245 



On Slaverjj hi Southern India. 



[July 



descended to onr own times nearly unimpaired, I recollect one trial 

 bavins; come before the Suddcr Foujdary Court in 1830, in which 

 the members of a high-caste Hindoo family, to conceal the disgrace 

 to which they would have been exposed from retaining- one of the 

 daughters whose chastity was more than suspected, forcibly carried 

 her off to a distant province, where they were taken up, on account 

 of endeavouring to dispose of her as a domestic slave. 



In the Madras provinces, it is the collectors and magistrate!? 

 alone who can give any correct returns of the population. In t'.ie 

 Bellary division of the Ceded Districts, where I first held that 

 situation, 1 have idready stated that no agrestic slaves whatever 

 exist. In Tanjore, on the contrary, they amount to many thou- 

 sands : but I cannot, from memory, give any correct estimate of 

 their number. The house or domestic slaves in neither district 

 can exceed one or two hundred, in a population of above a million 

 of souls, in each of these provinces respectively. 



There is no doubt that the Hindoo law recognizes slavery, do- 

 mestic as well as agrestic, though practically amongst the Hindoos 

 under the Madras Presidency, domestic slavery, as before explained, 

 can hardly be said to exist, except as regards female children, 

 occasionally purchased by dancing women, for the purpose of 

 bringing them up to their own unhappy profession of prostitution, 

 or the dancing women themselves, attached to the several Hindoo 

 temples. I have already stated that the Mussulman code, though 

 opposed in its text to the reduction of free Mahomedans to a state 

 of bondage, not only recognizes and sanctions, in practice, slavery 

 in general, especially that of conquered infidels, amongst whom it 

 may fairly include the Hindoos, but encourages domestic slavery in 

 particular, especially by the purchase of children, in order to 

 increase, by their conversion, the number of the faithful. Notwith- 

 standing the modification of the Hindoo and Maaomedan laws 

 respecting slavery, recommended in the papers on that subject 

 printed by order of the House of Commons, 1 am sorry to state 

 that the Government of Madras have hitherto left them entirely 

 unaltered by any enactment of their own. At the close, indeed, of 

 the papers in question, notice is taken of a former enactment by 

 the Government at Madras, contained in clause 14, Section 18, 

 Regulation ii. 1812, prohibiting the exportation of slaves from the 

 province of Malabar : but the result of the reference mentioned to 

 have been made to the Advocate general, was the formal repeal of 

 that enactment, on the just ground that the Act of Parliament of 

 the 51 Geo. 3, c. 23, against the slave trade, sufficiently prohibits 



