Chapter 13 - Slavery and Dependency in Medieval South India

Summary

This chapter considers South India, in the period of 500-1500 CE, focusing particularly on the region that is today Tamilnadu. Based primarily on the evidence of stone inscriptions, as well as religious literature composed in Tamil, it argues that slavery must be understood within the framework of a large and complex system of dependency and hierarchy. Virtually all members of society – whether attached to the land or land-owners, or part of the “households” of Hindu temples or royal courts – were bound into relationship of dependency. These relationships were not systematized and caste identities and hierarchies were not fixed. Categories of persons evidently of “lowly” status, such as the paraiyar, might in some cases have been enslaved agricultural laborers but also appear in the inscriptions as temple patrons. Women who were sold to temples were assigned menial domestic duties but sometimes also performed high-status ritual services. The social reality of servitude and slavery in medieval South India, especially in connection with what was probably the extensive use of slaves in rice cultivation (from the 13th century onward), is only hinted at in the inscriptional sources, and in Hindu religious literature was transformed into an idiom of devotion.