Between 1834 and 1916, over one million Indian indentured laborers were shipped to the “King Sugar” colonies in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, of whom only a quarter returned to India upon the expiration of their contracts. An important feature of the system of indentured emigration was that it was state regulated, though, of course, there was a yawning gap between the rhetoric of protection on paper and the reality on the ground. Another was the requirement that a certain number of women accompany men on each shipment. After the 1870s, the ratio was set at forty women to every hundred men. The planters caviled about cost and wastage, and the recruiters grumbled about the difficulties they encountered in recruiting women, but the quota was mostly met. But who were these women and why did they leave their homes for unknown places thousands of miles away, most never to return? And how did they survive in the harsh and often inhospitable, violence-ridden conditions of chaos and misery in the colonies? Much is assumed about these women and their predicament, but little is actually known. For the most part, sadly, their history lies hidden behind a “veil of dishonor” about their motivations, morality, and modus operandi on the plantations, about their position as “objects of rape versus concubines with leverage” (p. 150).
In this fine book, Gaiutra Bahadur probes the hidden world of these indentured women deeper than most scholars I know. There are few startling revelations, but this is not for lack of trying. The sources are silent, and women's voices in written records and oral evidence largely absent. Bahadur's research (conducted in Guyana, India, and the United Kingdom) is deep and meticulous in both primary and secondary literature, and the story is told with the novelist's practiced eye for the telling detail. Good history here is a good read as well. And along the way, we catch glimpses of the sordid world of servitude and suffering on the colonial plantations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries across the world.
This book is a journey of exploration. Bahadur's great-grandmother, Sujaria, left for British Guiana on July 29, 1903 (around the same time as my grandmother, Umrai, left for Fiji). She was alone, but four months' pregnant. “Who was she?” Bahadur asks. “Displaced peasant, runaway wife, kidnap victim, Vaishnavite pilgrim or a widow?” (p. 39). We do not know, but what is clear from the history of the Indo-Gangetic plains of the late nineteenth century is that she would most likely have been part of an already uprooted mass of humanity unhooked from their traditional homes because of natural calamities or human oppression and looking for a livelihood elsewhere, perhaps encouraged by arkatis, recruiters, telling tall tales about golden opportunities awaiting them in Demerara (Guyana), Chini Tapu (Trinidad), or Miritch Dwip (Mauritius).
But for most migrants, including women, such opportunities were rare. In the second section of the book, “Exploring,” Bahadur takes us through women's journeys across the kala pani, the dark, dreaded oceans; the life on the plantations; the violence, murders, and suicides; and the sexual molestation by those in authority. There is a debate in the field about whether, on the one hand, indenture represented a potential site for the emancipation of women only to be thwarted by men bent on reasserting the institutions and practices of patriarchy (that is, women as proto-feminists) and, on the other, whether women sought a larger space for themselves but within the overarching framework of their own culture. Bahadur takes a nuanced and, for me, convincing view of the subject, seeing both men and women as a “disfigurement of indenture: the complicity of women in their own fates, the tortured attachment—the tenderness—they felt and continue to feel in the cave of their hearts for their own men, who had also been disfigured by planters and the colonial state” (p. 208).
This book is also a personal journey of discovery. Bahadur's family relocated from Guyana to New Jersey in 1981. “Dismembered from our imaginary homeland, we have felt the absence of the severed limb of India for generations,” she writes (p. 176). In two visits to the subcontinent, she seeks to discover the traces of her roots. “It may be clichéd, but it's raw and nervy and real nonetheless” (p. 176). I agree, for I myself have been on a similar journey twice now. Bahadur captures her testing encounters in rural Bihar and elsewhere in precise, poignant prose. Towards the end, she revisits her native village in Guyana and tells a sorrowful tale of the lives of men and women there. Some things have changed for women, but some things have remained the same. Yet, like their forbears during indenture, the women fight against all the odds, and survive: the triumph of the human spirit over the mundane adversities of life. It is Gaiutra Bahadur's great achievement that she writes about all this with sensitivity and understanding.
Finally, the title. “Coolie” in many places is a pejorative word giving great offense, with the potential to cause fists to fly. Not so in Guyana, where, depending on who says it, in what context, it could be a term of intimacy and endearment among friends and family. I can attest to that. Several years ago on a research trip to Guyana, I was taken to meet a man on the outskirts of Georgetown, the capital city. By mid-morning, the man was far gone in drink. Upon introduction, he looked at me quizzically and asked, “You a coolie maan?” “Yes,” I replied, after I understood what he was saying. It was a term of mutual recognition of our common history and heritage. This book underscored that point for me powerfully. Sujaria could have been my own grandmother.
