COOLIE WOMAN

The way a free bird is imprisoned

March 20, 2017 by gaiutra

On this day one hundred years ago, the system of semi-forced labor that scattered 1.2 million Indians to plantation colonies across the globe was suspended. Indenture, denounced as “a new form of slavery,” was abolished after a campaign by Gandhi and the Indian nationalists. They argued that the system made Indians “harlots and helots in the eyes of the world.” To mark the centenary, I’d like to share a reading of a section of “Into Dark Waters,” the fourth chapter […]

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The Stained Veil

October 6, 2016 by gaiutra

“The Stained Veil”: A short story, The Commonwealth Writers Foundation, addastories.org “The village sat unassumingly on the edge of endless rows of flowering cane, but hidden in its tall quiet, it contained well too much drama for the good of its inhabitants. Too much story, coiled like snakes in the cane. Her father used to say in rounded and swaying dialect, while observing his girls in some fracas, some private disagreement that had embroiled them: Ayu get too much o’ story wid ayu […]

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Of Islands and Other Mothers

September 11, 2016 by gaiutra

About this time last year, I spent some time with an extraordinary woman who lost her daughter in the Twin Towers. Her story closes the essay I wrote for Nonstop Metropolis, the anthology about NYC out in October; it’s a feminist essay about the role and number of women among Caribbean immigrants to New York City providing one bridge across race, religion, language and national origin. On this day, I thought I’d offer Mother Myrtle’s story: “It was mid-September 2015 […]

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Paperback Writer

July 20, 2016 by gaiutra

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. For the Guardian‘s Paperback Writer series, I discuss my strategies for overcoming biases and gaps in the archives when researching and writing Coolie Woman.

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Hips Liberated Because the Feet Have Been Shackled

March 14, 2014 by gaiutra

For the new Indian site Scroll.in, I wrote about my affection for chutney music. Here’s the piece: Bollywood and my mother’s bhajans were the background music of my childhood. Growing up in New Jersey in the 1980s, any and all yearning for lost homelands was set to the score of ‘Love Story’, ‘Dostana’, ‘Silsila’. Hindi film music was the approved soundtrack of our nostalgia. Arguably, since I am an Indian roughly a century out of India, born in Guyana, chutney […]

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TRADING PLACES

February 28, 2014 by gaiutra

In TRADING PLACES, in Britain’s Literary Review, author Andrea Stuart (“Sugar in the Blood”) writes: “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’.”

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The New York Times Interview

February 19, 2014 by gaiutra

A Conversation With Author Gaiutra Bahadur By MAX BEARAK Nov. 21, 2013 In “Coolie Woman,” the Guyanese-American journalist Gaiutra Bahadur excavates the forgotten story of her great-grandmother Sujaria and a quarter of a million women like her who left eastern India in the mid-1800s as indentured labor. The book, which was released last week in the United States and last month in India, is deeply personal yet assiduously researched. From the treacherous sea voyage to the colonial outpost of British Guiana […]

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The Overseer of British Guiana

December 19, 2013 by gaiutra

By Gaiutra Bahadur | Published in History Today Volume: 64 Issue: 1 2014 On March 22nd, 1869 a young plantation manager in the West Indies wrote an expansive letter to his sister in Essex. Often Henry Bullock only managed to scribble perfunctory notes to his family, but this letter probably satisfied their hunger for details about his life, running a sugar estate far from home on the remote coast of British Guiana (now Guyana). He reported what he had done […]

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Can the Subaltern Body Speak?

September 17, 2013 by gaiutra

While pursuing the history of indentured women, the sources I most craved were their stories in their own words: in letters, diaries, memoirs. I found none in archives private or public. The women did not write down their stories. For the most part, they couldn’t. For the most part, they weren’t literate, in English or any Indian languages. Their testimonies do survive in a few cases, involving mistreatment on plantations or during sea voyages, but those words cannot be seen […]

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