Shudras in Ancient India: A Social History of the Lower Order down to circa A.D. 600 c13.112

c13.112

In spite of all this the general weakening of slavery during the Gupta period seems to be evident. After the conquests of Samudra Gupta and Candra Gupta II we do not come across any large-scale wars in Gupta times. Therefore the possibility of acquiring slaves through conquest seems to have been exhausted. The system of slavery was further undermined because of the shrinkage of the market. In Greece and Rome, where it prevailed on a wide scale, it was connected with the money market. This was also partly true of India. The wide use of metallic money facilitated the sale and purchase of slaves for about a thousand years from about *circa* 500 B.C. But the paucity of coins from towards the end of the sixth century may have weakened the practice of dealing in slaves. Although the category of purchased slaves (*kriita dāsa*) exists in the later law-books, their number may not have been very large. Similarly lesser use of money would mean less of moneylending and reduce the number of those who were held as pledge or mortgage and made slaves. However metallic money seems to have decreased markedly only towards the end of the sixth and the beginning of the seventh century. And this phenomenon itself was a consequence of the decline of trade and towns¹ and the rise of a new type of economy in which various services were paid through land grants, and the donated villages came to form some kind of new, self-sufficient economic units catering to their own needs as well to those of the beneficiaries.²