A life in chains: ‘Azad Nagar: The Story of a 21st-Century Slave Revolt’

It was only a year or two before he and his neighbors staged a slave revolt that Ramphal even began to conceive of his own freedom—or his own enslavement.

Ramphal had never thought to question his family’s relationship with the local landlord. His early memories were of his parents harvesting grain for a wealthy family in the small town of Sonbarsa, in southern Uttar Pradesh, about three hours west of Varanasi. The landlord paid his parents a little more than a kilogram of rice per month. From that and whatever fruits or grains they could grow near their homes or gather from the forest, they fed themselves, their parents, and their five small children. For at least two hundred years, landlords in the region had taken advantage of the fact that families could not live on the pay they provided, so they also acted as moneylenders when predictable crises befell the families in their employ.

When Ramphal was just a toddler, his parents took out a small loan that amounted to just a few hundred rupees. Illiterate and innumerate, they nonetheless grew suspicious when the amount of their loan increased over time. The landlord explained that interest was compounding on the loan. One day, the landlord demanded that Ramphal’s family cede the rights to their mudbrick, thatch-roofed house to repay him. Suddenly homeless, they were forced to borrow more money to construct a new house.

Ramphal was only a young adult when he first took out a loan. At the time, much of the work had moved from the fields into the rock quarries. While Ramphal worked off his debt breaking rocks, the landlord’s adult sons studied at university, moved to big cities, started businesses, and ran for local office.

“Freedom of movement was something I didn’t know existed,” Ramphal told a documentarian in 2004. “And it was not just me. My mother, my father, my grandparents had to live through this generation after generation. It was deep in the psyche.” Ramphal belonged to the Kol community, one of India’s official indigenous “tribes” who are relegated to marginalized positions in the social hierarchy. The vast majority of the Kols in the village of Sonbarsa survived as laborers bonded by debts to a member of the Patel caste. The Patels form the backbone of the landholding and merchant middle class in Northern India today and are one of the castes designated as “other backward class” (OBC) in Uttar Pradesh. Whereas Ramphal and his neighbors do not have last names on their identification cards, people of the Patel caste often have the last name Patel or Singh, indicating their standing on the hierarchy, which K. S. Komireddi calls “the most oppressive apparatus of segregation ever devised by man.” Despite still being a “backward caste,” lower than the Brahmin and Kshatriya castes that constitute the “forward castes,” the Patel name marks them clearly as higher status than the landless Kols who live and work among them. Loans allowed the Patel families in Sonbarsa to control the Kol workers’ every movement. The laborers were denied an education, ate only one meal a day, and received no pay. They had no sense that there was any alternative for them.

Most bonded and other forced laborers will admit that they never realized they were enslaved because they took their subservience as a given, especially when it was inherited. As a result, they were also incapable of conceptualizing freedom. As Ramphal put it,

It is like this. Landlords were so powerful before that if there was a road in front of their gates and someone wanted to pass by with a cycle, no one even dared to pass by their gates because they used to stop us and beat us up. If someone wanted to go somewhere, he or she couldn’t go without their permission. They had that much power that we could not go or sit somewhere or meet anybody without their permission, as we were their slaves. And this tradition continued for many years.

The case of Ramphal and his neighbors illustrates precisely how slaveholders maintain complete physical and psychological control over the labor, lives, and minds of impoverished people. Everything about their lives was controlled by the landlords—their access to food, water, money, clothes, homes; the safety and well-being of their children and of themselves; their ability to weather crises or emergencies. To walk away from a slaveholder would be to walk away from your family’s only means of existence. That idea does not come easily, especially to those who have been subjugated for generations.

Excerpted with permission from HarperCollins India