Creating Archives: Book Talk with Gaiutra Bahadur

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Friday, April 4, 2025 | 6:30pm to 8:00pm

25 West 43rd Street, 10th Floor, Room 1000
between 5th & 6th Avenues, Manhattan

In this interactive talk, Prof. Gaiutra Bahadur will discuss her book, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (University of Chicago Press, 2013), and dive deep into the processes of creating a living archive, collecting oral stories, and preserving family histories.

About Coolie Woman
Gaiutra Bahadur uncovers the story of her great-grandmother, a young woman who sailed from India to Guiana in 1903 as an indentured laborer, or “coolie,” replacing emancipated slaves on sugar plantations. Through her journey across three continents and extensive research in colonial archives, Bahadur not only uncovers her ancestor’s life but also sheds light on the repressed history of the quarter of a million coolie women. These women, often widows or outcasts, endured harsh labor, poor conditions, and sexual exploitation, using their sexuality as a tool for survival and sometimes inciting uprisings. Coolie Woman is a gripping exploration of gender, power, and survival across generations, revealing a complex, untold history.

Purchase Book: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo13393932.html

This lecture is part of the Localized History Project Workshop Series

Author Bio

Gaiutra Bahadur is an essayist, critic and journalist born in Guyana and raised in New Jersey. She is the author of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, a personal history of indenture shortlisted in 2014 for the Orwell Prize, the British literary prize for artful political writing. A former daily newspaper staff writer and Nieman Fellow, she teaches writing and journalism as an associate professor at Rutgers University in Newark. The recipient of literary residencies from the MacDowell and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy, she is a two-time winner of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Award for prose.