One of my fondest childhood memory is reading sawyer and huck. The rural setting was similar to the ones we had in Kerala, India growing up.
It was an old copy and was not censored and included all the racial slurs. It took me years before knowing that the words used were racial slurs as those words were not in common usage in India.
The racial slurs are critical as Twain used them to indict the culture of the antebellum American South, and not to endorse its prejudices. When Huck Finn chooses "All right then, I'll go to Hell" by helping Jim, he goes against his ingrained social training as a white Southerner.
People who want to censor Twain misunderstand his message, either out of ignorance, or purposefully so as to take the sting out of Twain's social commentary and rewrite history.
Perhaps you can think of some works of literature set in India where characters utter analogous slurs, and the purpose of the author is to criticize the caste system?
I agree in the case of Huck Finn, but if you look at the slurs in Tom Sawyer there are not many and they are mostly inessential, which is funny because Tom Sawyer functions as a racist book, whereas Huck Finn is anti-racist.
https://medium.com/luminasticity/mark-twain-racism-2-tom-saw...
Same here. Seems like this was a phenomenon in Kerala. I read the Malayalam versions.
I don't believe new copies are censored? I read the book (Huckleberry Finn's not Sawyer's) as a kid in the 2010s and we read the version with slurs as well