Gaiutra Bahadur talks about her great grandmother and thousands of other women, addressing indenture through her book
Book critic and American journalist Gaiutra Bahadur debuts as an author
with a historically significant account of coolie women in plantation
fields. Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (Hachette Books)
begins as her attempt to unravel the story of her great grandmother who
embarked on a voyage, all alone, during her pregnancy along with several
other coolie women.
Gaiutra dwells on gender issues in colonial Guiana and finds that
several of these women, though classified as single, were widows
abandoned at pilgrimage sites or running from mistreatment by their
in-laws. They were runaways, outcasts and in some cases been sex
workers. Excerpts of an interview with Gaiutra Bahadur.
When did you first learn about the story of your great grandmother? How much of it was talked about within the family?
I first learned the bare outlines of my great grandmother’s story when I
was in my early 20s. She was four months pregnant and travelling alone,
husbandless, when she left India. This wasn’t talked about in the
family. But my aunts (her granddaughters) knew quite a bit, much more
than I ever expected them to know. In a way, they were just waiting for
someone to ask. Once I did, they answered — mostly openly, but there was
also a sense of shame that I had to work against. My aunt would share
incredibly rich details and then say, ‘But don’t put that in the book.’
I’ll give you one example of what she resisted sharing: Sujaria met a
married couple during her voyage from India and ended up having a child
with the husband. The wife was apparently barren. Later, Sujaria legally
married another man in Guyana.
I had to convince my aunt that there was nothing to be ashamed of in her
actions; that Sujaria was caught up in a plantation system where women
were in short supply and that this system both gave her choices and
forced her to make choices she might not otherwise have made.
It was not going to be easy to know the story of your great
grandmother and women of her times. What triggered you to get to the
bottom of the story?
What happened to her was a mystery. Solving that mystery kept me in the
archives. I realised I might not be able to unlock her back story. But I
was determined to flesh out the context, the characters, the landscapes
around her — the emigrant depots along the Hooghly River, the
biographies of her fellow passengers on that voyage of The Clyde in
1903, the ‘tween decks or cargo holds where emigrants ate and slept
during their journeys over eight decades to new worlds, the plantations
where the women experienced both violence and opportunity, the details
of their relationships with both Indian men and British (often Scottish)
men. Recovering those details was a painstaking process, but each
detail was a clue.
Beyond that, I was also driven by questions of identity and gender that
have always preoccupied me: not only who am I, as an American born in
Guyana with roots in India, but how has gender shaped who I am.
How long did it take you to research and write the book?
The writing took a year and the research roughly three. I started
digging for indentured women’s stories in 2008. This took me to
Trinidad, Scotland, England and Guyana. It took me to sugarcane fields,
archives, my great-grandmother’s village in Chapra (Bihar), Scottish
Highlands, on the trail of an overseer who had had sexual relationships
with several Indian women on the plantation where my great-grandmother
worked. I started writing in late 2011.
Why do you think coolie women have almost become a forgotten chapter of history?
They had very little power to write themselves into history. The
indentured as a group didn’t leave behind written traces of themselves:
diaries, letters. This was especially true of the women. There are only
two memoirs by the indentured and both were written by men. But the
amnesia about indentured women is part of a broader historio-graphical
problem. Even women who were letter-writers — Benjamin Franklin’s
sister, for instance — have only recently become the subject of books.
The work of the past few decades has been to recover and tell women’s
history. Power determines whose stories are worth telling, and for a
long time women’s stories (especially the stories of ‘ordinary’ women)
weren’t seen as fit subjects of history.
In your book, you explain your decision to use the word ‘coolie’ in
the title, which might seem offensive. Weren’t you worried about people
judging the book by its title?
It was and is the right title for the subject. The book is about
indenture, and the word coolie is used in the context of indentured
labour. It’s historically appropriate and also figuratively the best way
to capture the burdens that indentured women shouldered. In the novel
Their Eyes Were Watching God, the African-American writer Zora Neale
Hurston has one of her characters say that black women are ‘the mules of
the world.’ (The character uses not ‘black women’ but the n-word,
actually.) I use coolie in the same spirit, figuratively,
metaphorically, as a way to capture this sense of burden. Indentured
Indian women were expected to preserve culture and family, represent the
honour of the culture, meet the economic and sexual needs of both
British and Indian men on the plantations. I don’t use the word lightly.
The title isn’t an invitation to be loose with the word coolie, to use
it today to describe a person of Indian origin in the Caribbean — not in
the least.
I explain at great length why and how I use it, and that’s really all I can do.
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