Reading "Coolie Woman : The Odyessey of Adventure: during Navratra

Two bookmarks in Coolie Woman

I had the book since May. My mother read the book first,  then my father read it after - I think this must be the only book that all three of us have read.I  had dipped into it but  I am not sure why I did not start reading it properly - from cover to cover. 

This is not a review of Coolie Woman : The Odyssey of Indenture by Gaiutra Bahadur.
It is a long ramble, a tribute I think.

Navratra
Navratra is a nine-night festival when Hindus worship the divine Mother,  Shakti the creative force.  I opened the book around the start of Navratra in September.

During Navratra, the Ramayana Gole goes to mandir most nights to sing.  There are more women in the mandir than men. I dread the katha time though, because sometimes the sexist crap comes out of the pandit. And so I spend a lot of my Navratra policing which crap comes out and from who, rather than engaged in devotion per se.  It is getting better though and many pandits are giving their kathas in all embracing gender neutral terms.

My Vaishnavite patriarchal upbringing had us not worshipping Mother with such devotion , except Saraswati , Goddess of Knowledge.

In my head during this Navratra watching the women and men in the mandirs. The Coolie Woman in the book and the other coolie women I knew - mothers, aunts, politicians who terrified me, market vendors, teachers, friends, the coolie woman who told me I was abusive.

The first person who I saw with the book was a coolie woman whose trust I had betrayed (like many coolie men do) and who told me she forgave me (like many coolie women do).


Chapters and footnotes

Gaiutra uses the story of her great--grand-mother, Sujaria, to bring to life the women who came from India. Others could write better and more literately about the style in which this story is told.

A  mix of oral histories, written texts, newspapers, records of songs and other sources are woven to tell stories of people and incidents.

This is the first time I have read any book like this

The book has 11 chapters and many footnotes. I used two bookmarks - one for the text  and one for the footnotes because the sources of the stories were as fascinating as the text. (One of my letters is referenced in the text).

Each chapter could stand on its own.

The Magician's Box is about the movement from Guyana to the US.

Some of us coolies in Guyana usually snigger at how the coolies who go North either completely 'lose their culture and religion and become white' or 'they become more coolie than when they were here' .

This chapter explains things a bit more about what those who left go through in dealing with identity and the struggle to survive.

I only know about how well everyone does and that they can now get anything they want to eat in Toronto/New York. 

Ancestral Memory is about the journey to India to find out the past.  In the stupid way that I am fascinated by my namesake coolie woman with the fake nursing school who ripping off students more than one time,  I read and found myself with the Biharis who might have seen some financial opportunities in providing home and memory for those coming to find ancestors.

I mean.. isn't that what we coolies are supposed to do? Be able to make money anywhere? 

The Women's Quarters and Into Dark Waters are the chapters that are the most powerful for me. One night in the car going to mandir, we talked about the contradiction.. how coolie women and girls were urged to stay home, not go far on their own. But yet.. many coolie women and girls who came , left on their own and the journey was not easy. There were no relatives waiting here for many of them. Gaiutra had shared a record of  a 13 year old girl who was unaccompanied and then assigned to Plantation Lusignan

The day I started Her Middle Passage  , fertility and menstruation were on my mind.  The Navratra period included a workshop on sexual and reproductive health and a conversation with a menstruating woman who said she was unclean so could not go to mandir.

I told her what de rass, that we are worshipping divine Mother and mother can't be mother without menstruation. I normally do not intrude on coolie women's personal beliefs especially when it comes to their worship but in my head, the stories from the workshop rang in my head and I felt some responsibility.

The title of the chapter , brought to my mind the vagina and reproductive organs.  This chapter is about the  journey on the ship.. and I kept thinking of my ancestors . the women especially who came on those ships and being thankful to them all the time.

The woman did go to mandir and no bad came to her as a result as far as I know. I do not know if bad or good will come to me for encouraging an "unclean" woman to go worship the feminine power.

Some women survived the journey to Guyana and some did not. Bad came to many on the journey. This chapter exposes the violence which the women endured. Saroda's story - a child who was raped. There was  another coolie girl in Berbice,  almost a hundred years later, who tried to get justice for rape and whose mother was further assaulted by the coolie lawyer in the courtroom defending the coolie man who did to her what  Balmer did to Saroda.

This chapter talks also about how women dealt with pregnancy and birth on the journey. Sujaria gives birth to her son on the ship and they survive.

Part of the chapter A New World, - Parallel Worlds - is powerful, in terms of how Gaiutra imagines her great-grand- mother arriving. "The moon was full the first night Sujaria spent in Georgetown"

The treatment of coolie women is described in this new world. And we meet Baby - a woman who way back then petitioned the colonial state for her rights. Baby's story among other things, includes more than one 'man'.

Beautiful Woman without a Nose tells the story of the violence which some coolie men meted out on the women in their lives. The chapter is difficult for me. Gaiutra proposes that the chopping up violence against women deemed unchaste is inspired by Ram and Laxman's violence to Surpanakha. They rejected her advances to them and the story goes, Laxman cut off her nose and ears after she went to attack Sita.

 Perhaps in the Ramayan Goles of those times, that story was told over and over again. But not now as far as I know and while wives are encouraged to be like Sita, I am not sure how many coolie men who chopped their wives believed that they were maiming their wives in the form of Suparnakha.
I also wonder about the non-Hindu men, and the incidence and nature of their violence? Is coolie violence against coolie woman inspired by Hindu myths?

Hinduism is complicated by the acceptance of multiple narratives and interpretations. One young woman had said that Sita was not an obedient wife.. she disobeyed Ram by insisting on going with him to the forest and exile.

One night at the mandir, one of the guys told me that the woman at the harmonium also played the drum well. Women who play the drum are breaking gender barriers. There is a part of the Tulsidas Ramayana which translates to something like"Dhol, Ganwar, Shudra, Pashu, Naari, ye sab tadan ke adhikaari” (a drum, an idiot, a shudra and a woman all need severe beating[by a man???]) (cut and paste from the Internet)" . The hermeneutics are diverse around this as with many Hindu scriptures.


But women are beating drums now, making music as part of the worship and not to be destructive as Tulsidas writes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy8Z9-a7398






Gone but Not Forgotten examines the Rose Hall killings in 1913 and other disturbances and examines that the relationships which the overseers and others had with coolie woman were part of the source of those disturbances. The Dream of Return reminds about those who had wanted to go back and who went back and came back. Nowadays, many persons visit as tourists and like the place. Others go and don't want to go back. Lal Singh adjusted and found ways of making money by fooling people that they could go back through the Guyana jungle.

India has sophisticated ways to making money from the nostalgia and desire to connect with roots - from the religious pilgrimages to the Bollywood exports which we are mandated to buy to prove our Indianness.

I am asked often  'do you want to visit India'  - No, not particularly as India comes to me in so many ways.

Every Ancestor is a surprising chapter. The other side of the story.. the history of the overseers and managers and plantation owners is explored and there is a description of the origin of some of the names of the places in Berbice.

Surviving History is a chapter I read more than once. It is not easy to read as it shows how things have more or less remained the same , except that there is impunity now for the men who abuse and kill their wives.

Gaiutra writes about how the landscape shifted as the sugar changed. The shortage of women probably eased. 

Questions

It seems according to the history, that coolie women were put back into villages and homes. Did more literate men come now with the Ramayana and push the faithful and obedient Sita.. the good Hindu woman who never leaves her husband as one pandit put it at a wedding ceremony a few years ago?

The questions in my head.. when did things change? When did women stop working and walking and making their choices of partners and leaving those who were not good to them? After Kowsilla at Leonora, did coolie women on the estates get involved in strikes and resistance?

This book has no obligation to provide for the gaps in history, but I wonder, what happened to coolie woman between 1950 and now? Did Janet Jagan's story silence theirs?

What were the interactions with people who were not coolie during this period apart from the race riots of the 1960s and the racial violence over the next decades?

Coolie women and coolie and other men
Gaiutra had presented an Indian Indentureship Anniversary lecture in May 2013 and she read from this final chapter, the story of Latchmin Mohabir whose husband had chopped her.

I remember the sniggers coming from some of the prominent coolie men in the audience. One of the prominent coolie men who is an upholder of things Indian had walked out - pissed off that the violence of coolie men was being told about . Another prominent coolie man made a joke about a child rape allegation - the rapist another prominent coolie man and upholder of Indian values.The new maninjahs.

I finished reading the book the day after Vijaydashmi/Dussera. The day when Durga killed the demon Mahiasura and the day when Rama killed Ravan.

Coolie women on my mind today as I write this.. coolie women who are in power and who abuse that power. Kamla in Trinidad, the first coolie woman Prime Minister and the coolie women in the Highway Reroute Movement who are challenging Kamla.

The pandit at the Vijayadashmi satsangh  said that Sita's statement to Ravan that he will be destroyed by Ram; and Draupadi's vow that she would not rest until she washed her hair in Dushasana's blood are examples of how the curses of women could come true.
He urged the men in the mandir, 'never to drag a woman by her hair' even as he said "Beware a woman's wrath".

I want to imagine and hope that he was urging men to respect women.

Some pandits, like many men of all races, sexual orientations, ages  like to critique how women dress and the language is demeaning and sometimes violent, intended to humiliate when the 'dress' does not please them. 

The book had references to the orhini, the head covering.  It is a point of contention in many mandirs - to cover the head, not cover the head, or be glad that the women are attending. One of my favourite progressive pandits (he askes men to respect women) has this obsession with 'women must cover their head during aarti'. Other seemingly less progressive pandits do not bother too much with instructions to women on how to dress.

The pandit  told  a story about the shawl over Durga's head.. and encouraged  the women to cover their heads. I watched to see what would happen.

Some women in the mandir had their head's covered already. Some raised their head coverings which fell down again. Many of the women though, kept looking ahead, at the pandit and the altar with the Durga murti behind him and like Raghubansia on the cover of the book, chose not to cover their heads at this time.