Unsilencing History: A Critical Review of Gaiutra Bahadur’s ‘Coolie Woman’

Gaiutra Bahadur’s Coolie Woman is a daring combination of narrative, archival research, feminist critique and diasporic history. At its core, it is both an intimate quest for the author’s great-grandmother, Sujaria, an indentured woman who travelled alone and pregnant from India to British Guiana in 1903 and an unvarnished portrayal of the indenture system that supplanted slavery in the colonial plantation world. Bahadur’s success stems from her ability to relate the microhistory of one woman’s trip to the macrohistory of an empire’s labour requirements, highlighting the complexity of race, gender and migration in forging diasporic identity. The book’s core themes are erasure, survival and the politics of name. The usage of the term “coolie”, as explained in the preface, is a provocative gesture that grounds Bahadur’s endeavour in the politics of reclamation. The term, originally a racial slur and a colonial name for Asian indentured servants, has deep traumas and implications of servitude. However, Bahadur refuses to whitewash the historical truths that her great-grandmother endured. This emphasis on linguistic and historical correctness demonstrates the book’s adherence to truth above nostalgia. It is not a romantic family story, but rather a systematic examination of the social and economic machinery that created and limited lives like Sujaria’s. Bahadur’s archival research provides valuable insights into the historical and emotional components of indenture.

The “coolie woman” was subjugated in two ways: as a labourer in the plantation economy and as a woman within patriarchal norms, both Indian and colonial. While indenture contracts promised income, housing and medical care, the reality was hard labour, surveillance and sexual vulnerability. Women, in particular, were frequently vulnerable to abuse from supervisors, coworkers and the personal tyranny of poverty. Bahadur’s depiction of these issues is both compassionate and analytical; she does not romanticise their pain or minimise their agency. Her images of women who resisted, built new familial structures or negotiated transgressive relationships demonstrate how indenture produced both places of limited opportunity and cruel exploitation. The narrative is powerful when it probes the silences in the historical record. Bahadur’s story is compelling when it explores historical silences. Bahadur admits that ladies like her great-grandmother “were not known persons” in colonial archives. Their voices are heard indirectly via ship records, medical notes, court testimony and colonial correspondence—but the gaps themselves are illuminating.

The absences represent the institutional exclusion of women from the official tale of indenture. These silences provide an interpretative space for Bahadur, who weaves oral tales, folk music and her own diasporic imagination to rebuild a life reduced to an emigration pass stamped “Pregnant 4 mos.” This is both a methodological strength and a possible source of criticism: at times, the speculative reconstructions risk blurring the distinction between verifiable truth and narrative inference. But Bahadur is open about these difficulties, frequently pausing to consider the ethics of filling historical spaces. Bahadur’s study revolves around gender, migration and diaspora identity. The book rejects the masculinist narrative of diaspora as being driven by masculine explorers or economic pioneers. Bahadur redefines migration as a fundamental negotiation of selfhood under situations of displacement and injustice, emphasising women’s experiences rather than merely a geographic crossing.

Indentured women’s travels were sometimes pushed or moulded by desperation, escape from abusive marriages, starvation or despair in India, but once in the colonies, they faced new freedoms and limits. Because of the gender imbalance in the indenture system (men outnumbered women), women could use sexual and relational choices to negotiate better conditions, but at a societal cost. Bahadur demonstrates how these compromises formed part of the diasporic heritage, impacting family structures, gender norms and even communal politics across decades. In the portions when Bahadur discusses her travels to Guyana and India, the book becomes as much about the modern afterlife of indenture as it is about its history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her return journeys show multiple alienations: in Guyana, she is both an insider and a foreigner, bonded by shared cultural memory but alienated by her American upbringing; in India, she seems to be a local but is viewed as an outsider, her conduct assessed against norms she did not receive directly. These texts emphasise a vital point: the diasporic self is formed not by a single movement, but by a series of displacements, each filtered via race, gender and class. While the novel succeeds at conceptual profundity, it occasionally falters under the weight of its aspirations.

\The combination of narrative, history and feminist ethnography is academically stimulating, although the switches from personal to archive may be jarring. Readers looking for a chronological biography of Sujaria may be dissatisfied by the many digressions into larger historical analysis, whilst those interested in macrohistory may find the intimate autobiographical portions too lengthy. However, this hybridity is also the book’s greatest strength; it refuses to separate the emotional and political, asserting that the two are inextricably linked in any honest engagement with diaspora. Subsequently Coolie Woman is more of a nuanced, multi-voiced meditation on the entanglements of race, gender, migration and memory than a clean biography or comprehensive history of indenture. Its power comes in its refusal to provide closure when readers are left with the unsettling realisation that diaspora identity is established not in pure beginnings or entire histories, but in pieces, erasures and contested meanings passed down through generations. Bahadur’s work serves as an essential reminder to researchers, activists and members of the Indian diaspora that to understand where we are, we must be honest about the travels that led us here, both forced and chosen.