Latest update May 23rd, 2026 12:01 AM
Guyanese holds book reading on struggles of indentured women
Journalist Gaiutra Bahadur held a Book Reading at the University of Guyana Berbice Campus (UGBC) over the weekend for her book “Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture”. The book traces the journey of her great-grandmother, Sujarai, from Calcutta to the Caribbean as a “coolie” and also excavates the buried history of the quarter million other women who left India as indentured plantation laborers.
Gaiutra Bahadur
Bahadur, a Berbician by birth, grew up in Cumberland. Her family migrated to New Jersey in 1981. She grew up in Metropolitan New York. She worked as a journalist with the Philadelphia Enquirer for many years, after which she became a Freelance Contributor to the New York Times Book Review, The Nation’s Magazine, and Miz Magazine—a feminist magazine. She is also a literary critic.
What the book does, she says, is to look at their journey from Guiana to India and elsewhere in the West Indies. It explores the effects of indentures on the psyche of both men and women. Bahadur, a journalist by profession, worked in the Colonial Office and India Office Archives in London for three years, researching materials and articles for the book. “I looked at great details, for instance, at the reports by Immigration Agents and Captains and Ship Sergeants about the journey from India to the West Indies.”
She noted, too, the numerous instances of women who tried to kill their children. “One woman tried to stuff her baby down the bathroom—the child survived—stories like that…stories of suicides, stories of women being sexually exploited by white ship captains and doctors aboard the ship.” The book gives a whole lot of qualitative data but also quantitative, in that she calculated the percentages of women who were pregnant aboard the nearly 100 ships; percentages who were married and who gave birth aboard.
Her book draws from the work of historians but what is different from her book is that “it’s told by a journalist and by someone located inside the history and who has a personal connection to the main character—my great grandmother.”
She noted that historians tend to focus on analysis, but as a journalist, she focused on the stories. When asked why Guyanese should read the book, Bahadur said that it is an “uncomfortable book for many people” which forces us to look at our history in objective ways, “parts of our history that some people might wish to have known.”
“People should read this book because it really is a forgotten history, in particular, it is a story of women—a lost history within a lost history.”
The book is available at Austin’s Book Services in Georgetown and also at Amazon and Barnes and Noble online.
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