Slavery in India

rdf:langString Slavery in India

rdf:langString The early history of slavery in the Indian subcontinent is contested because it depends on the translations of terms such as dasa and dasyu. Greek writer Megasthenes in his work Indika, while describing the Maurya Empire states that slavery was banned in Indian society. Slavery in India escalated during the Muslim domination of northern India after the 11th-century, after Muslim rulers re-introduced slavery to the Indian subcontinent. It became a predominant social institution with the enslavement of Hindus, along with the use of slaves in armies for conquest, a long-standing practice within Muslim kingdoms at the time. 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. Many 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. 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. Over a million indentured labourers (referred to as girmitiyas) from the Indian subcontinent were transported to various European colonies in Africa, Asia and the Americas to labour on plantations and mines. The Portuguese imported Africans into their Indian colonies on the Konkan coast between about 1530 and 1740. Slavery was abolished in the possessions of the East India Company by the Indian Slavery Act, 1843.