h i s t o r y a n dre a s t ua r t
Trading Places Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture
By Gaiutra Bahadur (Hurst & Co 274pp £20)
The exigencies of sugar have shaped the modern world. This ‘noble condiment’, which was virtually unknown in the West before the Crusades, became by the 15th century as valuable as pearls and as sought after as musk. Over the next couple of centuries desire for the commodity dubbed the ‘white gold’ grew exponentially across all social classes; and so thousands of adventurers from the Old World ‘took ship’ for the New in order to cultivate sugar cane and become rich. Their migration precipitated another mass movement of people, this time a forced one in which millions of African slaves were transported to territories as varied as Brazil and Barbados, Cuba and Louisiana to labour in the cane fields. By the 18th century sugar was as significant to the geopolitics of the age as oil in the 20th century.
most menial work and had the lowest status on the newly rejuvenated sugar plantations. Over the following eight decades the British would ferry more than a million of these maligned workers (a quarter of whom were women) across the globe to places as varied as British Guiana, Trinidad, Surinam, Mauritius and Fiji.
Bahadur is clear to note that ‘indenture ships were not slave ships’, but they were certainly bad enough to be going on with. On vessels with innocuous names such as Hesperus and Whitby, servants who had committed themselves to labour in the New World for up to seven years in the hope that they would return home enriched
Arrival, too, was a terrible letdown. Instead of ‘the land of milk, honey and gold’ that the recruiters in India had conjured up to ensnare their desperate victims, many of the places were unspeakable. Indeed Demerara, where Bahadur’s ancestor was destined to disembark, was rightly known as a ‘white man’s grave’ because of its high death rates. Whatever the newcomers’ race, however, they perished extravagantly – as a result of long hours labouring under the unforgiving tropical sun, terrible housing, poor food, floggings and other punishments. It is no wonder that only a quarter of the Indians who left the subcontinent ever returned to their homeland, or that some historians have retrospectively described indenture as ‘a new form of slavery’.
Someone once said that migration is a bit like murder: if you have done it once, it is easier to do it again. So it is no surprise that later generations of the author’s family chose this option. In 1987 they fled the troubled realities of British Guiana,
The history of sugar after emancipation is almost as tumultuous and bloody as the centuries that preceded it, as Gaiutra Bahadur explores in her remarkable book, Coolie Woman. She 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. It is no wonder that she comments, ‘Colonialism and migration are inextricably joined in my family history. Colonialism caused us to migrate, first to British Guiana, then from independent Guyana still struggling to emerge from its colonial past.’
The story begins when Bahadur’s greatgrandmother, a high-caste Hindu woman, leaves India on an indentured contract to cultivate sugar across the globe. Workers like her from the Indian subcontinent were known as ‘coolies’, a term that swiftly became a derogatory one, referring to those brown-skinned people who did the
The men and crew of an indenture vessel recently arrived in Georgetown, Demerara, c 1890
were allotted a space of just five square feet per person, only twice what most slave ships traversing the Middle Passage had allowed. Although conditions were not as diabolical as those endured by the slaves, the journey was three times longer and they still had to survive wormy rations and shipboard diseases. The situation was particularly bad for women, who often travelled alone and were vulnerable to frequent sexual exploitation, as well as still births, seasickness, homesickness and profound depression.
still haunted by its slave past, and moved to New Jersey. There the new migrants would find the conditions almost as hostile as those that their ancestors had once encountered elsewhere in the New World. A group of local citizens who had dubbed themselves the ‘Dot Busters’, a nom de guerre that was a riff on the film Ghostbusters and referred to the bindis that some married women wore on their foreheads, decided to terrorise this new wave of immigrants. Their manifesto, distributed around d e c e m b e r 2 0 1 3 / j a n u a r y 2 0 1 4 | Literary Review 9
