by Alex Bacchus (they/them)
From Mauritius and Fiji to Trinidad and Guyana, people were trafficked from South Asia as a form of near-to-free labour to quell the disruptions of sugar production with the abolition of slavery. They were called “Coolies.” These are my ancestors and the ancestors of many others, and our lives and cultures are their legacies, and even the legacies of ancestors, that are not of our bloodlines, but those from elsewhere, from Africa to China and beyond, that helped build the new cultures and new countries that became our homelands. And, living in diaspora, whether that be in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, France or the Netherlands, amongst other places, we all grapple with questions of identity, home and belonging in different and similar ways.
How do we reconcile descending from South Asian indentured labour while living in diaspora with many layers of migration? How do we Coolie descendants relate or not relate to ancestral homelands on the South Asian subcontinent? What does it mean to be Coolie? What does it mean to be Indian? What does “Indian” mean? And how do these meanings change across migrations of time and space? There is no one answer, let alone a correct answer. These meanings are fluid. The beauty is that these stories are not monoliths–every individual has a unique experience to share.
These are the questions I will investigate in this digital humanities site, with a base in podcasting. Over the next several months, I will explore these themes with focus on dance, literature, spirituality and performance art, while also diving deeper into the experiences of those shaped by French colonization and the French language and Dutch colonization and settlement, looking at indenture and la francophonie (the francophone world) and those of Surinamese heritage living in the Netherlands. And I will have an array of guests to accompany me on this journey who can better speak to certain topics, and, of course, you’ll get to hear their brilliant voices if you stay tuned!
But the question I pose to commence this journey is what is Coolie?
Growing up in New York City, my childhood was filled with many moments with my extended family, all the siblings and their children and grandchildren who called home the U.S., but still there was Guyana, forbidden by the traumas of post-colonialism and imperialism, too dangerous to return, a Guyana overrun by violent poverty-driven crime, where there was no one left. But behind remained our hearts, dreams and memories of houses on stilts, the Caribbean sun, the cane fields, the sea wall, the salty air and the Demerara river, flowing deep into the interior, into the heart of the Amazon. But, yet there was another home, far, far away on the other side of the globe. This home taught us to eat dhal, roti and curry, and to sawney or eat with our hands. This home taught us to make sirni and prasad, the sugary and creamy parched flour, for every pooja and Quran sharif. This home gave us the tales of the Ramayana and the Urdu-fied Arabic verses of the Quran we later creolized, surviving the voyage across kālā pānī. As a child, whether I be age 5 or age 10, ignorant and naive of the darkness and injustices lost in time, I was surrounded by my Indo-Guyanese family and spent a lot of time in Indo-Caribbean neighbourhoods, an hour drive or more from the little brick house I called home. We collectively knew there was a home deep in the past called India, and di olda peeple dem ah kyall ayadem coolie, and the older people called themselves Indian. The two words we use interchangeably. It is who we are. The turban-wearing Sikh man sitting on the Queens park bench reading the Punjabi newspaper is a cooliemaan. The Trini woman behind the counter asking if you want your jerk chicken with rice and peas is also coolie. It is our word for South Asian. It captures the smells of freshly ground toasted masala and the rising of oil roti on the hot tawa. You might even compare it to the word “desi,” a word, personally, I don’t feel is my own. But that’s not to say the word doesn’t resonate with you. The beauty is we have so much to learn from our diverse, varied and unique experiences.
Inn abedeez patwa or in our creole, the word “coolie” means “Indian” as much as it means “Indo-Caribbean,” and as similar as the two are, we could not be more different. I was never aware of the dark history behind the world until I got older, or even how it can be used in a derogatory way (depending on the context) by those who are not of South Asian ancestry. Perhaps I’m not fully conscious of the pains of the word in my own ignorance with the privilege of never experiencing explicit discrimination rooted in my indenture heritage. And many of us do not understand the meanings the word has in our ancestral languages. For me, it has always been a word of familiarity and self in my upbringing with Indo-Caribbeans and in time spent in Indo-Caribbean ethnic enclaves in New York City and the Great Toronto Area. The immense accomplishment of our ancestor’s survival injects this word with pride we carry today.
When colonial powers finally emancipated our Black siblings with the abolition of slavery, there was still a high demand for cheap or near to free labour. Under the guise of indenture, indentured servitude or indentured labour, hundreds of thousands of bodies were trafficked out of what was India around the world to stoke the fires of empire. Yet, many were also stolen from China and Java, amongst other places.
The politics of the word are vast and complex. I saw it referred to as the “c-word” for the very first time in Gaiutra Bahadur’s Coolie Woman, well into having written the majority of this text. It’s a word that I heard used and I have so casually without deeper thinking.
Bahadur writes:
“Coolie” may bare a jagged edge, like a broken bottle raised in threat. But it also ricochets still down dirt lanes in the Guyanese village where I was born, in far more complicated ways, in greetings that are sometimes menacing but also often affectionate and intimate, signifying a sense of shared beginnings. Much depends on who is using the word and why.[4]
In the prefix of her book, she acknowledges that this word may be upsetting for some. I wish to do the same. I realize this word may carry scars for some, but I intentionally use this word because of the truths it speaks to me and my lineages, and it is a word that has been reclaimed and harm taken away by the circles I have been a part of. Gaiutra Bahadur quotes the Guyanese Poet Rajkumari Singh (b. 1923, d.1979), who called to destigmatize the word:
The word must not be left to die out, buried and forgotten in the past. It must be given a new lease on life. All that they (the indentured) did and we are doing and our progeny will do, must be stamped with the name COOLIE, lest posterity accuse of not venerating the ancestors.[5]
Furthermore, I seek to ground my work in an anti-oppression, decolonial frame, and I add that, while my work explores the Indianness–or lack thereof– of those descending from indenture, that this work does not proclaim Indianness as superior to other groups disenfranchised under colonialism, such as those of African, Chinese, Javanese or Indigenous origin. My work in exploring connection to ancestral homelands in India does not proclaim the suffering of one group as worse over another. And, in unpacking Indianness, we cannot ignore anti-Blackness and other forms of oppression–in fact these are divisions we must interrogate and question to unlearn colonial thought in working towards healing deep wounds that still pain.
Under indenture or l’engagisme (French) or contractarbeid (Dutch), stolen land became further populated with stolen bodies that continued to face many brutalities and hardships. Some chose to freely make the passage. And, of course, different individuals had “free-er” and easier experiences. But what conditions prompt an individual to forsake everything to journey twenty five weeks or so at sea to a faraway land in the late 1800s and early 1900s? Either way, one needs to also consider how markers like caste, skin colour and shade, hair texture, body size and shape, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, (dis)ability, neurodivergence and even religion shaped these experiences.
Accordingly, between 1838–1917 tales of an affluent life in British Guiana combined with Indian recruiters’ strategies of kidnapping and coercion, enticed and beguiled nearly half a million Indian nationals to sign indentures that contracted them on British Guiana’s plantations (Seenarine 1999; Samaroo 1987). As well, unsuspecting Indians signed the indenture and boarded ships believing that they were going to “Cha lay Cheenee,” meaning, “stir sugar and earn easy money” (Tiwari 1997). For others that signed the indenture and boarded ships, their destination was unknown (Samaroo 1987).[6]
The following numbers begin to quantify the number of people taken from South Asia under indenture. I’m sure there are at least some, if not many, that were not officially documented, and, consequently, I find it most accurate to say there were at least X many people taken to the following places from South Asia and the different meanings of India:
Mauritius – (nearly) 700,000[7]
Guyana – 238,909[8]
Trinidad and Tobago – 143,939[9]
Fiji – 60,500[10]
Guadeloupe – 45,844[11]
Jamaica – 36,412[12]
Suriname – 35, 501[13]
Martinique – 25,509[14]
French Guiana – 19,276[15]
Grenada – 3,033[16]
St. Vincent – 2,472[17]
St. Lucia – 4,354[18]
St. Kitts – 337[19]
And their descendants have made new homes in diasporas overseas. The most significant Indo-Guyanese and Trinidadian diasporas are in New York City and the Greater Toronto Area, with smaller communities in London and South Florida. Montréal is home to various Caribbean folx and even individuals with heritage from Mauritius. Paris and other parts of France offer a home-away-from-home to many Mauritians and those from the francophone Caribbean like Guadeloupe, Martinique and French Guiana. And many Surinamese have migrated en masse to the Netherlands, where the Hague in Zuid-Holland houses a large Surinamese diaspora.
This project does not even begin to scratch the surface of the themes and questions. This work seeks to uplift and give platform to diverse voices and cultural and historic richness that have been silenced, ignored and overlooked throughout time. The questions to ask and the answers to find are infinitely endless. I specifically chose this medium of a digital humanities site based in podcasting to share and create information in an accessible way, and to bring people together in conversation, in a way, returning to our oral traditions and storytelling as a means of sharing knowledge. Writing a thesis is a contribution to academia, but so often the subjects of this writing are excluded by the segregated nature of academia, whether the language is too advanced for the people or the people have not had the education to understand it. The subjects of my work are my people. I hope this audio and digital format of this project will overcome the hegemonic boundaries of knowledge production so rooted in colonialism, racism, sexism, ableism, classism and so much more, and I hope this will give a voice back to the community I have come from.
[1] “Coolie, n. 1a,” in OED Online (Oxford University Press), 1, accessed September 16, 2021, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/40991.
[2] “Coolie, n. 1b,” in OED Online (Oxford University Press), accessed September 16, 2021, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/40991.
[3] The Sciolist, “Coolie | Origin and Meaning of Coolie by Online Etymology Dictionary,” accessed September 16, 2021, https://www.etymonline.com/word/coolie.
[4] Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), xxi.
[5] Rajkumari Singh, “I Am a Coolie,” in They Came in Ships: An Anthology of Indo-Guyanese Prose and Poetry, ed. Ian McDonald et al., 1998, 85–87.
[6] Parbattie Ramsarran, “The Indentured Contract and Its Impact on Labor Relationship and Community Reconstruction in British Guiana,” International Journal of Crimininology and Sociological Theory 1, no. 2 (December 2008): 178.
[7] Atman Ramchalaon, “Indo-Mauritians and the Innocents: A Photo Gallery,” UCLA Social Sciences: MANAS, accessed September 21, 2021, https://southasia.ucla.edu/diaspora/indo-mauritians-innocents/.
[8] Tota Mangar, “East Indian Immigration (1838-1917),” Guyana Chronicle, accessed September 21, 2021, https://guyanachronicle.com/2014/05/05/east-indian-immigration-1838-1917/.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Lal V Brij, Chalo Jahaji: On a Journey through Indenture in Fiji (s.l.: ANU Press, 2012).
[11] Mangar, “East Indian Immigration (1838-1917).”
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid.