Author: Gaiutra Bahadur
publisher name: C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd
ISBN: 9781849042772
In 1903, a Brahmin woman sailed from India to Guyana as a 'coolie', the name the British gave to the million indentured laborers they recruited for sugar plantations worldwide after slavery ended. The woman, who claimed no husband, was pregnant and traveling alone. A century later, her great-granddaughter embarks on a journey into the past, hoping to solve a mystery: what made her leave her country? And had she also left behind a man? Gaiutra Bahadur, an American journalist, pursues traces of her great-grandmother over three continents. She also excavates the repressed history of some quarter of a million female coolies. Disparaged as fallen, many were runaways, widows, or outcasts, and many migrated alone. Coolie Woman chronicles their epic passage from Calcutta to the Caribbean, from departures akin either to kidnap or escape, through sea voyages rife with sexploitation, to new worlds where women were in short supply.
