Historians have dealt with slavery and the plight of the slave caste in the State of Kerala during the nineteenth century. Yet, there has been no systematic attempt at describing the beginning of the slave caste. My attempt, ambitious though, has been to fill out this historiographical gap to a certain extent. This study depends on archaeological material, heroic poems, inscriptions, and an oral composition, ostensibly a mere legendary account, and on the theory of Social Formation. The theory focuses on the sequential transition from one social formation to the next in terms of techno-economic processes, together with productive relations. My reconstruction also relies, with a methodological preoccupation, on the strategy of extrapolation from the known situation in the adjacent Tamil region to the unknown, through which I seek to imagine the making of slaves in Kerala.
Dr Rajan Gurukkal is the Vice-Chairman of the Kerala State Higher Education Council. He has taught at Union Christian College, Aluva (1972-88), and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi (1988-1990). He has been in the Executive Committee of the World Association of Semioticians since 2004. He was a member in a few national Councils, such as the Indian Council of Historical Research, and the Indian National Science Academy, and a member of the National Tiger Conservation Authority, Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India, since 2015. Gurukkal is a historian and social scientist famed for critical historiography. He wrote history beyond the discipline as a pioneering researcher of interdisciplinary perspective, including social theory, historical human ecology, human geography, philosophy of science, social semiotics, Dravidian poetics, and theory of knowledge production. He has authored eleven books mostly brought out by Oxford University Press, and over 160 research articles. His latest books are: Rethinking Classical Indo-Roman Trade, OUP, 2015; History and Theory of Knowledge Production, OUP, 2019.
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