| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Indrani Chatterjee. Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India. New York: Oxford University Press. 1999. Pp. xii, 286. $32.00.

Joining a small but substantial collection of recent books addressing related issues of bonded labor, servitude, and slavery in British India, Indrani Chatterjee approaches the discussion of Indian slavery from a unique perspective. Slavery, she argues, must be understood (at least in part) as a domestic institution. It is a mistake, she argues, to allow "ideological blinders" to define slavery only as economic exploitation and to categorize as slaves only those whose work produces profits capable of being expropriated. Further domestic slavery and the slaves who were part of it must be seen as having multiple (and often changing) connections to indigenous caste and community groupings. Slaves were not exclusively members of the lowest jatis of the Indian caste system, and the concept of "slavery" should not be limited to those belonging to such groups. 1

At the conclusion to her study, Chatterjee places her subject in its modern context. We must understand personal law in modern India as the product of colonial intervention and construction. We must reconstruct the history of domestic slavery in India out of the nineteenth-century genealogical, kinship, and legal subterfuges that sought to obscure and occlude it from India's historical past. Finally, we must include the "sexual reproduction" of domestic slavery within our understanding of productive labor systems in India. Only when we have done all this "can the legacy of administrative complicity and family collusion in the persistence of a traffic in women and children in modern India be fully understood" (p. 239). . . .

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