This book focuses on subjugated indentured Indian women, who are constantly faced with race, gender, caste, and class oppression and inequality on overseas European-owned plantations, but who are also armed with latent links to the womens abolition movements in the homeland. Also examining their post-indenture life, it employs a paradigm of male-dominated Indian women in India at the margins of an enduringly patriarchal society, a persisting backdrop to the huge 19th century post-slavery movement of the agricultural indentured workforce drawn largely from India.
This book depicts the antithetical and contradictory explanations for the indentured Indian womens cries, degradation and dehumanization and how the politics of change and control impacted their social organization and its legacy.
The book owes its origins to the 2017 centennial commemorative event celebrating 100 years of the abolition of the indenture system of Indian labor that victimized and dehumanized Indians from 1834 through 1917.
Preface.- Foreword.
Chapter 1: Introduction and Overview: Indian
Indentured Women a Human Agency.
Chapter 2: Devoted Wife/Sensuous Bibi:
Colonial Constructions of the Indian Woman, 1860-1900.- Chapter 3:
Conceiving the Coolie Woman: Indentured Labour, Indian Women and Colonial
Discourse.- Chapter 4: Female Indentured Labor in Suriname: For Better or for
Worse?.
Chapter 5: The Position of Indian Women in Suriname.
Chapter 6:
Kunti's Cry: Indentured Women on Fiji Plantations.
Chapter 7: Kunti,
Lakshmibhai and the Ladies: Women's Labour and the Abolition of Indentured
Emigration from India.
Chapter 8: Fallen through the Nationalist and
Feminist Grids of Analysis: Political Campaigning of Indian Women against
Indentured Labour Emigration.
Chapter 9: Constructing Visibility: Indian
Women in the Jamaican Segment of the Indian Diaspora.
Chapter 10: Time to
Show Our True Colors: The GenderedPolitics of Indianness in Post-Apartheid
South Africa.
Chapter 11: Reflexivity and The Diaspora: Indian Women in
Postindenture Caribbean, Fiji, Mauritius and South Africa.
Chapter 12: The
Indo-Fijian Womans Story: Violence Against Women.
Professor Prem Misir, Vice-Chancellor, The University of Fiji, Fiji.
Contributing Authors:
Ashrufa Faruqee, formerly of St. Anthonys College, University of Oxford, UK.
Brij V. Lal, Professor Emeritus, School of Culture, History and Language at Australian National University, Australia.
Indrani Sen, Associate Professor, Department of English, Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi New Delhi, India.
Karen A. Ray, formerly of Marianopolis College, Montreal, Canada.
Pieter Cornelis Emmer, former Professor of European Expansion and Migration, University of Leiden, the Netherlands.
Rajesh Chandra, Vice-Chancellor and President, University of the South Pacific, Fiji.
Ravindra. K. Jain, formerly Professor of Social Anthropology and Dean, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi,
India.
Rosemarijn Hoefte, Professor in the History of Suriname, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Shobha Nijhawan, Associate Professor of Hindi Language and Literature at York University, Toronto, Canada.
Smitha Radhakrishnan, Associate Professor of Sociology, Wellesley College, USA.
Verene A. Shepherd, Fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Society; Professor/University Director of the Institute for Gender & Development Studies and Professor of Social History at the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies.
