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Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture
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About Coolie Woman: The Odyssey Of Indenture
Product Description SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE In 1903, a young woman sailed from India to Guiana as a "coolie"―the British name for indentured laborers who replaced the newly emancipated slaves on sugar plantations all around the world. Pregnant and traveling alone, this woman, like so many coolies, disappeared into history. In Coolie Woman, her great-granddaughter Gaiutra Bahadur embarks on a journey into the past to find her. Traversing three continents and trawling through countless colonial archives, Bahadur excavates not only her great-grandmother's story but also the repressed history of some quarter of a million other coolie women, shining a light on their complex lives. Shunned by society, and sometimes in mortal danger, many coolie women were either runaways, widows, or outcasts. Many of them left husbands and families behind to migrate alone in epic sea voyages―traumatic "middle passages"―only to face a life of hard labor, dismal living conditions and sexual exploitation. Coolie Woman is a meditation on survival, a gripping story of a double diaspora―from India to the West Indies in one century, Guyana to the United States in the next―that is at once a search for one's roots and an exploration of gender and power, peril and opportunity. Review "[A] spellbinding account of a story that needed to be told." --- The Library Journal "[D]eeply personal yet assiduously researched. ... Ms. Bahadur reconstructs the 'coolie' woman's fate in astonishing detail." --- The New York Times "[A] genealogical page-turner interwoven with a compelling, radical history of empire." --- The Guardian (UK) "[A]n intricate, thoroughly researched and beautifully written book that evokes the experience of emigrant Indians and their descendants." --- The Times Literary Supplement (UK) "In her remarkable book, Gaiutra Bahadur chronicles the extraordinary but neglected saga of indentured labour that evolved when the British began to replace slavery on their sugar plantations worldwide. But the book is more than this: it is also a highly personal account that traces the history of the author's maternal line to the present day. 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.'" --- Andrea Stuart, The Literary Review (UK) "[A]n important, unmissable account. From colonialism to labour in India, immigrant narratives to the hidden lives of women, Ms Bahadur excavates a rich and unforgettable set of stories that will permanently change our view of the past." --- Nilanjana Roy, The Business Standard (India) "[A]n ode... [E]xceptional detective work." --- The Sunday Times (South Africa) "[A] moving, foundational book." --- The Women's Review of Books From the Back Cover "An astonishing document--both a historical rescue mission and a profound meditation on family and womanhood, Gaiutra Bahadur's Coolie Woman spans continents and centuries, the private and the national, to bring to light the extraordinary lives of the author's great-grandmother and the other quarter of a million 'coolie' women that came to the New World as indentured laborers." --- Junot Diaz, author of This Is How You Lose Her "Gaiutra Bahadur's pathbreaking book carefully excavates an imperial history of violence and uprooting. But this is no simple account of victimhood. It shows, with understated literary power, the bitterly paradoxical nature of colonial modernity: the unbearable dialectic between enslavement and liberation that many unsung millions underwent in their private lives." --- Pankaj Mishra, author of From the Ruins of Empire "Gaiutra Bahadur's book made me realize how the experience of a whole generation of women like her great
