COOLIE WOMAN

Product DescriptionIn 1903 a young woman sailed from India to Guiana as a cooliethe 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. InCoolie Womanshortlisted for the 2014 Orwell Prizeher 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-grandmothers 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 voyagestraumatic middle passagesonly to face a life of hard labor dismal living conditions and especially sexual exploitation. As Bahadur explains however it is precisely their sexuality that makes coolie women stand out as figures in history. Greatly outnumbered by men they were able to use sex with their overseers to gain various advantages an act that often incited fatal retaliations from coolie men and sometimes larger uprisings of laborers against their overlords. Complex and unpredictable sex was nevertheless a powerful tool. Examining this and many other facets of these remarkable womens livesCoolie Woman is a meditation on survival a gripping story of a double diasporafrom India to the West Indies in one century Guyana to the United States in the nextthat is at once a search for ones roots and an exploration of gender and power peril and opportunity.ReviewCoolie Woman is a genealogical page-turner interwoven with a compelling radical history of empire told from the perspective of indentured women--or 'coolies ' as they were known by the British. The collective voice of thejehaji behen (ship sisters) has been barely audible across the centuries until now. . . . Bahadur grants us rare imaginative access to the odyssey through the experience of women's stories she finds in the archives.-- GuardianA moving foundational book investigating the experience of indentured Indian women in the Caribbean. It is solidly researched and as such it reveals the difficulty of understanding the human lives concealed within documents. Bahadur delicately reconstructs these women's lives seen only through a glass darkly piecing them together with respect and even admiration.-- Women's Review of BooksAn impassioned meticulously researched and gripping book that shines a fierce light on a dark unexplored corner of the history of colonialism and slaveryCoolie Woman intertwines the personal and the historical to sensational effect. It is also a uniquely affecting piece of work.--Neel Mukherjee author of A Life ApartBahadur has written a masterly chronicle of the lives of 'coolie women' (and also 'coolie men'). . . . . The stories are both poignant and horrific: abuse promiscuity rape mutilation cuckoldry and murder abound (according to Bahadur this legacy still survives in Guyana) owing to the shortage of women and the double struggle between 'men and women colonizer and colonized.' . . . This spellbinding account of a story that needed to be told is highly recommended.-- Library JournalDeeply 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 Bahadur reconstructs the 'coolie' woman's fate in astonishing detail.-- India Ink New York TimesEvery so often a history book comes along that grips you into a cascade of compelling narrative. The writer excavates new ore from old seams.Coolie Woman is such a book destined for a unique place in the multi-mirror of Caribbean cu