Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture

Guyana-born U.S. journalist Bahadur has written a masterly chronicle of the lives of "coolie women" (and also "coolie men"), indentured laborers who were transported from India to the Caribbean from 1838 (i.e., after slavery was outlawed in the British Empire) to 1920, by which time such indentures had ceased. The work focuses on the author's great-grandmother, who, pregnant and alone, sailed from Calcutta to Georgetown, Guyana (formerly British Guiana), in 1903. Bahadur sheds light on the subaltern lives of these women: their recruitment in India, their middle passages, their struggles to survive in the new world. The stories are both poignant and horrific: abuse, promiscuity, rape, mutilation, cuckoldry, and murder abound (according to Bahadur, this legacy still survives in Guyana), owing to the shortage of women and the double struggle between "men and women, colonizer and colonized." The author investigates the lives of the Scottish supervisors on the sugar plantations and their complicated relationships with the coolie women. Bahadur's extensive research draws from archival material, historical records, primary and oral sources, family history, fiction, and poetry.