Ulrike WilsonGaiutra Bahadur, author of the book ‘****** Woman.’

In “****** Woman,” the Guyanese-American journalist Gaiutra Bahadur excavates the forgotten story of her great-grandmother Sujaria and a quarter of a million women like her who left eastern India in the mid-1800s as indentured labor. The book, which was released last week in the United States and last month in India, is deeply personal yet assiduously researched. From the treacherous sea voyage to the colonial outpost of British Guiana to the sexual privileges conferred on indentured women as the scarcer sex, Ms. Bahadur reconstructs the “******” woman’s fate in astonishing detail.

In an email interview with India Ink, Ms. Bahadur explained how the story of indentured women is “a lost history within a lost history,” as she put it.

You’ve chosen a term some might consider pejorative as the title of your book. Why did you take that risk?

I took the risk because I think the title captures perfectly the burdens shouldered by the women whose stories I tell. The word “******,” coming from the Tamil for “wages,” was originally a neutral term for porters paid to carry loads at docks or baggage at railway stations in the subcontinent. Then it gained the stigma of a new form of slavery, when the British imperial bureaucracy used it as their term for the indentured laborers on plantations across the globe. In the West Indies, it became even sharper edged, an ethnic slur really, used to describe any Indian, indentured or not, plantation worker or not. The word “******” is the right one to use because it carries the history of colonialism on its shoulders, and the title “****** woman” is the right one because Indian women in the Caribbean did too. They had to fulfill the needs and desires of both Indian men and British men. They carried the weight of expectations: that they maintain a transplanted culture, that they represent its honor, that they hold families together.

How and when did you learn about your own family’s history with indentured servitude? Is a collective memory of that process integral to Indian-origin culture in places like Guyana, where you were born?

I can’t remember how or when I learned that we were descended from indentured workers. The vast majority of Indians in Guyana do come from that history, so it’s a sense of self we carry almost from first knowing about the world and the way it works.

I didn’t learn about my great-grandmother until I was in my early 20s and made a point of asking. That’s when my father told me about my great-grandmother who left Calcutta, pregnant and alone, in 1903. Partly, I think the silence was deliberate. But I think in many cases the details had just been erased with time.

Why did you choose to focus on indentured women?

I chose to focus on the women because their story is a lost history within a lost history: the story of Indian women within the story of Indian indenture. While many slave narratives exist, only two memoirs about indenture do, and men wrote both. Women’s stories were in greater need of excavation, and this gave me a sense of purpose. Beyond that, their journeys were in many ways more compelling, defying expectations and challenging preconceptions.

How long was this book in the making? What unexpected places did you find yourself in, or what unexpected things did you find yourself poring over?

This book was five years in the making. It took me to archives in Scotland, Trinidad, Guyana and England. It took me to my great-grandmother’s village in rural Bihar and back to my own village in the Guyanese countryside. I was born and raised a mile away from a sugar estate and lived on one when I was 6, but I’d never been in a field of sugar cane. Because of this book, I pulled on long boots and trudged through mud and cane. I went to both plantations where my great-grandmother had worked, felt the saw-like edges of cane leaves, saw the unexpected purple of their stems, got nearly high off the sickly sweet smell of a burnt cane field.

I read early 20th century newspaper accounts of indentured women who were killed by their partners, using the tool from the cane fields, the cutlass. And then I interviewed a woman who, a century later, was the victim of a similar attack by her husband. I found myself poring over a once-confidential government dossier on a Scottish overseer who had slept with several Indian women on the plantations — and found that one of the women had lived in the village where I was born and that my family knew both her and the son she had with the overseer. The surprises were endless in the pursuit of this story, not only in terms of my family’s history, and not only in terms of the wider public history I was uncovering, but in the intersection between the two.

How would you compare the indentured servitude of Indians to the enslavement of Africans on American plantations?

Overseers beat indentured servants, like the enslaved before them, with whips and canes. The women were subject to sexual abuse. They did the same work that the enslaved had done and lived in the same quarters they did. Abolitionists in England, and several magistrates at work in Guiana who had seen the system up close, called it a new form of slavery.

And it was a system based on deception and exploitation. The indentured often didn’t know what they were getting into; some were led to believe that they could return home to India for the weekend. There were even cases of outright kidnap.

They were, however, paid. It was a pittance and planters often cheated them out of their daily wages, but they didn’t work for free as slaves had. The indentured signed up for five years of work. Their contracts were often extended, because illegally low wages led them to become indebted to company stores and planters. But at the end of the day, most ultimately did win their freedom. And their children were born free.

How have the descendants of Indian indentured labor fared in their surrogate places of birth? Are there large mixed Indian and indigenous populations? How many have stayed on in places like Guyana, and how many have embarked on a second diasporic dispersal?

Indentured Indians were shipped to more than a dozen colonies across the globe. How they fared depended on where they went. The difference from one country to another, even in the Caribbean, can be great. Trinidad and Guyana have so much in common, culturally and ethnically, but oil was discovered in the first in the 19th century, leading to greater prosperity and opportunities for everyone.

Guyana was and is a much poorer place. The country’s economic woes and its racial tensions have led many, many Guyanese, of both Indian and African origin, to leave for the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom in the last three or four decades. More people of Guyanese origin now live outside the country than live inside it. Emigration is so common that the way to say someone has left is to say, “She’s gone outside.” It’s as ordinary and as casual a thing as stepping out for a walk.

(This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.)

http://india.blogs.nytimes.com...aiutra-bahadur/?_r=0