Hachette India

Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture

Gaiutra Bahadur

In 1903, a young woman sailed from India to Guiana as a 'coolie' -indentured labourers who replaced the newly emancipated slaves on sugar plantations all around the world. Pregnant and travelling alone, this woman, likeso many of the indentured, disappeared into history. Now, in Coolie Woman, her great-granddaughter Gaiutra Bahadur embarks on a journey into the past to find her. Traversing three continents and trawling through countless colonial archives, Bahadur excavates not only her great-grandmother's story but also the repressed history of some quarter of a million other coolie women, shining a light on complex lives.

Shortlisted for the 2014 Orwell Prize, and winner of the 2014 Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Prize for the best book about the Caribbean, Coolie Woman is a meditation on survival, a gripping story of a double diaspora - from India to the West Indies in one century, and from Guyana to the United States in the next. It is at once a search for roots and an exploration of gender and power, peril and opportunity.

Gaiutra Bahadur

Gaiutra Bahadur is a journalist and book critic who writes frequently about the culture and politics of global migration. Her reporting, criticism and essays have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, the Nation, the Observer (London) and Ms., among other publications. A former daily newspaper reporter, Gaiutra studied literature at Yale and journalism at Columbia and was a 2008 Nieman Fellow at Harvard. She was born in Guyana and emigrated to the United States as a child.