JULY is a historic month in the transportation of Indian indentured labourers to Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago.
While more than 500,000 such workers were shipped to the Caribbean between 1838 and 1917, a sailing in 1903 has particular significance because of a subsequent striking documentation.
In July 1903, the vessel Clyde left Calcutta for Guyana in choppy waters caused by the monsoon climate.
A total of 12 women gave birth on the long, arduous trip, according to the book Coolie Woman, written by journalist Gaiutra Bahadur, and published in 2013.
They included Sujaria, who was 27 years old, single and travelling alone.
Ms. Bahadur is Sujuria’s great granddaughter.
Between 1938 and 1917, there were 500 ship voyages to Guyana, with 238,909 workers.
From 1945 to 1917, some 143,000 migrants landed in Trinidad.
Most came from the United Provinces and Bihar in northern India.
In a 2016 article in the British Guardian newspaper, Ms. Bahadur said her great grandmother “left behind letters or diaries describing the circumstances that led her to climb aboard a ship for the other side of the world…”
In what has been termed “a genealogical page-turner,” the author, a Guyanese-American, tells her ancestor’s riveting story and that of other indentured women.
The book, subtitled The Odyssey of Indenture, has received stellar reviews and was shortlisted in 2014 for the Orwell Prize.
Ms. Bahadur has said that “indentured women were born into the wrong class, race and gender to write themselves into history.”
She said that two-thirds of the female workers left India “without men at their sides.”
The author stated in the newspaper article: “Uprooted from families and villages, they were the sub-continent’s most dispossessed: widows, sex workers or outcasts, running from or thrown out by husbands.”
History left these women voiceless, Ms. Bahabur wrote.
The author did extensive research “tracing not only my roots but also the inheritance of harm.”
The ship arrived in Guyana on November 4, 1903.
Georgetown is described in the book as “a graceful, modern city,” with “broad boulevards” and “grassy medians and freshwater canals.”
Ms. Bahadur wrote: “Everywhere there were luxuriant trees providing shade and beauty, the samaan with its umbrella of foliage; the flamboyant, with its scarlet boom, and a peculiar palm with its leaves splayed flat like a lady’s fan.”
She added: “Fruit trees enfolded elegant wooden houses with verandas for taking the air and jalousies for letting it flow.”
The author told of a bustling and beautiful city and of “Raleigh’s fortune-seeking heirs” hunting for gold.
There have been several other published narratives of immigrants’ lives, but Ms. Bahadur has been credited with using her journalistic skills to write “a haunting portrait” and “a compelling radical history.”
One reviewer termed the book “an astonishing piece of history.”
The story remains essential and thought-provoking, and probably even more relevant on another July anniversary.
