Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India

The study of South Asian society has been dominated by the concept of communities and households made up of biologically and emotionally connected relatives. This book shows that this apparent bedrock is unstable, and theorizations based upon it are blind to the continual flow of slaves across the supposedly impermeable barriers of descent, caste, and community. With the aid of evidence drawn mainly from the ruling households of eastern India in the late 18th and 19th centuries, this book illustrates how slaves contributed to the constitution of the family and to kinship. In the process, the book argues that colonial legislators left these domestic slaves out of abolitionist agendas, while simultaneously erecting standards of legitimacy, proofs of marriage and purity of descent that eroded the position of slave-born in pre-colonial status systems.