In our beginning, there was a boat

In Coolie Woman (Hachette), Guyanese-American journalist Gaiutra Bahadur reaches into her family history to create a riveting narrative of migration and colonisation. Though vast in scope, and dense in facts, it remains a deeply intimate story of a woman who left India without a husband on a ship for Guiana in 1903. In an email interview Bahadur reveals how she knew her great-grandmother’s ship sailed on a full moon night, and on recreating the lives of women whose histories were either lost or repressed. Excerpts from an interview:

As soon as I realised that it was bigger than my great-grandmother (Sujaria), that it would balloon from the private and familial into a broader public history, that’s the moment I wanted to write it. It may have been the reporter in me at work. My great-grandmother’s story excited the part of my brain that likes representative figures. She left Calcutta in 1903, pregnant and alone, travelling without a husband. When I first found out about her, I thought she must have been really exceptional, lit up by this incredible halo of transgression. But in fact, the vast majority of the women who left India as indentured workers were just like her, women unmoored from men, leaving India without husbands.

From the start, I knew this would be my title. Growing up, I heard the word coolie used by members of my family to refer to themselves, not in a hateful or self-hateful way but in an intimate, comfortable, even ironic way. I realise that the word has been used by outsiders as a slur. I’m not condoning or echoing that negative and hurtful association. What I am doing is acknowledging its place in our history. This was the term the British used to describe indentured labourers, and at least two generations of poets and writers from the Caribbean, Fiji and Mauritius have reclaimed it for their own use. That said, my use of the word is more figurative than it is political. The figure of the coolie sums up the lives of so many indentured women. They carried the baggage of expectations: expectations that they preserve culture and represent its honour; expectations that they meet the needs of both Indian and British men, needs both economic and sexual, on the plantations. The title Coolie Woman suggests their burdens.

I did find women quoted in court documents or official reports, but this wasn’t their direct testimony. The paper trail on the lives of women was rich and detailed, but it was told from the perspective of colonial officials. It didn’t --- it couldn’t --- tell me anything about the inner lives of the women, the texture of their thoughts. Since they were largely illiterate, they didn’t leave behind diaries, letters, memoirs. Only a few indenture memoirs exist, and they were all written by men. In the absence of written traces of the women, I had to look to oral and visual traces. I was fortunate to find interviews with several former indentured women in Fiji and Trinidad, conducted by a linguist, a sociologist and a few historians. My book sings best when I’m telling stories based on those interviews, because I could hear their voices (literally — I listened to tapes of some of the interviews at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad). When I couldn’t hear or read their own testimony, in their own words, I had to find other ways to recover their commitments and experiences. I turned to family histories, photographs, folk songs, The Ramayan, even their body art. (A tattoo that new brides were inked with in northeast India, called Sita ki Rasoi, intimated so much.)

If only I had such clarity when I started! I like that sentence. It sets up the sea voyage from India as a creation story for Indians who found themselves in the Caribbean. 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.

The book was heavily researched, with an eye to recovering the high-resolution detail of landscapes and lives. As one example, I was able to say the moon was full the day my great-grandmother’s ship pulled into British Guiana because I read the entire newspaper for that day, including the weather report and the ads. I was able to say that the depot hospital for indentured immigrants had once served as the pit where wild animals fought at the Nawab of Awadh’s court-in-exile, because I read an early 19th century article in an obscure agricultural journal that described it. Every detail in my book is documented. The footnotes are a point of pride! The unknown and the unknowable in this story were so great, that writing a novel might have made sense. But I chose not to because I’m a reporter; I believe in the integrity and also the enormous power of fact. Whenever I speculate...I show the reader my hand very clearly.

When I was six, my family left Guyana, our home for four to six generations, for the US. We were voluntary migrants, and indenture was for many people involuntary in spirit if not in law. Still, I felt that I could imagine, with some confidence, what it must have been like for her as a transplant because we had been displaced too.