My great-grandmother Sujaria didn’t leave behind letters or diaries describing the circumstances that led her to climb aboard a ship bound for the other side of the world on a summer’s day in 1903, in the middle of the monsoon, while four months pregnant and alone.
A decaying emigration pass in a ship’s manifest in Guyana told me that, when she departed Calcutta to work as an indentured labourer – or “coolie” – in British Guiana, she was 27 years old and high-caste. It provided the name of her father and her native village and, with remarkable intimacy, hinting at possible trauma, even recorded a burn mark on her left leg. Missing from the written record, however, was her own testimony, the story in her own words of how she came to leave and who she truly was. A waylaid religious pilgrim? A widow? A fugitive from an abusive marriage? A woman deserted by her husband?
These were experiences shared by other recruits. So which was her story? Did my great-grandmother choose to go and work on a Caribbean sugar plantation, or was she forced? On these and other crucial questions, the record is silent, stranding me at the very edges of the archives, at the limits of what can be known.
Coolie Woman is not only a family history, but a broader social and narrative history of indenture; the system that, for roughly 80 years after the abolition of slavery in the British empire, provided exploitable bonded labour to plantation owners across the globe. More than a million Indians were transported to colonies from the Indian Ocean to the West Indies, in a traffic one-third the size of the British slave trade. My book focuses on the women in this group, two-thirds of whom had quit India without men by their sides. Uprooted from families and villages, they were the subcontinent’s most dispossessed: widows, sex workers or outcasts, running from or thrown out by husbands.
History had left these women voiceless. The existing archives that document indenture contain biases and elisions. I found a rich paper trail in India Office and Colonial Office records in London: statistical reports and diaries by captains and surgeons aboard the ships that transported the indentured; transcripts of inquiries into uprisings on the plantations; confidential dossiers on overseers who slept with Indian women. These documents allowed me, partially, to reconstruct the texture of the women’s lives.
But what the archive didn’t do, and could not do, was reveal their thoughts or their feelings: indentured women appear in the records only when something goes awry, in moments of tragedy or scandal. They are only described by others, by the various white men who held power over them; the ships’ surgeons and captains, planters and overseers, immigration agents and magistrates. I could read the women only through the often sexist, racist eyes of government and plantation officials who had vested interests – economic, careerist, sexual – in telling the story from their own perspectives. Since indentured women were, for the most part, illiterate, they didn’t leave behind written traces of themselves. Just as there isn’t a single existing narrative from a woman or girl who survived the Middle Passage, the rare first-person accounts of indenture – there are three – are all by men. The stealing of the voices of indentured women, born into the wrong class, race and gender to write themselves into history, was structural.
How could I write about women whose very existence the official sources barely acknowledged? To enter their unknown and to some extent unknowable history, I had to turn to alternative, unofficial sources. I looked for clues in visual traces and the oral tradition: folk songs, oral histories, photographs and colonial-era postcards, even a traditional tattoo on the forearms of elderly Indo-Caribbean women. Perhaps most daringly, I turned to the self and wrote about my own journeys: to India, to visit my great-grandmother’s native village in order to uncover why she left; and back to Guyana, where I was born, to explore how gender-based violence there – currently a problem of disturbing proportions – could be a legacy of indenture. In weaving myself into the narrative, I was tracing not only roots but also the inheritance of harm. I was calling on my own experience in two ways, both as a former newspaper reporter and as a child immigrant: my professional and personal background converged to suggest a strategy, a gambit for restoring the stolen voices.
A child immigrant’s way of seeing the world has much in common with a journalist’s way of seeing the world. Both ask questions: in the reporter’s case, this is about scepticism; in the immigrant’s case, it’s about identity. Those who cross cultures at a young age often ask not only “Who am I?” and “Where do I belong?” but also “Who might have I been, had my family never emigrated?” We are primed to speculate, to imagine multiple possible endings. Coolie Woman is, as such, a speculative history. Where the voices of indentured women were absent, I used my own, as their descendant, to question the records as aggressively as I could.
This solution presented itself by accident. About the time when I sat down to write my first chapter, I heard Salman Rushdie read Donald Barthelme’s Concerning the Bodyguard on a New Yorker podcast. The short story, told through the eyes of a bodyguard assigned to a politician in an unnamed Latin American country, is written almost entirely in question form. The device is meant to mirror the bodyguard’s uncertainty and anxiety when he views the world; he never knows who or what precisely is coming at him, or what threats they might pose. It occurred to me to try a similar experiment to deal with gaps and silences in indenture’s archive. Whole sections of Coolie Woman unfold entirely in questions: mine, my great-grandmother’s, the reader’s, one relentlessly following the next. These questions allow me to imagine interiorities withheld by the written record. They paint landscapes, advance the plot, convey a tone. They communicate my own attitude to the archive and its elisions and biases: I could never be neutral because I am, after all, a product of the history I’ve written.
Extract
So it was that, despite hard times for cane sugar, the Clyde arrived in British Guiana on 4 November 1903. I can’t say if Sujaria was on deck or if it was light enough for her to see the flat coast of her new world, with its monotonous line of black mangrove, broken occasionally by cabbage palms or a plantation smokestack. The ship pulled in beside a floating lightship at the mouth of the Demerara river, its waters muddy with silt carried from the interior, a territory almost as undeveloped and lightly populated as when Raleigh explored.
Despite the colony’s reputation in Britain as a “white man’s grave” of malarial swamps, yellow fever and hard drink, the capital was a graceful, modern city. Georgetown’s boulevards were broad – and down their middles ran grassy medians or freshwater canals with Victoria Regia lilies. Everywhere there were luxuriant trees providing shade and beauty: the samaan with its umbrella of foliage; the flambouyant, with its scarlet bloom; and a peculiar palm with its leaves splayed flat like a lady’s fan. Fruit trees enfolded elegant wooden houses with verandahs for taking the air and jalousies for letting it flow. The architecture had fanciful flourishes: cupolas or towers rising from roofs, fretwork crawling like vines from verandah posts. The city boasted botanical gardens, a philharmonic hall and a gothic cathedral that is still among the world’s tallest wooden buildings. Along the Demerara river ran a bustling commercial road with electric tram service. Nearby, dock workers loaded casks of sugar, rum and molasses and unloaded endless ice from America for coping with the heat. Schooners continuously returned from the interior with Raleigh’s fortune-seeking heirs; during the 1890s, these miners began exporting more than 100,000 ounces of gold every year, somewhat vindicating his vision of El Dorado. It was in the briskness of all this shipping in and shipping out that the Clyde landed its human cargo.
More about the book
Bahadur grants us rare imaginative access to the odyssey through the experience of women’s stories she finds in the archives. Between 1854 and 1864, the death rate on ships to Guiana was 8.54% and the threat of sexual exploitation ever present. But she is careful to stress that coolie ships were not slave ships; indentured women also played games, sang, worshipped, fell in love and began the process of re-inventing themselves for their new lives. – Read more
Buy the book
Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture by Gaiutra Bahadur is published by C Hurst and Co priced £12.99. It is available from the Guardian bookshop.
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