Her Middle Passage

A journey to unravel the truth of one woman’s courageous crossing reveals a social and family history of indentured labour migration from India to the Caribbean

01 September 2011
Trinidadian postcard of indentured women.
COURTESY THE ALMA JORDAN LIBRARY, THE UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST INDIES
Trinidadian postcard of indentured women.
COURTESY THE ALMA JORDAN LIBRARY, THE UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST INDIES

OUR JOURNEY TOOK US past endless fields of flowering yellow along the northern bank of the Ganges. When we pulled into towns, we asked for directions, from children balancing loads three times their size on their heads, from crouching women tending baskets of cauliflower and brinjal by the roadside, from men in the stores that stared open-faced onto the street, framing a tailor at his sewing machine or a man pumping air into bicycle tyres. We sought the guidance of random people on the route, turning to them as to a collective human compass. And they obliged. They pointed us along bumpy roads bracketed by tiny pastel altars made to worship the sun, until one man finally indicated a rocky path. “That way,” he said.

We had travelled five hours over shell-pocked roads and narrow dirt lanes to arrive here, at the threshold of a place I wasn’t even sure still existed. It did a century ago. That’s what a document that I had discovered two years earlier, in Guyana’s National Archives, indicated. It was the emigration pass issued to my great-grandmother on 29 July 1903, the day she sailed from Calcutta to the Caribbean.

Catalogued on this brittle artifact, yellow and crumbling with age, was everything about Immigrant #96153 that the imperial bureaucracy had considered worth recording: “Name: Sheojari.” “Age: 27.” “Height: five-feet, four-and-a-half inches.” “Caste: Brahman.” Here was colonial officialdom’s cold summary of an indentured labourer’s life. Yet, it included strokes of unsettling intimacy. The emigration pass told me that my great-grandmother had a scar on her left foot, a burn mark. Someone had scribbled “Pregnant 4 mos” in pencil at the document’s edge. On the line for husband’s name, there was only a dash.

Though my great-grandmother claimed no husband, she did list coordinates for home. The pass pointed to it precisely, almost like a map to some mythic location with hidden riches. X marks the spot: the state of Bihar, the district of Chhapra, the administrative block of Majhi and the village of Bhurahupur. There rested the past, buried. And here we were, just a few kilometres away, more than a century later, hoping to excavate lost history.

Sujaria’s emigration pass from <em>The Clyde’</em>s 1903 registre, which recorded her name at the time as Sheojari.. COURTESY THE GUYANA NATIONAL ARCHIVES Sujaria’s emigration pass from <em>The Clyde’</em>s 1903 registre, which recorded her name at the time as Sheojari.. COURTESY THE GUYANA NATIONAL ARCHIVES
Sujaria’s emigration pass from The Clyde’s 1903 registre, which recorded her name at the time as Sheojari.
COURTESY THE GUYANA NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Gaiutra Bahadur is a reporter and book critic whose work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Observer (London) and The Nation, among other publications. Her first book will be published in 2012.

Keywords: Indian community labour migration Caribbean emigration indentured labourers women ancestry coolies
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