From Calcutta to the Caribbean: Indian Women and the Journey of Indenture

This presentation will focus on journeys across the transfiguring seas from Calcutta to the Caribbean. The approach is fitting because indenture itself proved to be a journey for the quarter million Indian women engaged as "coolies," replacement plantation workers after the enslaved were freed in the British Empire. They journeyed from a position of complete marginalization in the subcontinent, as widows and other outcasts, to a position of tenuous power as the scarcer sex, greatly outnumbered by Indian men on the plantations. In its paradoxes and its complexity, that figurative journey was mirrored in their literal journey across the dark waters ("the kala pani").

Drawing on the records available for 77 indenture voyages to the West Indies, mainly British Guiana, most taking place in 1890s, I was able to pull back the screen, if only for brief moments and partial views, on the lives of the women aboard. It is hard, in these glimpses, to escape the angle of sexual exploitation by figures of all ranks and races. But the records also provide other views of the women: on deathbeds, giving birth, losing children, going mad, being driven to suicide, engaged in infanticide, rejecting or being rejected by shipboard husbands, demanding that husbands prove themselves, stowing away, crying, cursing, possibly in love and clearly in anguish. They provide a picture of women who, while vulnerable to rape and abuse as enslaved women before them had been, were somewhat emboldened to make choices, because they were few in number.