Caste, Memory, and the Afterlives of Bondage: How a Spectral Slave Became a Demigod in Coastal Kerala

Abstract

The former colonial port town of Kochi in India is home to memorial sites dedicated to enslaved Africans (Kapiri in Malayalam), called Kapirithara. Unlike memorials to slavery that centre victimhood, these sites venerate the Kapiri as a mighty, cigar-smoking demigod. According to popular lore, when the Portuguese lost the city to the Dutch in 1663, they killed their enslaved and buried their treasure with them, believing they would guard these treasures until the owners returned. These shrines, small inconspicuous spaces, marked by candles, incense, alcohol, beef and cigars, remain central to the ritual life of the marginalised communities of the region. The Kapiri is remembered not as a victim, but as a benevolent ancestor, a spectral protector dressed in white, offering help to those in need.

The memorial sites of the Kapiri contradict prevailing narratives of cruelty and victimhood and challenge understandings of the memorialisation of slavery. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and oral narratives, this article argues that these shrines enact a form of multiple memorialisation in which diverse communities, from former slave castes like the Pulayas to landowning Brahmins, remember histories of slavery and caste oppression in ways that converge, yet refuse a narrative of victimhood. The article shows how these material practices constitute a vernacular mode of remembering that complicates dominant historiographies of slavery in South Asia and the Indian Ocean world.