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Lost in transition

Coolie Woman sheds new light on indentured labourers, who were forced to migrate from India in the 19th century

A JOURNEY to trace the roots of her great grandmother, who had sailed from India to Guyana as a ?coolie? in 1903, brings the author to a village in Chhapra, Bihar, called Bhurahupur. Here, an elder, a schoolteacher, reproaches her that she should be living in India. Even as the prodigal was being reprimanded, her thoughts flew to her great grandmother: No good Indian girl in 1903 should have crossed the ?kala pani? or the waters of the Indian Ocean, much less a Brahmin girl. But she did?the author discovered the emigration pass issued to her great grandmother in Guyana?s national archives, immigrant number 96153, Sheojari, age 27, four months pregnant.

When the slave trade was abolished in the 19th century, and when India was still under colonial rule, the onus of providing labourers for the vast British empire fell on the vast Indian population. As Gaiutra Bahadur?s incredible story outlines, from 1838 to 1917, the British transported a million Indians, half of them to the Caribbean, to grow and cut sugar cane. These were indentured labourers, or ?coolies? sailing the seas after signing a contract and hoping to be free at the end of it. But were they really free? What really happened to these people whose migration put thousands of miles between their adopted land and their ancestral home? This book throws light on Sheojari and the other quarter of a million coolie women lost in time and memory.

Bahadur, having travelled from the Caribbean to Chhapra to the archives in Britain, explores the roots of these women: Were they displaced peasants, runaway wives, kidnap victims, prostitutes, widows, pilgrims? And did the indenture system ?liberate women, or con them into a new kind of bondage? Did it save them from a life of shame, or ship them directly to it??

As for Sheojari, she made a life of her own in Guyana having Guyana-born children with a husband not of her caste. She never returned to India, writes Bahadur, ?Perhaps she knew that India was best kept in the past?that it would be sweet as long as she shed tears for it, desired it, but never actually held and beheld it.?

Bahadur, a journalist, writes of the double diaspora?her great grandmother had travelled from India to Guyana in one century, and her family would travel from Guyana to the US in the next?a great story of survival. She also tries to explain why the migration happened in the first place. For example, India suffered 24 famines in the last quarter of the 19th century, ?more than enough to cause large-scale displacement. Nor were women sheltered from this. Indeed, as women, they had more reasons to flee, greater oppression to escape?. Emigration may have provided an escape for Bahadur and many others, but as she observes, leaving the country cannot be the only way to transcend a history of exploitation, degradation and violence.

Sudipta Datta is a freelancer

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First published on: 29-12-2013 at 02:20 IST
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