PROBLEM OF SLAVERY IN ANCIENT INDIA 33 Resurrected Brahminic Hinduism declared through the mouths of Pur anas that Kshatriyas had ceased to exist with the advent of the Sudra Nandas (Nanda-antam Kshatriya-Kulam), replacing thereby the four-caste system with the two-caste system.1 Vishnu Dharma-sutra compiled between the third and first centuries BG, coined for the first time the term 'untouchable' (asprsya), thereby legalising the pariah status of a vast section of Sudra toilers.2 The mediaeval legal pandits, Raghunandana of Bengal (fifteenth century AD) and Nagabhatta of Maharashtra (eighteenth century AD), laid down that only two castes exist in the Kali age, namely, Brahmins and Sudras.3 The present day industrial state terrorises the modern Sudras of the factories and farms into rebellious submission with advanced weaponry of violence, luring them at the same time with the mirage of democratic socialism. Religion in the persons of the Jagad-guru Sankaracharya of Puri and Guruji Golwalkar of the RSS3^ defends the divine origin and the resulting eternality of the caste society and the justifiability of the degradation of the Hindu woman. The Sankaracharya evidently re-echoes the following passage of Satapatha Bramana : tf. . . Woman, the Sudra, the dog, and the black bird (the crow) are untruth; he should not look at them3.4 The Sudra-hating Monistic Idealism of the first Sankaracharya5 has virtually become the state philosophy of the Indian republic. With the hour of the final liberation of the Sudras of industrial society drawing near, the problem of the origin of the slavery of their Dasa-Sudra progenitors presses for solution. Glorification of the good and slurring over or minimisation of the evil in the nation's past was the weapon with which our revivalist scholars countered the attempts of the British imperialists at national humiliation during the period of freedom struggle. Slavery in ancient India received the same treatment at the hands of these scholars. Being one of the foremost of our traditional scholars and also a follower of Tilak, P V Kane's view represents this trend the best : Slavery was probably not much in evidence in India in the 4th century B C, or the treatment of slaves in India was so good that a foreign observer like Megasthenes accustomed to the treatment of slaves in Greece thought that there was no slavery.6 Tilak was, as were the other leaders of the national movement, a political representative of the Indian industrial class. His biographer N C Kelkar records that Tilak started a ginning factory at Latur in Maharashtra in about 1889.7 Tilak hailed from a Khot landlord family and he wrote a series of articles in defence of Khot landlordism in 1899.8 Thes-e semi-feudal affiliations made him a staunch champion of Hindu orthodoxy and led him to offer stiff opposition to the Age of Consent Bill which intended to prohibit child marrige by raising the minimum marriageable age limit of girls.9 Hence, it is no wonder that the political philosophy of these national leaders and their scholarly followers attempted to present exploita-