Azad Nagar: The Story of A 21st-Century Slave Revolt

A celebrated revolution brought freedom to a group of enslaved people in northern India - or did it?

Millions of people around the world today are 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 after staging a rebellion against their slaveholders. International organizations championed this as a nonviolent '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 Azad Nagar, found that whispers and deflections suggested there was something troubling about Azad Nagar's success.