Begarie

/bɪˈɡɑːri/ noun

Definition

Another variant spelling of begar; compulsory unpaid labor service in historical India.

Etymology

One of several English variant spellings of Hindi begar. Different colonial writers, lacking standardized transliteration, spelled this word differently based on their phonetic interpretation.

Kelly Says

Reading old British India texts is like watching people try to spell without a dictionary—'begarie,' 'begary,' 'begar' all appear in respectable 19th-century sources for the exact same exploitative labor system.

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