The Archive, the Repertoire and Disnarration: Performing the Colonial Archive in Gaiutra Bahadur’s "Coolie Woman"

Following on the abolition of slavery, more than one million Indians indentured themselves between 1834 and 1917, signing contracts to work a minimum of five years in the British sugar colonies across the world. Transported in overcrowded ships with a high mortality rate, more than 500,000 indentured workers were thus brought to the British Caribbean to do identical work to the former African enslaved, so that Indenture would be dubbed “a new system of slavery” (Hugh Tinker). Perhaps because such a “system” challenges the narrative of imperial benevolence that dominates the abolition of slavery in British colonies, the history of the “old Indian diaspora” – which is also known as the “Brown Atlantic” – has been given little visibility.

Recently, though, Indo-Caribbean writers have turned to the colonial archive to breathe new life into the memory of Indenture, and Gaiutra Bahadur’s Coolie Woman (2014) offers a fine instance of this trend. Strikingly, the book combines forays into colonial archives and family records with autobiographical passages and sections that formulate and re-formulate hypotheses about the lives of indentured women, which is reminiscent of Gerald Prince’s disnarrated, in that Bahadur’s use of this narrative strategy grants a paradoxical form of existence to “expressions of unrealized possibility, […] epistemic expressions of ignorance, ontologic expressions of nonexistence […] suppositions and false calculations and so forth” (Prince). In The Archive and the Repertoire (2003), Diana Taylor distinguishes between “archival memory,” which sustains power and exists as “items supposedly resistant to change,” and “the repertoire,” which “enacts embodied memory,” “allows for individual agency” and more fully represents the memory of marginalized people. My contention is that Bahadur harnesses Gerald Prince’s ‘disnarrated’ in her book to create a tension between the (colonial) archive and the repertoire, so she can expose the gaps and biases of the existing record while creating a counter archive of indenture. Moreover, such a ‘floating’ counter archive also intersects with Bahadur’s genealogical quest for origins. Indeed the US-based Indo-Caribbean writer thus pieces together the life of her great grandmother, finally locating her own place of origins neither in Guyana nor in India nor in the USA, but on the boat her great grandmother took in 1903 to travel from India to Guyana as an unaccompanied female indentured labourer.