Bawi and Sal in Mizo Society

Abstract

Slavery has existed in one form or another throughout the world. Slavery is a word often associated with the past, evoking unimaginable injustices difficult to be forgotten by history. Despite the considerable advances in conceptualizing slavery in global histories, studies of the same phenomenon in Mizo society caused profound unease among the modern scholars. Like most tribal societies, the Mizos had their own variety of slaves and bonded labourers. The ethnographers and historians have tried to retrieve this history of slavery/ bondedness in the Mizo society. This article is a study of the forms of slavery or bonded labour that existed in Mizoram