Breaking the shackles: Azad Nagar

If you thought slavery doesn’t exist in India today, Azad Nagar: The Story of a 21st Century Slave Revolt will make you question your assumptions. Azad Nagar: The Story of a 21st Century Slave Revolt; by Laura T Murphy, published by HarperCollins India, 160 pages, ₹299 There is scant media coverage or easily available information about how this Adivasi community revolted against their landowners, eventually going on to establish an Azad Nagar of their own. This reflects two things: the unsavoury truth that many in India are still uncomfortable to acknowledge that slavery exists, just in a different form than it used to, and that the uprising in 2000 was a one-off incident that did not lead to any institutional change over the years, and did not receive much interest from the media to have been documented or discussed at length. She finds that the making of Azad Nagar has achieved little despite the efforts put in by NGOs to make Adivasis the owners of land and that the community has new burdens to bear—their lives do not matter at all but are interchangeable for the development of the country, more so when there are profitable mining and quarrying opportunities.