P. Sanal Mohan’s (2015) Modernity of Slavery: Struggles Against Caste Inequality in Colonial Kerala (published by the Oxford University Press, is a crucial and timely contribution both in terms of the argument he postulates and the interdisciplinary apparatus he employs to construct it – archival history and ethnography.  Mohan opens up the unmediated field of the lived history and socio-cultural transformation of the slave castes namely Pulayas, Parayas and Kuravas in Travancore, Kerala, under colonial rule and emphasizes a gradual but certain evolution and assertion of their agency in the process. He argues that the slave castes received Christianity within a given social, cultural and political milieu and therefore their engagement with it is a process which is rather dynamic and diverse. While the bible became a text which enabled new social imagination for the slave castes, their existent religious identities did not get metamorphosed wholly and irreversibly, nor was their attachment to Christianity merely inspired by the material benefits it promised. 

Mohan carves out the concept of a ‘colonial modernity’ as spilled out of European modernity to its colonies, facilitating the formation and articulation of the idiom of resistance for them. Negating the popular view that caste transformation was a result of an overall environment and pervasiveness of nationalism, which according to him only serves the purpose of legitimizing the caste movements, he asserts that protestant Christian missionaries were the first to ever talk about the slave castes in Kerala, while the national elites remained indifferent to their situation. Some landmark changes that occurred with the coming of the missionaries were the abolition of slavery in 1855, the introduction of free wage labour and the spread of literacy as a direct consequence of missionary intervention in India.  Since slavery was part of an organic caste system in Kerala, little changed in the lived situations of slave castes, which remained in penury. However, the coming of the law, the new governmentality of the colonial rule and the literacy drive held out a promise for these castes. Mohan underlines, that the scope of liberation and emancipation through the missionaries was very clear to the slave castes, who actively sought engagement with the former. His methodology of ethnographic history has enabled him to challenge the asymmetrical nature of information collection on slave castes and delve deeper into the nuances of the every day, where these subtle social changes bred and surfaced. In his own words, it allows him a ‘thick description’ of the historical events. Benefiting from this methodology, he has managed to unpack the role and influence of missionaries on the evolution of the slave castes as a contested site. It enables the author to explicate the multiple layers and shades of influence they had on the process of change, dismissing the comfort and complacency of one extreme viewpoint.

The missionaries needed to challenge the social arrangement of slavery to make religious conversion possible. In the earlier part of the book, Mohan takes us through these gradual transformations that occurred in the ‘habitus’ of the slave castes with the coming of the missionaries. In the process of surveying the lives of the slaves, the missionaries unknowingly created a possibility for emergence of a new subjectivity for them. Perhaps for the first time, they understood that they were oppressed. Their engagement with Christianity opened up avenues for imagining a new social self, constituted of the ideas of cleanliness, freedom, equality, and sin and repentance, which enabled them to develop a new personhood devoid of victim identity. The pursuit of civilization necessitated the possession of property, hitherto denied to the slave caste. They asked for rights to education, land, a law on property inheritance as well as access to free books and clean clothes for their school-going children.

The surfacing of an active agency of the slave caste in relation to their interface with missionaries is made evident at several points in the text. New congregations are seen using missionary prayers as relatable to their own local contexts, slave castes attend night schools for understanding Bible despite their grueling workday schedules, their children listen to the Gospel, they practice Sabbath, inviting strict resistance and cruel punishments from the landlords and make their choices in keeping with their own beliefs when faced with moral dilemmas once baptized. Mohan highlights that the acceptance of Christianity was not a sweeping whitewash of slave identities; they retained a lot of what they were before the conversion. It was from these crevices that the evolution of new religious and social order founded by the leaders of slave castes emerged. The dissatisfaction with the existing social arrangements and perceived inadequacy of the missionary intervention, as the hierarchy between castes and sects persisted within the Church, led to the rise of movements like the Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha (PRDS). Analysis of the rise and trajectory of PRDS constitutes the last half of the book.

Poyikayil Yohannan, the leader of PRDS, pursued the cause of material and spiritual emancipation of the slave castes. This new movement, arising out of disillusionment from both Christianity and Hinduism, was able to garner massive support and membership. The core of this movement for a new divinity, with Yohannan as the saviour prophet, rearranged the discourse of caste slavery as the basis for building a progressive orientation of the movement. As slavery was revisited, the family was seen as a coveted social institution historically denied to the slaves, as they were bought and sold, dividing children from their parents and separating couples and siblings. The Sabha’s worship rituals pivoted around family, which was not only an invocation of what has been denied but also an assertion of what is desirable (a stable family structure) in the pursuit of emancipation. At a later stage of its trajectory, the movement lamented the lack of history and emphasised its importance. Mohan delves into this interesting and important question of why movements for social change need history at a certain stage. Why do myths of origin become important? Is the process of emancipation, oriented to the future as it is, directed via a lost glorious path?The PRDS recoups the social dignity lost in the process of slavery by bracketing it with a glorious past which is lost (248) and the present which needs to toil to bring back lost glory. The development of a ritual language, Sanskritic Malayalam was also seen as an avenue to negotiate newer fields of emancipation. While history creation was important for the conjuring of a glorious past, property, education and religion were important for the present. Modernity provided an orientation to the imagination of a future, which invoked the past and gave it a desirable trajectory, which was up to the present to mediate.

Interestingly, while Mohan localizes and situates his research lens regionally, he manages to invoke and address central questions peculiar to emancipatory struggles, globally. Mohan’s work is a rare account of ethnographic history in the South Asian context and is relevant to students and researchers of history, anthropology and caste/social movements for both its method and content. It emphasizes the centrality of the agrarian slave castes in the cultural and economic evolution of Kerala, which historiographies have overlooked or neglected altogether.

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Dr. Benu Verma is a Research Consultant with the Institute of Social Studies Trust, where she works with issues around precarious livelihoods and care, gender-based violence, gender and digitality and social movements building.