Corporation festivities.
The new municipality was inaugurated with much pomp and ceremony in 1688, the year of the glorious Revolution. The Governor of Madras was outside the corporation, but the mayor and three senior aldermen were members of council. On Saturday, the 29th of September, 1688, the Governor received the mayor, aldermen, and burgesses in the council-chamber at Fort St. George. The members of the new corporation then took the oaths and sat down to a corporation dinner; and after a while they all marched to the town-hall in their several robes, with the maces before the mayor. Nothing, however, is said about the heads of castes, and nothing more about the burgesses.
Failure of municipal rule.
The mayor and aldermen were to be a Court of Record, with power to try all causes, criminal and civil, in a summary way, according to "equity and good conscience," and such laws and orders as might be made by the Company. The corporation were authorised to levy taxes for building a guild-hall, a public jail, and a school-house for teaching English, arithmetic, and merchants' accounts to Indian children, and for payment of the necessary salaries. Henceforth, two aldermen sat as justices of the Choultry; but the corporation raised no tax and founded no institution, and eventually died out from sheer want of vitality.
Slavery under Hindu rule.
§6. All this while the slave trade was an institution in Madras, and indeed, throughout Southern India. In most of the Hindu kingdoms of the Peninsula, the farm-labourers were slaves or serfs attached to the soil; they were probably aboriginal populations who had been reduced to slavery by their conquerors. Prisoners of war, male and female, were also compelled to serve the conquerors as domestic servants, and treated as slaves of the family.
Mohammedan slavery.
When Turks and Afghans introduced Mohammedan rule, slavery was recognised, but Hindu slaves might raise their condition by embracing Islam, and the converts might become important personages in the household, and marry female members of the family. The favourites of a grandee or Sultan might even marry a daughter, and rise to the rank of steward of the household or minister of state, like Joseph in the court of the Pharaohs.
Mogul restrictions.