Slavery in India

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The early history of slavery in the Indian subcontinent is contested because it depends on the translations of terms such as dasa and dasyu.^[1][2] Greek writer Megasthenes, in his 4th century BCE work Indika, states that slavery was banned within the Maurya Empire,^[3] while the multilingual, mid 3rd Century BCE, Edicts of Ashoka independently identify obligations to slaves (Greek: δούλοις) and hired workers (Greek: μισθωτοῖς), within the same Empire.^[1][4]

Slavery in India existed during the Muslim domination of northern India after the 11th century.^[1] It became a social institution with the enslavement of Hindus, along with the use of slaves in armies, a practice within Muslim kingdoms of the time.^[5][6][7] According to Muslim historians of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire era, after the invasions of Hindu kingdoms, other Indians were taken as slaves, with many exported to Central Asia and West Asia.^[1][8] Slaves from the Horn of Africa were also imported into the Indian subcontinent to serve in the households of the powerful or the Muslim armies of the Deccan Sultanates and the Mughal Empire.^[9][10][11]

The Portuguese imported African slaves into their Indian colonies on the Konkan coast between about 1530 and 1740.^[12][13] Under European Christianity, slavery in India continued through the 18th and 19th centuries. During the colonial era, Indians were taken into different parts of the world as slaves by various European merchant companies as part of the Indian Ocean slave trade.^[11][14]

Slavery was prohibited in the possessions of the East India Company by the Indian Slavery Act, 1843, in French India in 1848, British India in 1861, and Portuguese India in 1876.^{[1][15][16][17][18]} Following the prohibition of European slave ownership, from the 1830s, more than a million substitute indentured Indian labourers (referred to as girmitiyas) would be recruited, over the following century, to five year bonded contracts, to labour in European colonies, established across Africa, the Indian Ocean, Asia, and the Americas, primarily on the previously slave labour dependent plantations and mines.^[19][20]