How do Enslaved People Today Win (and Sometimes Lose) their Freedom? A community of rock quarry miners in a village in Uttar Pradesh, India gave their tiny cluster of thatched roofed houses the name Azad Nagar. Freedomville. But it hasn't always been identified by that auspicious moniker. The miners renamed their village in 2000, after they staged a revolt that overthrew the profit-driven landowners who held their families in debt bondage for generations. Non-profits celebrated their tenacity; a film promoted their non-violent grassroots efforts; their success inspired other villages to fight for their own freedom. But the complex story of Freedomville, the murder that these revolutionaires nearly got away with, and the short-lived freedom its inhabitants created for themselves has never before been told until now.
Laura T. Murphy, a leading scholar of contemporary global slavery, spent years following the story of a small group of transgenerationally-enslaved men and women who fought to liberate themselves from their overseers, wrest control of the rock quarry in which they worked, and become masters of their own fates. Their journey reveals the precarity of that hard-won freedom, as those rock quarry miners fight to sustain their freedom after liberation without the literal and figurative tools necessary to run their own businesses, develop their village, and improve the opportunities avaiable to their children. Their struggle suggests that the effort to sustain freedom after liberation is as much about successful revolution as it is about the stories we tell about societal change. In the process of capturing the constanty changing narrative that emerged, Murphy reveals how it is that slavery continues to exist in the twenty-first century, how the slow and possibly interminable dissolution of the caste system has led to a veritable class war in India, and how the global construction boom has contributed to the continued alienation of impoverished people around the world.
Industry Reviews
"A brave and brilliant report on the tyranny of the caste system and continuing feudal practices in India's villages. Freedomville rips apart the cliche of India being the largest democracy in the world and shows us how millions of Indians are deprived of their basic constitutional freedoms and rights." -Basharat Peer, author of A Question of Order: India, Turkey, and the Return of Strongmen, and a Contributing Writer for The New York Times
"A powerful, damning account of economic growth, beautifully told through the tragic story of the fight for freedom from slavery of tribals in India. A must-read for anyone wanting to understand modern slavery, the fragility of ideas of freedom, the place of violence in bringing about progressive change, and modern India." -Alpa Shah, professor, Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics, and author of Nightmarch: Among India's Revolutionary Guerrillas
"Laura Murphy brings a formidable array of experiences and skills to this compelling project. Trained in literary studies and the author of previous works on slave narratives of the past and human rights abuses in the present, she makes effective use in Freedomville of research techniques associated with oral history, ethnography, and investigative journalism while demonstrating a novelist's feel for scene setting, character development, and pacing." -Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Chancellor's Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink
"In Freedomville, Laura Murphy returns to an Indian village known to many as an anti-slavery success story, where she uncovers complex interconnections, unresolved truths, and a community and its former enslavers wrestling with mechanization, globalization, and environmental racism. Drawing on her deep understanding of historical slave resistance and modern human trafficking policy, Murphy echoes Dr. Martin Luther King's warning that Emancipation cannot become an uncashed promissory note, but must be an ongoing guarantee of liberty and opportunity."-Ambassador (ret.) Luis C.deBaca, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University
