Somewhere in India today, a labourer working at a brick kiln or a construction site is being paid less than the statutory minimum wage, kept under debt bondage by an advance he can never repay, or moved across State lines under false promises of work. None of this looks, on its face, like slavery. But Indian constitutional law has spent four decades establishing that it is exactly the kind of harm the Constitution's framers meant to outlaw when they wrote Article 23 — the prohibition on "traffic in human beings" and "begar and other similar forms of forced labour." A recent retrospective on this jurisprudence is a useful occasion to unpack what Article 23 actually does, how far its reach now extends, and how the criminal law that backs it has just been rewritten.