To fix the beginning of bondage at the time of marriage is therefore quite arbitrary. Getting married, sons would continue to serve their father’s dhaniamo, while girls joined as maids the household of their husband’s master. Children started to work when they were six or seven years old sons to graze the cattle and tend the beasts in the stable, daughters to join their mother ( harekwali) performing domestic chores in the master’s house and courtyard. The hali was born in bondage and became domesticated at young age in the master’s household.

The variant I put on record in my field-based research when it was already on the verge of being extinguished derives from the pre-capitalist past, when bondage was a hereditary relationship attaching a landless servant in beck-and-call availability to a landowning master. At least, that is how they have been documented in the literature, although the setting in which they came about was highly dissimilar. The two forms of labour bondage that I focused on in my local-level research in south Gujarat are both based on indebtedness. While the extremes at both ends are clearly articulated, the range in between is more ambiguous and difficult to classify – not least because it can change according to time and place.

My contention in this section is that this fluidity holds equally for the distinction between free and unfree labour. Lack of control over one’s labour power can also differ in duration, stretching from being held in life-long captivity to more temporary forms of engagement in servitude. In the first part I demonstrated that there are various grades of bondage, along a continuum from mild to harsh.

Capitalism ii ign