Public Administration in Ancient India c5.36

c5.36

The members of the family were the father, the mother, sons, daughters, daughters-in-law, brothers, sisters, and other dependent relations. Slavery, such as existed in olden times in other parts of the world, was unknown in India. Megasthenes emphatically asserts, “None of the Indians employ slaves.”¹ And, again, he says, “All Indians are free, and not one of them is a slave. The Lakedaemonians and the Indians are so far in agreement. The Lakedaemonians, however, hold the Helots as slaves, and these Helots do servile labour; but the Indians do not even use aliens as slaves, and much less a countryman of their own.”² This was perfectly true, and yet there existed in Ancient India a class of persons who were not completely free. This class was known as the Dāsas. The word ‘Dāsa’ is a variant of the word ‘Dasyu,’ and, originally, the Dāsas consisted of the non-Āryans who were captured in war.¹ To this class were afterwards added the issue of Dāsas and those who were deprived of their freedom as a judicial punishment. The number of Dāsas was never very large, and no Ārya could be a Dāsa.² Trading in Dāsas was prohibited,³ and any Dāsa could purchase his freedom by paying a reasonable price.⁴ The Dāsas were members of the family of their masters, and their condition was very different from that of the slaves in ancient Rome. In Roman law, a slave was nothing better than the chattel of his owner, and the penalty for the killing of a slave was the same as that for killing a four-footed beast. In India, on the other hand, a Dāsa had the protection of the courts, and any ill-treatment of a Dāsa was visited with severe punishment.⁵ Moreover, the emancipation of a Dāsa was always considered as a virtuous act, which produced the happy result that the institution died out in India at an early period, and Hindu society was rid of an evil which continued to disfigure other civilised societies for a much longer time and in a much more degraded form.