Remembering rebellious Indian women

Dr Gabrielle Jamela Hosein

WHAT DOES it mean to bring post-indenture feminist politics to how we remember the past? The Botanical Afterlife of Indenture: Imaginative Archives, which opens on June 10, 6 pm at the Art Society of TT and continues until June 21, provides an example.

I use post-indenture rather than jahajin or girmitya because the first anchors us to those women who crossed the Indian and Atlantic Oceans as jahajis to become indentured workers, and girmitya defines our bond to them by their five- and ten-year plantation contracts.

The term post-indenture incorporates these and a range of other inherited terms but is distinctly contemporary, drawing on the past but located in the present. It is also multi-ethnic, seeing all of us across race as impacted by the Indian indenture experience and living post-indenture Caribbean lives.

By feminist politics, I mean our solidarities with those from the past who challenged norms of gender and sexuality, defined rules of respectability, sought self-determination, protested injustice, and worked through the mutual recognition necessary for cross-ethnic organising.

Post-indenture feminist politics, then, draws on the most rebellious and radical, seeing in them an example of the struggles to which our politics should remain committed. It means reading archives carefully for its abundance of transgressive and fearless Indian women, men, and queer individuals.

Amid commemorations of Indian indenture in the Caribbean, I often look for bold affirmation that most Indian women did not come to the region as wives, but as workers, whether by choice, trickery, or kidnapping.

They sought far more economic and sexual autonomy than today’s voices extolling the patriarchal Indian family would approve. They brought their children with them as single mothers. Left unsatisfactory men and took their jewellery, savings, and land with them. Fought men in court. And, used every form of freedom or power available to be the makers of their own histories despite colonial exploitation, violence, domestication, and dehumanisation.

They chafed at exploitative working conditions, raised their voices, downed tools, and lead protests. Some dressed like men, some desired women, some were promiscuous, some were sex workers, some were own way, and some were bad gyals.

All of them were our foremothers, just like the respectable ones.

They say nice women do not make history. On the other hand, troublesome ones are hardly exalted. A post-indenture feminist politics is not concerned with whether women met feminine ideals, but with their bold and fearless spirits’ contribution to changing who Indian women could be today.

The Botanical Afterlife of Indenture exhibit centres these women. The 19th and early 20th century ones on the margins. Those who wore a dhoti and shirt, and men’s clothes, while working on a coconut plantation. Those who were angry at their sexual vulnerability in plantations, villages, and towns. Those who didn’t protest politely. Those who didn’t defer to male authority because it was men. Those who chose sex with the partners they wanted and refused those they didn’t want. Those who made sure daughters finished their education before they even considered marriage. Those who could be vulgar. Those whose daughters inherited as much as their sons.

I see excitement in my young women students when they realise they don’t have to fulfil myths about Indian women because there were foremothers who never met or refused those ideals. For them, empowerment is tracing histories of Indian women being who they want to be. It is understanding that, from colonial portraiture to contemporary representations, those women are easily erased from history.

For example, there are dozens of images of docile-looking, bejewelled, indenture-era Indian women on the internet and near complete absence of studio images of Indian women’s defiance and protest.

The Botanical Afterlife of Indenture: Imaginative Archives makes these women visible through its engagement with archives of Indian womanhood.

It brings jahajin bandals (creolised as "georgie bundles"), rangoli, mehndi, godnas (tattoos), jewellery, film, and photography to its imagining of the legacy these women left for generations who came later. To remember them like this is to absolve their defiance, rather than disown their ruction. The exhibit is contemporary, political, historical, and beautiful in these ways.

It is produced in collaboration with Abigail Hadeed, Melanie Archer, Risa Raghunanan-Mohammed of Henna Trinidad, Portia Subran, Nicola Cross, Mitchum Weaver, Richard Rampersad, Michele Jorsling, Geneva Drepaulsingh, Chandra Rattan, Christeen Harewood, Vinay Harrichan of The Cutlass Magazine, Lyndon Livingstone, Ziya Hosein-Livingstone, and Lina Vincent, Gaurav Maurya, Dhanya Kolathur, and Setika Singh from India.

Join us at the Art Society of TT in their honour.

Diary of a mothering worker

Entry 557

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