Coolie Woman

This book unfolds in a compelling, nonlinear manner, and crosses genres. A combination of biography and family memoir and journalistic and scholarly research, it traces overlapping stories as the author sets out to discover why her great-grandmother traveled from India to America as a “coolie” at the start of the twentieth century and how this migration shaped future generations. Beautifully written, the book raises thorny issues around gender, race, and nationality, offering insight into the wider journeys of Indian contract laborers to the Caribbean and beyond.

This book is both a biography of Sujaria, the author’s great-grandmother, and a critical look at indentured labour in the Caribbean. Many thousands were transported from India to British Guiana to work on plantations in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The vast majority were men. This created a society where women were both exploited and yet held unusual power due to their scarcity. In seeking to discover more about her ancestor, Bahadur also returned to her ancestral village of Bhurahupur, in Bihar. A fascinating look at past and present.