Review: Coolie Woman – The Odyssey of Indenture by Gaiutra Bahadur

Gripping tale of India’s women indentured labourers: The Business Standard

Over half a million Indians were taken to the Caribbean colonies to work on the sugarcane plantations; a little more than a third of them were women. Some of them travelled abroad on their own without male relatives. Who were those women and why had they left their homes to go to a distant land? Gaiutra Bahadur takes the story of her great grandmother, Sujaria, who travelled alone to British Guiana (now Guyana), to relate the little known saga of the women immigrants during the indenture period.