Gender historians have contributed some of the most powerful methodological interventions to the discipline of history. Their rigorous scholarship on the concept of agency has transformed widely accepted historical accounts of colonialism, slavery, and nationalism by substantiating the place of women and other marginalized historical actors. Their research has also produced new modes of reading traditional archives and illuminated how material culture, oral history, visual culture, and speculative history are powerful sites to produce history.
Arunima Datta's first book, Fleeting Agencies, draws from and contributes to this expansive work by underscoring the centrality of transnational coolie women to the development of plantation economies, and to the history of colonialism, gender, and racial capitalism more widely. Fleeting Agencies disentangles the history of coolie women from colonial and nationalist discourses that constructed these women as weak and helpless, shrewd and cunning, and hypersexual or sexually exploited. Datta challenges these colonial and nationalist stereotypes and articulates how coolie women were producers and reproducers of labor in a global imperial economy, and historical agents in their homes, colonial courts, plantations, and offices and within the context of World War II. This move reorients more canonically accepted histories of indenture that displace the voices and lives of coolie laborers, including men, to explicate the political, legal, and financial changes that emerged as the global economy transitioned from relying on enslaved laborers to indentured laborers on plantations through archival research across three continents, including extensive oral histories.
Datta theorizes her approach through three interwoven concepts: fleeting agency, situational agency, and survivance. These concepts animate the foundation of each chapter and enable Datta to foreground how coolie women were historical actors who showcased agency ranging from strategic compliance to armed resistance within the context of uncertainty and shifting power dynamics that presented their own conditions of oppression. Each chapter of the book moves chronologically through time and into distinct spheres of coolie women's everyday lives, including the British imperial economy, colonial plantations, coolie households, and male-female intimate relations.
The first chapter centers the movement of coolie women within the global transformation of imperial economies following abolition. Datta refuses to interpret coolie women as the passive victims of aggressive recruiters or appendages to husbands as colonial officials and Indian nationalists claimed at the time. Instead, Datta reinterprets the decisions of coolie women to leave colonial India for British Malaya as a moment of situational agency in which they hoped to escape abusive marriages, family quarrels, the stigma of widowhood, and prostitution. The subsequent chapter highlights coolie women as integral laborers on rubber plantations in colonial Malaya, to challenge conventional wisdom that coolie women were secondary, casual, or passive laborers. It elaborates on the array of political action coolie women took, including protests, strikes, riots, and complaints, to secure slightly better pay and working conditions.
Chapter 3 shifts the book's focus from global and local plantation economies to the domestic space of coolie lines on rubber plantations. Datta argues that colonial interpretations of coolie households as violent and dysfunctional enhanced the power of the colonial state so it could rescript domestic violence as a product of violent coolie men by displacing complex economic, political, and gender constellations that emerged as a result of colonial practice and policy. In the following chapter, Datta explicates the intimate relations between coolie men and women through what the colonial state labeled husband desertions, wife enticements, and immoral relations. The chapter underlines how coolie women navigated their intimate relations and widely accepted stereotypes of them as victims as part of larger gendered political strategies to mitigate, if only temporarily, unequal power dynamics.
The final chapter in Fleeting Agencies explores the decisions of coolie women who joined the Rani of Jhansi regiment, the only women's regiment within the Indian National Army. In a pivotal reinterpretation supported by oral history, Datta locates the decisions of coolie women to join the Indian National Army at the intersection of Japanese war violence, economic hardship on plantations, and the search for better opportunities. This reinterpretation prefaces coolie women's lived experience during the war over previous interpretations that have centered on Subhas Chandra Bose's charisma and nationalist appeal.
A further engagement with gender scholars in the fields of Black and Indigenous studies may have instantiated how a study of indenture nuances our understanding of agency beyond the work produced by historians of British imperialism, South Asia, and Southeast Asia and bolstered a larger conversation among gender historians studying other parts of the modern world. This line of inquiry may have also opened the book's efforts to situate how scholars can conceptualize the study of indentured women's agency and survival tactics vis-à-vis enslaved women given that indentured laborers were conscripted by colonial officials during and in the aftermath of abolition. Much more can also be said about the role of nonbinary relations of men and women to excavate other forms of intimate and queer relations. Moreover, an introduction of the vernacular terms that are commonly used by coolie women to describe the conditions they historically experienced may have offered new ways of locating how these women understood their agency.
These untaken routes, however, do little to undermine the critical and rich insights that Datta posits. Fleeting Agencies expands the canonical scholarship in the field of labor history which has only marginally explored the importance of South Asian migration to the development of a global economic order and racial capitalism. Additionally, the book contributes to rich scholarship gender scholars have produced in relationship to widows, concubines, children, and prostitutes within the British Empire by centering itinerant women. In doing so, Datta expands traditional imperial accounts of women's history, explicating the role of European colonial officials and upper caste Indian nationalists in the production of gendered stereotypes. Fleeting Agencies further adds to the emerging literature on inter-Asian networks and migrations within the field of Asian studies, and it serves as a timely reminder to scholars of Asia and European imperialism that global histories of labor, imperial law, plantation economies, nationalism, and colonialism are incomplete without the study of itinerant female laborers.
