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.

本文包含对十三世纪印度教法律摘要中称为Smṛticandrikā的奴隶制相关法律的研究和翻译。通过集中讨论单一文本，我们可以从中世纪印度的一位重要作家的角度清楚地看到奴隶制的意识形态。首先，奴隶构成了工人的绝对连续体的一个末端，由于他们被剥夺了法律上的自主权，他们所有人为他人的利益而劳动。奴隶制和其他形式的工作虽然不尽相同，但在通常称为“主人和仆人法”的法律下形成了一个统一的主题。其次，在文本中，奴隶经常被比作Śūdras和妻子。这表明种姓和性别与奴隶地位之间的持续联系。结果是，在这种情况下，将奴隶制定性为“社会死亡”并没有令人感到不安的想法，即奴隶制是一般性的强化工作形式，这种帮助不那么有用。所有工作，包括奴隶制，都受到丧失自由和个人利益以及社会分层的偏见的影响。