Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture
Gaiutra Bahadur
London: Hurst &Co, 2013
The Conquest of India by the East India Company, the agrarian changes that came in its wake particularly the transition to commercial agriculture and of course, the introduction of western education and modes of governance changed the historical landscape of India. Concomitant with this very important historical transformation there was another a silent revolution whose social and cultural dimension are the subject of the book under review. The Western world, particularly the United Kingdom, took the lead in the abolition of Slave Trade and the House of Commons formally outlawed Slave trade by British citizens and UK went on very successfully to impose the abolition of Slave Trade by the force of its navy, a subject studied by Christopher Lyod. India was at hand to provide the labor required to run the agrarian economy of the British Empire founded on Sugar and in the case of the USA, Cotton. Emperor Sugar and King Cotton demanded labour on a scale that the abolition of Slavery made a monumental necessity. The West was able to assume the high moral ground of opposing Slavery as an economic institution because India was at hand to provide a new kind of Slaves, the Indentured worker.
The post colonial historians attempt to dress the past by using euphemisms to hide the ugly reality of Indenture and its kinship with Slavery. The language and rhetoric of post colonialism may make the past pretty, but History has a higher purpose: to reconstruct, record and preserve the memoria of the past.. The book under review fortunately does not make this patronizing curtsey to post colonial fashion. The author appropriates the term coolie and uses this term to right contextualize the forced immigration of large number of men and a much smaller number of women to sugar plantations ion Fiji, Guyana, Surinam, South Africa and Mauritius. The West Indian Islands of Trinidad, Tobago and Jamaica were opened up to Indian indentured labour as early as 1845, a few years after the formal ending of Slavery in 1834. There is a strong political and economic bomnd between the end of Slavery and the export of labour from India. The author, born in Guyana was educated in the USA and belongs to the generation that came of age in the 1990s and so we do not have the usual attribution of blame to this country for the horrors of Indenture. India was also an exploited country and Indenture was part and parcel of the history of exploitation.
The book deals with the conditions surrounding the migration of the author's great grand-mother, Sujaria to Guyana, The woman was four months pregnant when she made the perilous journey from Calcutta to Guyana and the author.s grand father was born on board the Steam Ship Clyde, in 1903. She was able to trace the journey of the woman on the basis of the colonial documentation. The book is a deft combination of historical research, personal narrative and the anthropology of the indenture society in the New World.
Several years back when I was doing my Ph D at the University of Hawaii, I had the opportunity to work with Professor Brij V Lal who had just published his book Girmitiyas on the indentured labor in Fiji. I was left with the distinct feeling that as an Indian, I had to ba=ear the burden of guilt for the ills of indenture. In a faculty meeting he presented his study on Kunti, a woman who endured savage mistreatment at the nhands of both her husband and her lover. I am bringing this point only to show that gender and violence was part of the indenture experience and the author has ably documented both.
The book is based on archival research and is a good study of the history of indenture in South America.
Gaiutra Bahadur
London: Hurst &Co, 2013
The Conquest of India by the East India Company, the agrarian changes that came in its wake particularly the transition to commercial agriculture and of course, the introduction of western education and modes of governance changed the historical landscape of India. Concomitant with this very important historical transformation there was another a silent revolution whose social and cultural dimension are the subject of the book under review. The Western world, particularly the United Kingdom, took the lead in the abolition of Slave Trade and the House of Commons formally outlawed Slave trade by British citizens and UK went on very successfully to impose the abolition of Slave Trade by the force of its navy, a subject studied by Christopher Lyod. India was at hand to provide the labor required to run the agrarian economy of the British Empire founded on Sugar and in the case of the USA, Cotton. Emperor Sugar and King Cotton demanded labour on a scale that the abolition of Slavery made a monumental necessity. The West was able to assume the high moral ground of opposing Slavery as an economic institution because India was at hand to provide a new kind of Slaves, the Indentured worker.
The post colonial historians attempt to dress the past by using euphemisms to hide the ugly reality of Indenture and its kinship with Slavery. The language and rhetoric of post colonialism may make the past pretty, but History has a higher purpose: to reconstruct, record and preserve the memoria of the past.. The book under review fortunately does not make this patronizing curtsey to post colonial fashion. The author appropriates the term coolie and uses this term to right contextualize the forced immigration of large number of men and a much smaller number of women to sugar plantations ion Fiji, Guyana, Surinam, South Africa and Mauritius. The West Indian Islands of Trinidad, Tobago and Jamaica were opened up to Indian indentured labour as early as 1845, a few years after the formal ending of Slavery in 1834. There is a strong political and economic bomnd between the end of Slavery and the export of labour from India. The author, born in Guyana was educated in the USA and belongs to the generation that came of age in the 1990s and so we do not have the usual attribution of blame to this country for the horrors of Indenture. India was also an exploited country and Indenture was part and parcel of the history of exploitation.
The book deals with the conditions surrounding the migration of the author's great grand-mother, Sujaria to Guyana, The woman was four months pregnant when she made the perilous journey from Calcutta to Guyana and the author.s grand father was born on board the Steam Ship Clyde, in 1903. She was able to trace the journey of the woman on the basis of the colonial documentation. The book is a deft combination of historical research, personal narrative and the anthropology of the indenture society in the New World.
Several years back when I was doing my Ph D at the University of Hawaii, I had the opportunity to work with Professor Brij V Lal who had just published his book Girmitiyas on the indentured labor in Fiji. I was left with the distinct feeling that as an Indian, I had to ba=ear the burden of guilt for the ills of indenture. In a faculty meeting he presented his study on Kunti, a woman who endured savage mistreatment at the nhands of both her husband and her lover. I am bringing this point only to show that gender and violence was part of the indenture experience and the author has ably documented both.
The book is based on archival research and is a good study of the history of indenture in South America.
