Coolie Woman: The Odyssey Of Indenture - Softcover

Bahadur, Gaiutra

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022621138X ISBN 13: 9780226211381

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2013

Synopsis

In 1903, a young woman sailed from India to Guiana as a "coolie"--the British name for indentured laborers who replaced the newly emancipated slaves on sugar plantations all around the world. Pregnant and traveling alone, this woman, like so many coolies, disappeared into history. In Coolie Woman--shortlisted for the 2014 Orwell Prize--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 great-grandmother's story but also the repressed history of some quarter of a million other coolie women, shining a light on their complex lives.
Shunned by society, and sometimes in mortal danger, many coolie women were either runaways, widows, or outcasts. Many of them left husbands and families behind to migrate alone in epic sea voyages--traumatic "middle passages"--only to face a life of hard labor, dismal living conditions, and, especially, sexual exploitation. As Bahadur explains, however, it is precisely their sexuality that makes coolie women stand out as figures in history. Greatly outnumbered by men, they were able to use sex with their overseers to gain various advantages, an act that often incited fatal retaliations from coolie men and sometimes larger uprisings of laborers against their overlords. Complex and unpredictable, sex was nevertheless a powerful tool.

Examining this and many other facets of these remarkable women's lives, Coolie Woman is a meditation on survival, a gripping story of a double diaspora--from India to the West Indies in one century, Guyana to the United States in the next--that is at once a search for one's roots and an exploration of gender and power, peril and opportunity.

About this title

Product Description:

Title: Coolie Woman( The Odyssey of Indenture) <>Binding: Paperback <>Author: GaiutraBahadur <>Publisher: UniversityofChicagoPress

Review:

"Gaiutra Bahadur's pathbreaking book carefully excavates an imperial history of violence and uprooting. But this is no simple account of victimhood. It shows, with understated literary power, the bitterly paradoxical nature of colonial modernity: the unbearable dialectic between enslavement and liberation that many unsung millions underwent in their private lives."--Pankaj Mishra, author of From the Ruins of Empire

"Gaiutra Bahadur's book made me realize how the experience of a whole generation of women like her great-grandmother profoundly challenges the various stereotypes we have. This is a highly original combination of careful scholarship and well-told personal journey."--Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains

"In Coolie Woman, [Bahadur] combines her journalistic eye for detail and storytelling gifts with probing questions, relentlessly pursuing leads to create a haunting portrait of the life of a subaltern. 'Can the subaltern speak?' the theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak had asked rhetorically. Yes, she can. Through the story of Sheojari, Bahadur shows how."
--Salil Tripathi "Independent "

"With the exhilarating meticulousness of a period film, Coolie Woman recreates a vanished world and casts a personal searchlight on the saga of indenture. Gaiutra Bahadur rescues her great-grandmother Sujaria and other coolie women from the archives by means of a narrative that is both scholarly and soulful. In detailing the bitter journeys of her forebears, in making their astonishing experiences real and sympathetic, and in registering the complexities of their lives--not least the extent to which they made choices where one might have expected helplessness--Bahadur honors their memories and shows herself their worthy descendant."--Teju Cole, author of Open City

"An impassioned, meticulously researched, and gripping book that shines a fierce light on a dark, unexplored corner of the history of colonialism and slavery, Coolie Woman intertwines the personal and the historical to sensational effect. It is also a uniquely affecting piece of work."--Neel Mukherjee, author of A Life Apart

"Every so often a history book comes along that grips you into a cascade of compelling narrative. The writer excavates new ore from old seams. Coolie Woman is such a book, destined for a unique place in the multi-mirror of Caribbean culture."--John Agard, author of Half-Caste

"Coolie Woman is about indenture, yes. It's also a product of unflinching inquiry into community, diaspora, displacement, New World immigration, the body politic, and the persistent legacy of colonialism. Reading it is immersive, dense, and challenging in the best way: it marks a series of redefinitions, broadening the basin of one's assumptions governing indenture. It illuminates the tableaux of Indian women's stories, blowing heaped decades of dust from their surfaces. Bahadur handles this history without compromise, imbuing it with prismatic context, deepening the true stories that can be told about the journeys that so many women undertook."
--Shivanee Ramlochan "Trinidad & Tobago Guardian "

"Fascinating story, which will have resonance for millions of others who are swept up and transformed by history and have to find a new way to create 'home.'"
--Andrea Stuart "Literary Review "

"Gaiutra Bahadur braids a dazzling rope from the history of Indian migration to the Caribbean, the experience of Indians in Guyana and of Indo-Guyanese immigrants in the United States, and the joy and pain of 'return' to India. Deeply researched, elegantly written, Coolie Woman is a major contribution to the literature of diaspora." --Richard Drayton, King's College London

"This is a story of how colonialism made the modern world, and of how some of the women who laboured in foreign lands worked to build the wealth that still sparkles in the enclaves of opulence and power from London to La Lucia. This is a complex story about our complex past that offers little to the often crude nationalisms that, from Guiana to Fiji and South Africa, not to mention India, are emerging in response to our inability to really decolonise our societies. Those who wish to find romantic myths in the past to power deeply conservative ideas about the present, and the role of women in an imagined future, will find little to work with here. What this book does show, and what history always shows when it's examined properly, is that the past was just as complex and messy as the present. But it also shows that in that messy complexity there is, then as now, resilience, innovation, renewal and courage."
--Vashna Jagarnath "The Con "

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 022621138X
• ISBN 13: 9780226211381
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 312