Gaiutra Bahadur: 'How could I write about women whose existence is barely acknowledged?'

Coolie Woman’s author explains how researching her great-grandmother’s life in the archives took her only so far; to tell the whole story meant weaving in her own

My great-grandmother Sujaria didn’t leave behind letters or diaries describing the circumstances that led her to climb aboard a ship bound for the other side of the world on a summer’s day in 1903, in the middle of the monsoon, while four months pregnant and alone.

A decaying emigration pass in a ship’s manifest in Guyana told me that, when she departed Calcutta to work as an indentured labourer – or “coolie” – in British Guiana, she was 27 years old and high-caste. It provided the name of her father and her native village and, with remarkable intimacy, hinting at possible trauma, even recorded a burn mark on her left leg. Missing from the written record, however, was her own testimony, the story in her own words of how she came to leave and who she truly was. A waylaid religious pilgrim? A widow? A fugitive from an abusive marriage? A woman deserted by her husband?

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