Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture - Softcover

Bahadur, Gaiutra

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1849046603 ISBN 13: 9781849046602

Publisher: C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd, 2016

Synopsis

In 1903 a Brahmin woman sailed from India to Guyana as a 'coolie', the name the British gave to the million indentured labourers they recruited for sugar plantations worldwide after slavery ended. A century later, her great-granddaughter and American journalist Gaiutra Bahadur pursues traces of her great-grandmother over three continents. She also excavates the repressed history of some quarter of a million female coolies. Disparaged as fallen, many were runaways, widows or outcasts, and many migrated alone. Coolie Woman chronicles their epic passage from Calcutta to the Caribbean, from departures akin either to kidnap or escape, through sea voyages rife with sexploitation, to new worlds where women were in short supply. When they exercised the power this gave them, some fell victim to the machete, in brutal attacks, often fatal, by men whom they spurned. Sex with overseers both empowered and imperiled other women, in equal measure. It also precipitated uprisings, as a struggle between Indian men and their women intersected with one between coolies and their overlords.

About this title

Review:

'Gaiutra Bahadur has produced an intricate, thoroughly researched and beautifully written book that evokes the experience of emigrant Indians and their descendants.' --Times Literary Supplement

'Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture is a genealogical page-turner interwoven with a compelling, radical history of empire told from the perspective of indentured women. The collective voice of the jehaji behen (ship sisters) has been barely audible across the centuries, until now ... Bahadur grants us rare imaginative access to the odyssey through the experience of women's stories she finds in the archives.' --The Guardian

'In her remarkable book, Gaiutra Bahadur chronicles the extraordinary but neglected saga of indentured labour that evolved when the British began to replace slavery on their sugar plantations worldwide. But the book is more than this: it is also a highly personal account that traces the history of the author's maternal line to the present day. As Bahadur clambers down the generations, she provides the reader with a meticulous and lushly detailed family memoir. ...This is a 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'.' --Literary Review

From the Author:

Gaiutra Bahadur is an award-winning reporter and book critic. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Observer and The Nation, among other publications. She studied literature at Yale and journalism at Columbia, and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. She was born in Guyana and emigrated to the United States as a child.

About this edition

• Publisher: C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1849046603
• ISBN 13: 9781849046602
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288