Between 1772 and 1833, the British parliament debates, as recorded in Hansard confirm the existence of extensive slavery in India, primarily for Arabian and European colonial markets under the East India Company.
[72] When Britain abolished slavery in its Empire, through
Slavery Abolition Act 1833, it included a clause that allowed slavery inside India and enslavement of Indians for colonial markets operated by the East India Company.
[73] Andrea Major notes,
[74]
When the abolition did come into play in 1843, the officials that inadvertently used the term "slave" would be reprimanded, but the actual practices of servitude continued unchanged. Scholar Indrani Chatterjee has termed this "abolition by denial." In the rare cases when the anti-slavery legislation was enforced, it addressed the relatively smaller practices of export and import of slaves, but it did little to address the agricultural slavery that was pervasive inland. The officials in the Madras Presidency turned a blind eye to agricultural slavery claiming that it was a benign form of bondage that was in fact preferable to free labour.
[75]
According to Sir
Henry Bartle Frere (who sat on the Viceroy's Council), there were an estimated 8,000,000 or 9,000,000 slaves in India in 1841. In
Malabar, about 15% of the population were slaves. Slavery was officially abolished in India by the Indian Slavery Act V. of 1843. Provisions of the
Indian Penal Code of 1861 effectively abolished slavery in India by making the enslavement of human beings a criminal offense.
[4][76][77][7]
Indentured labour system
After the United Kingdom abolished slavery by the mid 19th century, it introduced a new indentured labor system that scholars suggest was slavery by contract.
[78][79][80]
In this new system, they were called
indentured labourers. South Asians began to replace Africans previously brought as slaves, under this indentured labour scheme to serve on plantations and mining operations across the British empire.
[81] The first ships carrying indentured labourers left India in 1836.
[81] In the second half of the 19th century, indentured Indians were treated as inhumanely as the enslaved people previously had been. They were confined to their estates and paid a pitiful salary. Any breach of contract brought automatic criminal penalties and imprisonment.
[81] Many of these were brought away from their homelands deceptively. Many from inland regions over a thousand kilometers from seaports were promised jobs, were not told the work they were being hired for, or that they would leave their homeland and communities. They were hustled aboard the waiting ships, unprepared for the long and arduous four-month sea journey. Charles Anderson, a special magistrate investigating these sugarcane plantations, wrote to the British Colonial Secretary declaring that with few exceptions, the indentured labourers are treated with great and unjust severity; plantation owners enforced work in plantations, mining and domestic work so harshly, that the decaying remains of immigrants were frequently discovered in fields. If labourers protested and refused to work, they were not paid or fed: they simply starved.
[81][82]
