Indian Slavery Act, 1843

The act states how the sale of any person as a slave was banned, and anyone buying or selling slaves would be prosecuted under the law, the offence carrying a strict punishment.

Implementation and effect

Some East India Company officials opposed the act, citing Hindu and Muslim customs and maintaining the fact that the act would be seen as interference in traditional social structures. Evangelical politicians who had led successful slavery abolition campaigns in the West Indies prevailed and the Act was implemented.

Historians are divided on whether the Act was able to exclude caste and slavery. The condition of workers in tea plantations in Tamil Nadu and Assam were compared to that of African, West Indian counterparts who worked in sugar plantations. Lack of alternatives meant tea plantation workers had become indentured labourers despite the Act, which historian Amalendu Guha maintained was a new form of slavery.

A 1996 Human Rights Watch report refers to Manjari Dingwaney's book, Unredeemed Promises: The Law and Servitude, and states:

Various forms of debt bondage co-existed with formal slavery, and while the British abolished slavery legislatively through the Anti-Slavery Act of 1843, large numbers of former slaves traded their status for that of perpetually bonded servitude. This was in part due to the fact that the British did not abolish debt-bondage; instead, they regulated it.