Haunting the Historiography of Slaves in South Asia from the nineteenth century to the present

ABSTRACT Using both English and Urdu‐language records, this article traces the career of a few African and Afro‐Asian women slaves in the household‐state of Awadh during the first half of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the same records, this article compares a master‐poet's recognition of the motherhood of the African and Afro‐Asian slaves to the treatment of other slave‐mothers. It then moves to analyse British official necropolitics towards the elderly African‐Asian women, who were either manumitted by death or by deed and lived in mid‐century Lucknow. British disregard for Islamic Laws of wala and obligations of senior mawla (patrons) towards these elders continued to shape the historiography of slavery until the present.