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*** Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize*** In 1903 a Brahmin woman
sailed from India to Guyana as a 'coolie', the name the British
gave to the million indentured labourers they recruited for sugar
plantations worldwide after slavery ended. The woman, who claimed
no husband, was pregnant and travelling 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. When
they exercised the power this gave them, some fell victim to the
machete, in brutal attacks, often fatal, by men whom they spurned.
Sex with overseers both empowered and imperiled other women, in
equal measure.It also precipitated uprisings, as a struggle between
Indian men and their women intersected with one between coolies and
their overlords.
In 1903, a young woman sailed from India to Guiana as a
"coolie"--the 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. In Coolie Woman--shortlisted for the 2014
Orwell Prize--her 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-grandmother's 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 voyages--traumatic "middle passages"--only 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 women's lives, Coolie
Woman is a meditation on survival, a gripping story of a double
diaspora--from India to the West Indies in one century, Guyana to
the United States in the next--that is at once a search for one's
roots and an exploration of gender and power, peril and
opportunity.
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