which these ideologies were co-elaborated is visible. As Pyrard observed, the Portuguese freshly arrived from Europe ruled the social roost, followed by castiços, born of Portuguese parents in the east, “that is to say of their caste and race.” Below them on the social ladder were the mestiços (children born to Asian mothers and Portuguese fathers) and mulatos (born to African mothers and Portuguese fathers). Still, even among mestiços those with brahmin mothers “regard themselves highly.”Footnote ⁹⁷ If the origins of casta lay in Iberian notions of blood purity stemming from the Reconquista, in India these ideas dovetailed with existing ideological systems of policing endogamy, which also depended on genealogical fictions.Footnote ⁹⁸

Yet, looking beyond elite discursive constructions, it is apparent that the sexual exploitation of enslaved women was deeply imbricated in the elaboration and enforcement of these ideologies. If caste structured slavery in seventeenth-century Portuguese Goa, then slavery structured caste in eighteenth-century Maratha country. The penalty for adultery under the Marathas could include the enslavement of the woman, unless she were lucky enough to have either her husband or powerful community members intervene on her behalf.Footnote ⁹⁹ Thus, around 1755–1756, while a girl from a Powar family was sold to the brahmin Gangadhar Bhat Karve for the crime of adultery, when the affair between a girl from a Patil family and a lower-caste Gosavi man was discovered, the intervention of the community and a hefty fine of Rs. 7,000 ensured their freedom. When we consider that another adulterous woman was redeemed by her husband in exchange for an enslaved person, who would likely not have cost more than a hundred rupees at most, this enormous sum tells us that rather more was at stake than the liberty of a woman; rather, the payment was in order to prevent communal excommunication for contravening caste practices.

By the same token, the state specifically protected brahmin women from slavery: around 1734–1735, Fod Sawant Bhonsle was reprimanded for allowing a married brahmin girl to be kidnapped and kept in captivity by a subordinate, an act described as one that even Muslims (yavana) would not commit.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Still, he did not learn his lesson: the following year, he was again reprimanded for confining the wife of the brahmin Gopal Ramrao and was reminded that this went against “the dharma of Maharashtra.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ In accordance with the same logic, around 1752–1753, when it was discovered a “defiled female slave” (baṭīk bāṭagī) had engaged in excommunicable (avyavahār) acts with Muslims, orders were made to purify the owner.Footnote ¹⁰² The sacralization of caste went hand-in-hand with the policing of enslavement.

The children born from enslaved women could also challenge existing social hierarchies: when a bitter conflict arose with the succession of the landholding (watan), the government eventually invited all parties to Pune before it was decided that a son of a female slave (dāsiputra) could not succeed, thus upholding the claims of his father’s (socially legitimated) kinsmen (bhāūband).Footnote ¹⁰³ Indeed, marriage and slavery were carefully distinguished: in several cases, the state found that the owner of a female slave had forfeit his rights to her as a slaveholder if he had contracted a marriage for her. Thus, when Ranaji Bhonsle applied to the state to reclaim Yesi, it was found that since he had previously married her off to someone else, he could no longer lay claim to her as a slave and she was free to live wherever she chose.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The Maratha state was as assiduous in adjudicating the sexual and marital lives of enslaved people as it was in governing other kinds of practices relevant to the maintenance of caste, from adoption to marital fidelity, precisely because these were not separable. After all, the sexual exploitation of enslaved women posed a threat to the fiction of elite endogamy, upon which the ideology of caste rests.

Analyzing the quotidian bureaucratic categories through which slavery was institutionalized in both indigenous and European territories allows one to view social phenomena in ways not clouded by the legacies of the elite discursive ideologies which upheld that system. Instead of taking for granted the classificatory labels imposed upon enslaved peoples by elite institutions, a social history of slavery elucidates the evolution of these elite mechanisms for policing identity and the centrality of expropriating labor involved in such processes of classification. We must resist the naturalization of such categories when they serve to obfuscate the consolidation of power and resources and the expropriation of labor, without losing sight of the importance of the ongoing production of such categories as part of the exercise of power. As Mahatma Phule argued, only by desacralizing and denaturalizing caste could slavery be truly abolished. In a meaningful sense, the history of slavery is the history of caste in South Asia.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

By the same token, as we have seen, the very mutability of these categories could sometimes be used by subaltern subjects to challenge the strictures that sought to bind them. The trajectories of many enslaved people reveal the porosity and fragility of the social boundaries asserted by elites. In turn, it demystifies the legacies of such elite projects and serves as a salutary corrective to our imaginations that are too often shaped by such fictions of power.