Coolie Woman

In 1903, a Brahmin woman sailed from India to Guiana as a ‘coolie’ – the British name for indentured labourers who replaced the newly emancipated slaves on sugar plantations all around the world. Pregnant and travelling alone, this woman, like so many of the indentured, disappeared into history. Now, in Coolie Woman, her great-granddaughter Gaiutra Bahadur embarks on a journey into the past to find her. Traversing three continents and trawling through countless colonial archives, Bahadur excavates not only her greatgrandmother’s story but also the repressed history of some quarter of a million other coolie women, shining a light on complex lives. Many were widows, runaways or outcasts who migrated alone in epic sea voyages – traumatic ‘middle passages’ – only to face a life of hard labour, dismal living conditions and sexual exploitation. As Bahadur documents, however, it was precisely their sexuality that gave coolie women a degree of leverage. In new worlds where they were the scarcer sex, they could have their pick of Indian partners. This often incited fatal retaliations by the men who were spurned. Meanwhile, intimacy with white overseers sometimes conferred privileges. It also provoked plantation uprisings, as a struggle between Indian men and their women intersected with one between coolies and their overlords. The women’s shortage gave them sway but also made them victims, caught in a shifting borderland between freedom and slavery. Coolie Woman is a meditation on survival, a gripping story of a double diaspora – from India to the West Indies in one century, and from Guyana to the United States in the next – that is at once a search for roots and an exploration of gender and power, peril and opportunity.