This article contains both a study and a translation of the laws relating to slavery found in the thirteenth-century Hindu law digest called the Smṛticandrikā. By focusing on a single text, we can clearly see the ideology of slavery in the view of one important author of medieval India. First, slaves formed one end of a categorical continuum of workers, all of whom laboured for the benefit of others as they were denied legal autonomy. While not equivalent, slavery and other forms of work formed a unified topic under what is often called Master and Servant law. Second, slaves were frequently likened to both Śūdras and wives in the text, indicating the persistent relevance of caste and gender to slave status. As a result, the characterisation of slavery as ‘social death’ is less helpful in this case than the unsettling idea that slavery is an intensified form of work in general. All work, including slavery, is affected by a loss of freedom and personal benefit, as well as the biases of social stratification.
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