When Europeans first came to Kerala, they did not arrive as saviors or as civilizing agents of light, but as merchants of bodies, land, and profit. This was the same role they played in other regions, including Africa and the Americas. What has often been celebrated as the “coming of Christianity” to Kerala hides a much darker story: the transformation of Kerala’s caste-based slavery into a global export economy, aided by churches and legitimized by politics.
The Deep Roots of Slavery in Kerala
Before Europeans arrived, Kerala already carried the weight of caste slavery. Pulayar, Parayar, Kuravar, and Cherumar communities lived as hereditary slaves, tied to the soil of landlords and temples. Travancore, Cochin, and Malabar states counted tens of thousands of such enslaved people in official records. William Logan’s Malabar Manual and Samuel Mateer’s Native Life in Travancore both describe this grim reality openly. These communities were treated not as human beings but as commodities—an existing system that Europeans quickly learned to exploit.
Europeans Turn Kerala into a Slave Port
The Portuguese and Dutch did not simply bring pepper and cardamom into their trading system; they also carried Kerala’s enslaved lower castes into the wider Indian Ocean.
Cochin in 1753: VOC (Dutch East India Company) court records from that year, preserved in the Acten van Transport, detail slave sales in Cochin. These are not vague references but concrete legal deeds: children and adults sold by private Dutch traders, registered, renamed, and shipped out. Entire families of lower-caste origin were commodified.
Dutch households in Fort Cochin: A Brill study reveals that nearly every Dutch family in Fort Cochin kept slaves—on average four to six per household. These were not just “servants”; they were coerced laborers, bought in markets that Europeans themselves regulated.
Destinations: From Cochin, Malabar’s enslaved were sent to Batavia, Ceylon, and the Cape of Good Hope. In Cape colony records, “Malabar slaves” appear as an identifiable group.
The stark truth is this: Kerala was not only a spice port—it was a slave port under European control.
Churches as Economic Instruments
The myth told today is that churches in Kerala were built purely for faith and conversion. But a different picture emerges from the records:
The Tarisappalli copper plates (9th century) already show that church land grants included aladimaikal (slaves). The church was never free from slavery—it was tied to the same structures as temple and landlord estates.
Later, parish account books from 17th–18th century Kerala record offerings called adimappanam (“slave money”). Far from rejecting slavery, churches collected revenues from it, symbolically and literally.
Changanassery, Cochin, Ernakulam: historical sources, government tourism profiles, and oral traditions remember these towns as markets where slaves were sold. Local accounts even suggest churches doubled as storage places for slaves, except on Sundays when rituals demanded a temporary shift of function. Whether or not every such claim can be pinned down in court-style evidence, it is clear that church compounds and Christian markets stood inside the slave economy, not outside it.
Thus, churches were not primarily built for saving souls, but for securing revenue. Conversion was never just about faith—it was taxation. To be part of the Christian fold meant being drawn into the European-controlled economy, paying dues in money, labor, and, at times, in one’s own body.
Erasing the Memory
Today, the very powers who once trafficked Kerala’s people—Europeans and their native political allies—pose as the “enlighteners.” Missionary accounts are circulated as proof of emancipation, while their complicity in owning and trading slaves is minimized. The grand narrative says: “Europe brought light to Kerala.” The suppressed truth is: Europe drained Kerala’s most vulnerable communities into its slave networks, and the church became its instrument.
By the mid-19th century, under pressure from missionaries and British reform laws, slavery was abolished on paper—1843 in British Malabar, 1855 in Travancore, 1864 in Cochin. But the cost was already paid: entire communities uprooted, their histories erased, their bondage sanctified as “civilization.”
The Real History
What needs to be remembered is not the myth of European benevolence but the continuity of exploitation:
Europeans did not “rescue” Kerala’s lower castes—they exported them.
Churches were not innocent houses of worship—they were economic machines, entwined with slavery, taxation, and social control.
Politicians and elites of later centuries whitewashed this reality, painting churches as centers of light, while silencing the story of those whose lives were broken to sustain them.
The truth is simple but devastating: Kerala’s encounter with European Christianity was as much about the slave trade as it was about salvation. Until this history is openly told, Kerala’s collective memory remains half-erased.
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