A Jesuit friend who teaches in Nepal mentioned almost casually in conversation that the young father who lives below his flat in Kathmandu with his newborn son had been a slave. He wasn’t exaggerating. He wasn't speaking metaphorically. He wasn’t lying. As hard as it is for most of my Western friends to grasp, slavery still exists. We might think of the sex trade which has been documented and exposed in the international press, but people other than women and girls are still treated as physical property which can be bought and sold. The practice might be far more widespread than we imagine.
Slavery is officially banned in all countries in the world; indentured servitude in India ended in 1920, but people have found ways around it. They always do. If there are statutes for example prohibiting harsh treatment or even execution of servants, they might be variants of English colonial law governing indentured persons or provisions in the Sharia. However I doubt that most cases of involuntary servitude are even apparent. A hidden network of illegal or semi-legal arrangements has its own set of rules.
In my 6th year teaching English in northern India, I tutored a young man who was completing his secondary education at the Tibetan Children's Village, a school run by the Tibetan Government in Exile. My student, Bama, was almost 21. Most of his fellow students were 8-10 years younger. I was charged with helping him bring his English up to 10th or 12th standard so that he could graduate and go onto College in India. Bama was a very dedicated, bright student. It was a worthwhile investment.
He told me that the monks called Bama because of the high esteem that they had for Barack Obama, and it was close to the English transliteration of his Nepalese name. He was descended from a class of Tibetan warriors that the Kings of Nepal at one point hired or captured on the tundra to be their royal guards, their Swiss Guard. He was ethnically Tibetan, and spoke Tibetan as well as Nepali, Hindi and English.
As I did with all my beginning students, I asked him to tell me his story. He said matter of factly that he had been the property of an Indian family who lived close to the border with Nepal. I was shocked. We took out the Tibetan-English dictionary, and checked the exact meaning of property. Yes, Bama said, they owned him in the same way that they owned their house, cars or businesses. They were a prosperous merchant family who treated him well, but he was their slave and had been since he was a young boy.
When the family moved South to a small town outside Sera Jey Monastery near Mysore to start a restaurant, he was taken along as the dishwasher. He made friends with some monks who came to the restaurant regularly for Sunday brunch. His Tibetan is quite good. I know one was a rinpoche because I took his address to send money to pay for further English lessons. These monks decided to buy him out of slavery, and begin his formal education. He was 15 or 16 at the time. I have no idea the actual cost of his freedom, but I do know it was expensive. I imagine that some of the monks approached someone in the Indian family who owned Bama and began a negotiation. The monks dug deep into their reserves.
Not only did his status change when the monks adopted him--he was no longer part of a clandestine world of cheap labor, there were now opportunities that had been closed off. He learned to read and write quickly. A whole world opened up and he was grateful. I should note that there was no expectation on their part that Bama shave his head and begin monastic training though I’m sure he would have been welcomed. It was a free gift.
After the major earthquake in Nepal in April of 2015, the Dalai Lama became very concerned about Chinese influence in post quake relief, and he wanted to get as many monks of Tibetan origin as possible out of Nepal. Bama still carried a Nepalese passport. He returned to Nepal and smuggled a group of 7 or 8 monks across the border into India. They didn't carry any passports but couldn’t use the border crossing designated for refugees from Tibet because of some bureaucratic technicality. He told me that this was one time he wore a monk’s robes, but he was not going to make it permanent. It was part of his returning the favor of finding his freedom. Bama had not heard had not heard MLK say, “no one is free until we are all free,” but he understood the maxim and lived it.
That is a real story of manumission that even includes an underground railroad, and it happened just a few years ago. But I have to admit that I found it unsettling. I had assumed that after our American Civil War and Eleanor Roosevelt’s inclusion of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the UN Charter, the question had been settled. But slavery has been around for as long as humankind has been defining civilized behavior. How could I be so naive?
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