"Coolie Women Are in Demand Here"

February 23, 2016 1:41 PM

I was made to recite the story of my greatgrandmother, to the extent that I knew it: Her name was Sujaria, and this was her village. The British took her away in 1903 to work their sugar plantations in a place now known as Guyana. She sailed on a ship called The Clyde. My grandfather was born on that ship.

Gaiutra Bahadur traces the story of her great grandmother's singular journey as indentured labour meant for the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, shedding light on the lives of women in British India over a hundred years ago.
posted by infini (11 comments total)

It's an interesting story, but the poor editing in the piece is really distracting.
posted by rmd1023 at 2:10 PM on February 23, 2016 [1 favorite]

Also, I'm struck by how much factual fuzziness is from the present as well as the past, from something as basic as whether or not an interpreter speaks the language fluently.
posted by rmd1023 at 2:35 PM on February 23, 2016

but the poor editing in the piece is really distracting.

Took me a while to figure out they were badly formatted photo captions that I kept wanting to italicize
posted by infini at 2:47 PM on February 23, 2016

"I was made to recite the story of my great-grandmother, to the extent that I knew it: Her name was Sujaria, and this was her village. ... Sujaria was a passenger on The Clyde and also part of its cargo." Heartbreaking. Another good find--thanks for posting, infini.
posted by MonkeyToes at 3:02 PM on February 23, 2016 [1 favorite]

The author has a website as well as a book on this subject; the NYTimes had an interview with her a while back
posted by Stu-Pendous at 5:17 PM on February 23, 2016

Thought it was fascinating! Found it fascinating that the British officers insisted on ladies immigrating as well. That certainly wasn't the case for coolie-immigration (if I may) from India/ China to South East Asia and US; most of the worker populations back then in South East Asia and US were all male-heavy.

There's also gender bias in re-telling accounts, obviously; kudos to the author for focussing on indentured women, specifically.

A shame the author couldn't speak Bhojpuri. Bhojpuri is still spoken in the Caribbean (here's the Story of Jesus in the dialect); would have been interesting to see a Guyanese-Bhojpuri speaker trying to speak with people from Bihar. Surely, there'd have been some difference in the respective dialects.

The interview is a great addendum; seems like there's quite a bit of pathos even after the story shifts to Guyana's sugarcane fields.
posted by the cydonian at 5:49 PM on February 23, 2016 [2 favorites]

_{Better editted version at The Caravan, btw.}

Here's another excerpt from the Guyanian side of things.
posted by the cydonian at 5:53 PM on February 23, 2016

What a great story.
posted by Joe in Australia at 1:37 AM on February 24, 2016

I grew up as an expat in Malaysia, another location for the diaspora of indentured servitude. This time from the more southern port of Madras (the M.V. Chidambaram, who remembers it now?) rather than my birth city of Calcutta. The tamils were brought over to work in the rubber plantations*, to eventually form one stream of the multicultural and multilingual heritage of Singapore and Malaysia.

In school, a british prep school for expatriates, I first met an Indo-Carribbean - I can't recall if she was from Trinidad or Guyana, and I recall we compared how the strains of Indian culture and language had diverged and folded back on itself in these various locations. Later I met a man from Guyana, who had immigrated to London and married an Italian nurse.

The world is at once much larger and much smaller in cultures and histories than we can imagine.

*An ethnostudy of plantation life in Malaysia
posted by infini at 3:43 AM on February 24, 2016 [3 favorites]

the Guyanian side of things

[pedant]Guyanese[/pedant]

Source: Born in Georgetown
posted by Octaviuz at 7:34 AM on February 24, 2016 [3 favorites]

[pedant]Guyanese[/pedant]

Coming from a cricket fan who's extremely familiar with Roger Harper, Clive Lloyd, Rohan Kanhai, Shivnarine Chanderpaul and all the greats from Guyana who made West Indies cricket special, that was inexcusable!
posted by the cydonian at 6:04 PM on February 24, 2016