Face to Face with Slavery by Kay Marshall Strom
Face to Face With Slavery
By Kay Marshall Strom
My latest book, The Love of Divena, is fiction set in
fact.
On my first trip to India,
I met a couple I’ll call Ajit and Jaya. Both came from the lowest rung of India’s
social ladder—Dalits. Outcastes formerly known as Untouchable. Both had spent
their entire lives working in a local landlord’s fields.
Ajit’s family belonged to the
landowner because many years earlier, in a time of desperation, his grandfather
borrowed a few rupees from the landowner’s grandfather, agreeing to work off
the debt. The landowner’s grandfather credited Ajit’s family for their work,
but he charged an outrageous amount to rent a small hut and buy a few handfuls
of rice. Because only landlords could read and write, they made certain that
for each generation, the family’s indebtedness grew and grew until it could
never be paid off. Ajit was doomed from
birth to spend his life working in the landlord’s fields. From dawn to sundown
every day, under the blistering sun or in monsoon floods.
Both Ajit and Jaya were bonded
laborers, entrapped in the most widespread form of slavery today. In India
alone, 10 million people are enslaved for generations in the same way.
Jaya was thirteen years old
when her father married her to Ajit. Every day she got up long before the sun,
built a fire and cooked rice, then headed to the fields at dawn. She knew no other life. And whenever the landlord looked upon her
with pleasure and told her to stay behind while the others went to the fields,
she screamed inside, but she always stayed. She had no choice. He owned
her.
But one day Ajit stepped
between his wife and the landlord. “No, she will not stay behind with you,” he
said. The landlord had Ajit beaten, but
Ajit would not back down. The landlord refused them rice, but Ajit and Jaya
said they would rather starve. When they managed to sneak away in the middle of
the night, the furious landowner sent his thags
to hunt them down and drag them back.
But God’s hand was on Ajit and
Jaya. They stumbled into a village of freed bonded laborers who hid them. The
landlord expected his men to beat a sobbing woman and her cowering husband into
submission. Instead, his thags were met by more than 100 freed
slaves armed with clubs and knives.
“A village of people like us?” Ajit asked in disbelief. “How can you
survive?”
“We got a micro-loan to start a dairy,” one woman explained. “We all
have jobs to do.”
The village women had done so well with the dairy that they started
their own bank so that they could lend money to others who wanted to start businesses.
Like Ajit and Jaya. Today the couple sells vegetables they grow on their own
small plot of land. And they are fast paying back their loan.
“We are not slaves
anymore,” Jaya told me. “And we never
will be again!”
Actually, The Love of
Divena is fact. It’s just framed in fiction.
Her latest book is the Christian historical fiction, The Love of Divena.
To find out more about Kay, or for contact information, check her website at www.kaystrom.com.
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Pick up your copy of The Love of Divena at the publisher’s website: http://abingdonpress.com/forms/ProductDetail.aspx?pid=7312
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