249 



On Slavery in Southern India, [July 



coast, which vest most of the land, and of the agrestic slaves who 

 cultivate it, in the hands of corporate village communities, and of 

 Hindoo temples, or other bodies, instead of in the hands of individual 

 land-owners, as on the opposite coast, contributes materially to the. 

 superiority of the agre.««tic slave on the eastern coast over his mihap- 

 py brethren on the western side of the peninsula ; for from the offi- 

 cial reports that have come thence before me, both in the Revenue 

 and judicial departments, I know that agrestic slavery assumes there 

 a far worse aspect, particularly in Malabar. The creatures in human 

 form who constitute, to the number of 100,000, the agrestic slave 

 population of that province, being distinguishable, like the savage 

 tribes still to be found in some of the forests of India, from the rest 

 of the human rare, by their degraded, diminutive, squalid appear- 

 ance; their dropsical pot bellies contrasting horribly with their ske- 

 leton arms and legs, half starved, hardly clothed, and in a condition 

 scarcely superior to the cattle they follow at the pl@ugh. I am by 

 no means satisfied that due provision is made for the support of ag- 

 restic slaves, in sickness or in old age. Their masters are no doubt 

 bound to support them ; but, in the absence of any summary means 

 on the part of the civil magistrate to enforce this obligation, I fear 

 the poor and infirm slave is too often left to the slow and doubtful 

 remedy of a law-suit against his master, or to the uncertain charity of 

 his brethren, stinted in their own means 



The agrestic or field slaves in the Tamil country are employed by 

 their masters in every department of husbandry : the men in plough- 

 ing the land and sowing the seed, and in all the various laborious 

 works necessary for the irrigation of the land upon which rice is 

 grown ; the women in transplanting the rice plants, and both sexes 

 in reaping the crop. Their labour is usually confined to the rice, or 

 irrigated lands : the lands not artificially irrigated, watered only by 

 the rains of heaven, and producing what in India is technically 

 termed dry grain, being seldom cultivated for their masters, whose 

 stock is concentrated on the superior irrigated soils ; and any cul- 

 tivation by the slaves in unirrrigated land, is generally as free la- 

 bourers for others, or on their own independent acr ount. In Tan- 

 jore, the liberality of one of my predecessors, Mr. Harris, now mem- 

 ber of Council at Madras, induced the Government to attach to 

 each house of the slave, in common with the other householders, 

 who are not land-owners, a small piece of land as garden, tax free. 

 The agrestic slaves work in bodies together, the village accountant 

 registering the work executed by them, which he inspects; but they 

 are not personally superintended by any one, nor placed under any 



