Salvaged Crossings, interview by poet Lauren K. Alleyne for Guernica Magazine
“Coolie Woman” Rescues Indentured Women From Anonymity: NPR interview with Tell Me More host Michel Martin in November, 2013.
BBC Radio’s Woman’s Hour, Oct. 24, 2013: interview at 34:30 minutes into the program.
Author interview with The New York Times blog India Ink, which begins: “The book… is deeply personal yet assiduously researched. From the treacherous sea voyage to the colonial outpost of British Guiana to the sexual privileges conferred on indentured women as the scarcer sex, Ms. Bahadur reconstructs the “coolie” woman’s fate in astonishing detail.”
The Spaces Between Words, audio interview with Trinidadian poet Shivanee N. Ramlochan, archived at the University of the West Indies
An interview with Of Note magazine, about art, journalism, ekphrasis and overcoming fear: “In a way, adopting this mode of ‘The Journalist’ was not being fully honest with myself. It was maybe an expression of fear because it’s a very hard history to confront. It’s a violent history, it goes to the core of who I am, and all the issues that we still struggle with.”
In an author interview, The Hindu (in India) asks why indentured women are a forgotten chapter in history: “… the amnesia about indentured women is part of a broader historiographical 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.”
Interview with The Writer for their “How I Write” feature. The magazine says: “With a poignant narrative that is part biography, part history and part memoir, Bahadur gives voice to the voiceless.”
Interview in October 2013 with Monocle 24, the Internet radio station affiliated with Monocle magazine:
Q&A with The Times of India: “Knowing your own history is armour – and for me, writing my own history was catharsis.”
A detailed and fine interview by the Indian literary magazine Fountain Ink: “I wasn’t trying to be politically incorrect. If we scrub our words clean, we can’t scrub our history clean. We can’t sanitise it that way.”
DNA India spoke with me at the Jaipur Literature Festival about the book, which they call “a vivid picture… part personal history and part documentation.”
Interview in BLINK, the Saturday magazine of The Hindu Business Line: “Every group of people who see themselves as a distinct people have a creation story, and for Indo-Caribbeans it would have to be a story that unfolds on the oceans, with that transformative journey in the wake of slave ships and slave crossings.”