Bonded labour has been a recurrent theme of research in my academic career. It was the focus of the anthropological fieldwork I conducted in 1961–2 as a Ph.D. student at the University of Amsterdam. My village-level investigations in south Gujarat concentrated on the changing relationship between the two classes/castes found at polar ends of the agrarian hierarchy: landless labourers who were members of a tribal community and their employers, big farmers whom I identified as a dominant caste of local landlords. To take stock of what was going on led me to find out how it had come about: I followed up my fieldwork by exploring colonial archives that shed light on the past. It was clear that the servitude of the agrarian underclass, framed in debt bondage, had over time lost its former character. A new generation’s labour power, instead of being permanently appropriated in a beck-and-call relationship, was casualized as labourers took work as daily wage earners. The decisive features of agrarian bondage as it used to exist were, in my analysis, exploitation and patronage. I emphasized that the master-servant relationship or halipratha had its origin in an era when systematic market production was not yet of major importance and money played a minor role in the local exchange of goods and services. The pre-capitalist nature of the subsistence-oriented economy implied that engaging servants not only liberated the master and his family from the physical labour of cultivating the land but was also driven by his ambition to subordinate clients who became assets in gaining political power and social status (Breman 1974a). Being attached to a landlord willing to provide a livelihood was an attractive option for an agrarian underclass deprived of the chance to own land in their own right. As viewed from above, to become a hali was to access a secure and safe existence.