August 05, 2021 Laura T. Murphy Story
In Search of Freedomville
In a tiny speck of a village in Uttar Pradesh, India, a community of rock quarry miners have given their cluster of thatched roofed houses the name Azad Nagar. Freedomville. The miners named their village in 2000, only a few months after they staged a slave revolt that overthrew the profit-driven landowners who had held their families in slavery in rock quarries for generations. If you search for Azad Nagar on a map, you won’t find it. To everyone else, it’s called Sonbarsa. Located in the poorest province in one of the poorest countries in the world, Sonbarsa is a barren, rocky, plot of land in the middle of one of the most densely populated states in the world.
