Where in your code does Perl escape this? What module are you using to talk to Elasticsearch?

If you are inspecting your data via Data::Dumper, that one will add an additional layer of escaping as it outputs data as Perl syntax.

Please show us a short, self-contained example that shows where Perl is doing additional escaping when sending data to Elasticsearch.

In my usage of Search::ElasticSearch I had no need to escape anything. If you want index a cleaned up version of your text, maybe you want to use the functions of Elasticsearch to clean up your text in the index but keep the document as is?