COOLIE WOMAN, the odyssey of indenture

274pp., illus., map, paperback, Johannesburg, 2014

First published in the UK in 2013. American journalist Gaiutra Bahadur's great-grandmother, a Brahmin woman, sailed from Calcutta, India, to Guiana in the Caribbean as a "coolie" or indentured labourer in 1903. Unearthing her story, she also chronicles the history of some quarter of a million female coolies recruited by the British to work on sugar plantations in the Carribean