
In the 1830s, a new
age began in the European colonies: the period of indenture, or debt bondage.
Thousands of Indians left the shores of their home country in what was called
kala pani, literally black waters, to work on plantations in Mauritius, Jamaica,
Fiji, Guyana, Surinam, and Trinidad, to name a few.
In 1903, a young woman called Sujaria sailed from Calcutta on an indenture ship called The Clyde, joining thousands of other Indian “coolies” to work on sugar plantations in British Guiana (Guyana) on the South American coast. She was four months pregnant when she left, and her son was born during the course of her journey. Sujaria never left Guyana, and her family lived there for decades after.
Over 100 years later, Sujaria’s great-granddaughter, Gaiutra Bahadur, traces the life of her ancestor and, in the process, excavates the stories of the other indentured women of Guyana in her book, Coolie Woman. Bahadur talks about her process of discovery and the expected, and unexpected, stories she found on the way.
Could you tell me a
little bit about how the idea of the book came about?
I started working on the book five years ago, but I had been interested in the
subject way before that. When I was in my early 20s, I first heard about my
great-grandmother from my father. I was simply asking him about our connection
to India; she’s our closest link. I come from a history of indenture—all my
ancestors were indentured, like most Indians in Guyana—but she’s the one who
left, at the latest, in 1903. He said to me that she was a pregnant woman
travelling alone. That of course was really interesting to me, because it
seemed to completely challenge the stereotypes that we had—that I had,
certainly—because I always thought that it was a family migration, the
indentured labour migration to the West Indies.
How was it that you
never heard about this till your 20s? Didn’t anyone else ever discuss it?
No, they didn’t really talk about it. They didn’t talk about it in front of me,
definitely. I didn’t know anything about her; it wasn’t like my dad sat around
talking about her or remembering her. But my aunt knew quite a bit about it.
Once I got around to interviewing her, she knew way more than I thought anyone
would know about her life.
But going back to your question, that’s how I first became interested in her story. I didn’t start working on it for another ten years or so. I decided there was a book to do when I saw that this very intriguing story of hers was actually very typical, and her story wasn’t exceptional so much as emblematic. And that a lot of the women who migrated were travelling without husbands like she was, a vast majority of them were. That’s when I decided that there was a book to do.
So how did you start,
considering there was so much research that needed to be done, and a lot of
sources were either not easily available or not available at all?
Well, I started with her, with her immigration pass. Before I even knew I was
working on a book, I was just interested in finding out more about her. In
Guyana, all of the ship records are kept. So for each ship, the immigration
passes of all the passengers aboard were kept. I found hers, and it told me her
caste background, her age, incredibly intimate things like she had a burn mark
on her left foot. And that she was pregnant, four months, which was written in
pencil at the top of the immigration pass.
So I started with her, and I broadened it out by looking at the records: the colonial office records for the year that she left, 1903. I was just so blessed throughout this whole process; I feel very lucky. What I mean by that is that in 1903, there was a back-and-forth between officials in London and India and Guyana about how hard it was to recruit women. I just happened to come across it, since I was looking for more detail on her in the records in 1903. I feel like the entire process was blessed by this kind of serendipity.
In Guyana, for instance, there is no justification for a history like this being lost or suppressed because this is our history. This was the first significant movement of Indians abroad. But I think some of it has to do with the fact that the indentured didn’t leave behind many written traces of themselves.
Do you ever feel like
this is a forgotten slice of history, or not as discussed in textbooks as one
might expect?
It’s a difficult question. I think the answer changes depending on the context
of where you are. In Guyana, for instance, there is no justification for a
history like this being lost or suppressed because this is our history. This
was the first significant movement of Indians abroad. But I think some of it
has to do with the fact that the indentured didn’t leave behind many written
traces of themselves. So there wasn’t as much of a paper trail, at least in
terms of personal testimonies. There is a huge official paper trail—a lot of
which I used in the book—but there are only two indenture memoirs that exist,
and they’re both by men: one out of Surinam and one from Fiji. That partly
explains it: you don’t have the story in the words of the people who lived this
history.
But why do you think
there’s such a lack of preserved narratives from the period, not even in the
form of letters or personal journals?
Well, it has to do with who the migrants were. They were mainly not coming from
privileged places or positions in society. Many of them were illiterate, so
they couldn’t write in English or other languages. But there actually are
written traces of them. There were munshis, letter-writers, in the various
colonies. An illiterate person could go to the letter-writer and dictate a
message for their family members in India. In certain colonies, when these
letters went astray, they ended up in some back office of some obscure
department. I just found out, actually, that there is a cache of letters like
this in Fiji, including letters by women. It’s the sort of thing you have to
hunt for.
In fact, a friend of mine—a novelist in the US—is working on a novel about indenture, focusing on the lives of women, and it’s called ‘The Letter-writer’. The fact that indentured women didn’t leave behind their own accounts is a problem and a challenge but for me, I saw it as an opportunity. I saw a chance to sort of make their silence a subject—almost like a character in the book to embody the silence—to try to politically evoke it and ask what this silence tells us about their position, and what might it even mean strategically. Is it possible that they might have wanted to keep their secrets and not reveal all of the circumstances behind their leaving?
A major part of your
book is about the violence against women: on the ships that carried them to
colonies and at the colonies themselves, since the gender ratio was badly skewed
and there simply weren’t enough women. Yet in a way these women also seem to be
empowered—though it’s hard to use that word—since they were able to make
decisions that they would not have been able to make back in India.
The women were working on plantations and it’s not like any other setting. It’s
one in which the planter has total control over the lives and the bodies of all
the workers on the plantation. It is difficult to talk about empowerment in a
setting like that. Nonetheless, what’s so interesting about this story is its
complexity. They were bonded labourers but at the same time, they were able to
exercise a certain amount of leverage because there were so few women on the
plantation; there was a shortage of women. A savvy woman could be calculating
to an extent and take her pick of partners, to an extent. I always feel like I
need to qualify this, because if you have an overseer interested in you, do you
really have the option to say no in that circumstance? Probably not.
Right, because it
comes down to women also having to make these decisions for their own survival.
Yes, it comes down to survival and hard choices. It’s taking a look at what
your options are, hard and uncomfortable choices. But the violence was a
backlash: it was a reaction to Indian women stepping out of bounds, which is
the way their partners might have seen it. The violence was an attempt to put
them back in their place.
You had compared it to
the men drawing parallels on what women should be like from the Ramayana,
which was very popular then. But do you also think that it’s because they were
so used, traditionally in India, to women being the subjugated sex? It was
difficult for them to accept women in any role apart from that.
I think the indentured men were used to having a certain amount of power
because they come from a patriarchal society. But it was very, very important
to me that I not paint them as monsters, and to look at the position that they
were in: in a system that subjected them to violence as well. They were
whipped, beaten, it was a system that in a way dismembered them. It severed
them from their country, their sense of place, their sense of self, and
disarranged everything that they had known before, including the power that
they were used to having as men in a patriarchal society.
They were imprisoned in large numbers for just violating labour laws, and the labour laws themselves were often ridiculously unjust. For instance, if you left without a pass, you could be and were often criminally prosecuted and convicted and imprisoned. In the face of all this—in the face of a system that subjected them to physical violence and emasculated them—you have to take all of that context and try to understand what might have been motivating their actions towards their own women, and try and understand the deep pain that they were in. It wasn’t just about the jealousy or the honour of their women; it was the total control of the plantation over their lives.
About a quarter of indentured immigrants did return to India. You know, I think return was really something that most people most looked forward to, and wanted to achieve. But for the vast majority, it became a return journey that they couldn’t make for various reasons.
You’d mentioned in the
book that once many of the coolies finished their indenture and could return
home, they still chose to re-migrate after they come back to India. Why did
this happen?
About a quarter of indentured immigrants did return to India. You know, I think
return was really something that most people most looked forward to, and wanted
to achieve. But for the vast majority, it became a return journey that they
couldn’t make for various reasons. If they were outcasts when they left
India—and many of them were, which is why they left to go to colonies—their
actively leaving India literally made them ‘out of caste’, so returning was
incredibly difficult.
For the few who did return, many of them had a really hard time. They weren’t accepted back by their families and their villages, and many of them ended up living in squatter settlements along the river, sort of waiting for ships to take them back to Guyana or Trinidad or wherever.
For them, there was no triumphant return to India. If we use the Ramayana as a model—and I do use it as a text for their lives—in the Ramayana, there is a triumphant return. Ram returns to Ayodhya and is embraced, etc., but this was a triumph that was denied to the indentured in large part. So they remigrated to various colonies.
So it was no longer a
question of going back home, since home wasn’t what it was when they left.
I think a lot of the ones who did return were the elderly. They were returning
to India to die, basically. India was no longer a place where they could live,
but a place where they could die.
When it comes to
language, the ships carried people from various parts of India. Wouldn’t there
have been some sort of language barrier on the ships, and on the plantations?
How did their language evolve?
Most of them came from the Bhojpuri-speaking regions of western Bihar and
eastern Uttar Pradesh. There were also migrants from Madras, but those were the
two main groups and Bhojpuri was dominant. The issues of communication came up
on the plantation between master and servant, and that’s how the Creole that’s
spoken in Guyana evolved from the plantation pidgin, the language the overseers
adopted when trying to communicate with their workers. So it was English, but a
very simple form of English.
Bhojpuri is still
widely spoken in parts of Fiji and Mauritius. Do any Indian languages linger in
Guyana?
No, people don’t speak Bhojpuri. It’s not a living language in Guyana. I know
it is in other places and Surinam has preserved what they call Hindustani. But
in Guyana, you will only hear Hindi in some music at rum-shops or where people
watch Bollywood movies, so they have some Hindi based on that. Also the very
basic words do survive—words that describe things that we do like eat and pray and
love—those words have survived. But it really is very fragmentary.
How would you compare
indenture to slavery? I understand that the indentured were paid and could
become ‘free’, but there are still many similarities.
This is an ongoing debate in the historiography of indenture: how do we see it?
Was it a new form of slavery, or did it amount to liberation for the people who
left? My book is not polemical, so I didn’t take one hard line or the other.
What I tried to do is look at individual people, individual women, and I do
think the answer to that question is as varied and multiple as there are women
and indentured people. It was a system that replaced slavery, and it came in
the wake of slavery. In many cases, planters continued to treat indentured servants
as they had treated the slaves before them. They lived in the same quarters as
the slaves had; in many cases it was called the ‘nigger yard’ even during
indenture.
The difference at the end of the day, of course, is that indentured workers were paid, even if they were cheated out of their wages and even if the wages were a pittance. Ultimately, they were able to work their way out of their contracts. They were supposed to be on five-year contracts; those contracts were often extended because some of the practices the planters engaged in led the workers to become indebted to the company or plantation.
Did that happen often:
the extension of their contracts?
Yes, that happened frequently. But again, at the end of the day, they were able
to be free. This wasn’t a lifelong condition. They wouldn’t pass it on to their
children; it wasn’t a condition you could inherit. Those are the primary
differences. Indenture was an exploitative system, no doubt, but there were
also fragile openings for freedom, especially for women because of the
shortage. Openings for exploitation, but also openings for freedom.
What kind of openings?
Because women were in short supply, they had their pick of partners, as I said,
to an extent. They tended to pick the men who had been in the colony the
longest as they were the most financially secure. Or in some cases, white
overseers: they picked them because in some cases, they could buy off a woman’s
contract and thereby free her. There were other advantages, things like moving
out of the plantation barracks, which were terrible places. Engaging in a
relationship with an overseer or planter could get a woman a house of her own.
These were the kinds of openings I mean.
Did you ever think
your research in Guyana and India would take you as far away as Scotland?
No, I didn’t see that coming at all. In Guyana growing up, you’re taught about
the British, right. The assumption is that the plantation managers or overseers
are all Englishmen. But that’s not the case. Many of them were Scots, so I
didn’t expect at all to end up in Scotland. I didn’t expect to see my own family
and village history, or find particular examples in the archives that would be
familiar to my parents and grandparents.
If we scrub our words clean, we can’t scrub our history clean.
For example, I came across a folder that was marked ‘Confidential’ and it was all about one particular overseer from Scotland, from the Highlands. His name was George Sutherland. He had been in relationships with five or six different Indian women and had children by them, and the folder was all about this, which was unacceptable. One of the women lived in the village where I was born and grew up, and I was stunned to find my own village mentioned in the archives. I told my parents about it and they were like, ‘George Sutherland Junior! We knew him! We grew up around him. He was a bully!’
That’s pretty amazing.
Yes. For me, it sort of yanked me out of the archives and back into the sphere
of family. It was wonderful. Again, the book began because I’d encountered an
unexpected thing. The research process was full of unexpected things and
surprises.
I saw an interview
online where you were asked about using the word ‘coolie’ in the title of your
book, since it has a negative connotation similar to ‘nigger’. A comment on
that story said that the term is appropriate, since it ‘doesn’t bow to the
post-colonial fashion of reducing the past to a discourse in order to drain it
of both ethical and historical content’. Would you agree with that?
I wasn’t trying to be politically incorrect. If we scrub our words clean, we
can’t scrub our history clean. We can’t sanitise it that way. These workers, the
indentured labourers, were coolies. This is the way they were seen, and this is
how they were put to use in the empire, on plantations. I’m not rebranding them
with that stigma by using the word in my title; I’m acknowledging the stigma.
The main reason for using it was metaphorical, figurative, because a coolie carries baggage. A coolie bears a burden. To me, that perfectly sums up the position of indentured women. They carried burdens. They had to meet the needs of both Indian men and British men on the plantations. They had to carry the weight of expectations: the expectation that they represent the honour of a culture, that they preserve a culture, so that’s why I used it.
You must be doing the
entire promotion circuit: literary festivals and other events and so on. What
has that been like?
It’s been exhausting. I’ve been travelling for two months talking about the
book. But apart from that, I’m not an extrovert so it takes a lot of energy for
me to do this. But there actually have been very moving interactions with
people who have read the book, and who have wanted to read the book. In
Toronto, a young woman brought her father with her to the reading. They were
excited about reading the book together. So although it’s been exhausting and
it’s pushed me out of my comfort zone, it’s also been very gratifying. I’ve had
so many Indo-Caribbeans come up to me, moved that someone has written this
story in this way, finally, because they don’t see themselves represented.
Because your history
is their history, too, in many ways.
Yes. It’s not just my story. It’s everyone’s story.