A celebrated revolution brought freedom to a group of enslaved people
in northern India. Or did it?
Millions of people today are still enslaved; nearly eight million of
them live in India, more than anywhere else. This book is the story of a
small group of enslaved villagers in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh
who founded their own town of Azad Nagar--Freedomville--after staging a
rebellion against their slaveholders. International organizations
championed it as a non-violent silent revolution that inspired other
villagers to fight for their own freedom. But Laura T. Murphy, a leading
scholar of contemporary global slavery who spent years researching and
teaching about Freedomville, found that there was something troubling
about Azad Nagar's success.
Murphy embarks on a Rashomon-like retelling--a complex, constantly
changing narrative of a murder that captures better than any sanitized
account just why it is that slavery continues to exist in the
twenty-first century. Freedomville's enormous struggle to gain and
maintain liberty shows us how realistic it is to expect radical change
without violent protest--and how a global construction boom is deepening
and broadening the alienation of impoverished people around the world.