An annotated photograph from ‘The People of India’, a British colonial compilation initiated in the 1860s, showing a man and woman from a “slave caste” in Travancore. “Slavery” is not a word used very often in histories of Southasia today, and even when it is discussed it rarely appears in conjunction with “caste”.

The forgotten history of caste slavery

How one Dalit woman's courage in 1841 challenged a centuries-old system of caste-based slavery and hastened the promise of freedom for millions

Sreyartha Krishna is a student of history and an aspiring fiction writer from Sittilingi, Tamil Nadu. This article is the result of research done for his dissertation at SOAS, University of London.

Published on:

28 Apr 2025, 10:59 am

IN FEBRUARY 1841, Islamic clerics in Madras appointed by the East India Company to serve in the Faujdari Adalat – the Madras Presidency’s highest criminal court – issued a fatwa that, though forgotten by history, changed the face of slavery in Southasia. For what was possibly the first time in modern Southasian history, a legal judgment abolished an entire, oft-overlooked system of slavery: slavery predicated entirely upon caste.

The case before the clerics concerned an escaped woman, one of millions of hereditary slaves who laboured the fields of South India in accordance with a supposedly timeless caste tradition. Her name was Eesoo. She hailed from a caste that we would today call Dalit. Four months earlier, Eesoo had walked out of her master’s house in North Canara – Uttara Kannada in modern-day Karnataka – and refused to go back.

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