Across the Black Seas

Late 1980s in Jersey City, US, was not an ideal place to be an Indian, or even a person of Indian origin from the Caribbean. Xenophobes don’t make such subtle distinctions. Any brown, “Indian-looking” person walking down the streets of Jersey City was in danger of being attacked by a group that identified itself as the Dotbusters. In July 1987, they published a letter in a local newspaper, stating that they would take any means necessary to drive the Indians out of Jersey City. It doesn’t take much to imagine how such an incident would affect an adolescent girl growing up on that street but Gaiutra Bahadur recounts it with a certain amount of equanimity. “This was one of the many reasons for me to question my identity. A Parsi man of Indian origin, Navroze Mody, was attacked and beaten to death,” says Bahadur, who was in the city to attend the Kolkata Literary Meet and to talk about her book, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture.

In the book, Bahadur speaks about the system of indenture that the British Empire devised after slave trade was outlawed in the 19th century. It was a veiled system of exploitation, where poor people were transported across oceans to work for a pittance in British plantations. Bahadur approaches their story through that of her great-grandmother Sheojari, who was four months’ pregnant when she boarded a ship from Garden Reach in Kolkata in 1903 to work as indentured labour in the sugarcane plantations of the Caribbean. Yet, the book is more than a personal journey of discovering one’s roots. “It’s a personal journey, yes.

But I also approached the book with a lot of academic interest. I visited a number of countries and went through tomes of official records,” says Bahadur, who studied at Yale and Columbia, and reported on the Iraq war for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

The Kolkata leg of her India visit is a poignant one. A day before the interview, she visited the address where her great-grandmother landed from Chhapra, Bihar, and spent the last few days in India: 61, Garden Reach.

“I could identify the building from old photographs. But I couldn’t explore the premises because it is owned by a private shipbuilding firm,” says Bahadur.  The author, in her late 30s, is not unaware that the cycles of migration continue, thousands of men and women from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh throng Kolkata to eke out a hard living only to be exploited and marginalised by the city. “Nothing much has changed has it?” she says.

When Sheojari left India in 1903 for an unknown future in Guyana, she was perhaps escaping a life of penury. Not much is known of the circumstances of her departure, whether she was married or a widow, a prostitute or an unwed mother-to-be. She was a 27-year-old light-eyed, fair-skinned Brahmin woman who boarded The Clyde in Calcutta.  Bahadur cautions you against applying ideas of “sexual liberation” and “freedom” to describe her escape. “The only thing my great-grandmother and other women like her had to their advantage in the plantations was the gender imbalance. There were far too many men and very few women. So they were pursued by workers and overseers (who were mostly white men) alike,” says Bahadur. Her great-grandmother had relationships with two men, with whom she bore children.

Writing and researching on those relationships was difficult for Bahadur, because her sources of information were her uncles and aunts, who were Sheojari’s grandchildren. “They talked in insinuations,” says Bahadur. When she describes an incident where Sheojari’s first partner (with whom she had a daughter) met her then husband during the daughter’s wedding, she does so with a sense of irony. “There is a beautiful sense of Bollywood melodrama in the way my relatives described the scene. Apparently, the first partner, who was the father of the bride, was waiting outside the marriage hall with a gift. When Sheojari’s husband came to receive him, he refused because he felt he had no right to participate in the wedding,” says Bahadur.

Though the tight-knit Indian community of Guyana is steeped in Indian values and mores where elders are never talked about as sexual beings, Bahadur’s family embraced the book with remarkable maturity. “It might also be because I was a bit coy in the book about my great-grandmother,” says Bahadur. She points out the true nature of sexual politics in the plantations of the Caribbean.

“Some women used (the demographic imbalance) to their advantage. Some faced a violent backlash from rejected suitors,” says Bahadur.  But there were stories of empowerment too. “I heard about this woman of Indian origins who was living in with a white overseer. He had built her a home. She knew that the man was considering getting himself a white wife. So, she asked him to write off the house in her name, give her a donkey and some money so that she could make her own living. Or else, she would tell the government about the nature of their relationship. Overseers were barred from having any sort of personal relationship with the indentured labourers and were persecuted if they flouted the law. The overseer had no choice but to relent,” says Bahadur.

Though the author will leave Kolkata without the satisfaction of a conclusion, she has made some sort of peace. As she
prepares to address a public gathering at Victoria Memorial, a reminder of the empire that encouraged the system of indenture, she says, “I have finally started feeling at home in India now.”