Gaiutra Bahadur

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Gaiutra Bahadur
Born New Amsterdam, East Berbice-Corentyne, Guyana
OccupationWriter and journalist
LanguageEnglish
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater Yale University
Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
Notable work Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture

Gaiutra Bahadur is a Guyanese-American writer. She is best known for Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2014. [1]

Contents

Early life

Bahadur was born in New Amsterdam, East Berbice-Corentyne in rural Guyana and emigrated to the United States with her family when she was six years old. [2] [3] She grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey and earned her bachelor's degree, with honors in English Literature, at Yale University and her master's degree in journalism at Columbia University.

Career

Before winning a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University when she was 32, she was a staff writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Austin American-Statesman. In her decade as a daily newspaper reporter, she covered politics, immigration and demographics in Texas, Pennsylvania and New Jersey and spent three months in the spring of 2005, during the Iraq war, as a foreign correspondent in Knight Ridder's Baghdad bureau. Since then, she has worked as an essayist, literary critic and freelance journalist, contributing to The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, Dissent and other publications. [2]

Her book Coolie Woman was published in 2013. It is partly a narrative history of indentured women in the Caribbean and partly a family history focusing on her great-grandmother, Sujaria, who left Calcutta for British Guiana in 1903 to work as an indentured plantation labourer. [4] The book was a finalist for the 2014 Orwell Prize and the Center for Documentary Studies Writing Prize at Duke University, and it won the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Award for Prose and Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Prize. [5] The Chronicle of Higher Education included the book in its round-up of the best scholarly books of the decade in 2020. [6]

She collaborated [7] with poet and translator Rajiv Mohabir to recover the only known text by an indentured immigrant in the Anglophone Caribbean, a songbook by Lal Bihari Sharma first published as a pamphlet in India in 1915. Mohabir's English translation, I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara, was published in 2019 [8] with an afterword by Bahadur, who first encountered the text in the British Library while doing research for Coolie Woman. [9]

She is an associate professor of journalism at Rutgers University-Newark and has taught creative nonfiction at the University of Basel in Switzerland [10] and Caribbean literature at City College of New York. [11]

Bibliography

Books

Afterwords

Anthologies

Nonfiction

Fiction

Notable Articles and Essays

Major Awards and Recognition

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Indentured servitude</span> Consensual or punitive unpaid labor

Indentured servitude is a form of labor in which a person is contracted to work without salary for a specific number of years. The contract, called an "indenture", may be entered voluntarily for purported eventual compensation or debt repayment, or imposed involuntarily as a judicial punishment. Many came with forged or no contract they ever saw.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Coolie</span> Offensive term for a labourer from Asia

Coolie is a pejorative term used for low-wage labourers, typically those of Indian or Chinese descent.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Guianas</span> Region in north-central South America

The Guianas, sometimes called by the Spanish loan-word Guayanas, is a region in north-eastern South America which includes the following three territories:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nieman Foundation for Journalism</span> Journalism institution at Harvard University

The Nieman Foundation for Journalism is the primary journalism institution at Harvard University.

Indo-Caribbean Americans or Indian-Caribbean Americans, are Americans who trace their ancestry ultimately to India, though whose recent ancestors lived in the Caribbean, where they migrated beginning in 1838 as indentured laborers. There are large populations of Indo-Trinidadian and Tobagonians and Indo-Guyanese along with a smaller population of Indo-Surinamese, Indo-Jamaicans and other Indo-Caribbeans in the United States, especially in the New York metropolitan area and Florida. The Washington metropolitan area, Texas, and Minnesota also have small numbers of Indo-Guyanese and Indo-Trinidadians. Indo-Caribbean Americans are a subgroup of Caribbean Americans as well as Indian Americans, which are a subgroup of South Asian Americans, which itself is a subgroup of Asian Americans.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diane McWhorter</span> American journalist and author 

Rebecca Diane McWhorter is an American journalist, commentator, and author who has written extensively about race and the history of civil rights. She won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize in 2002 for Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution.

David Dabydeen FRSL is a Guyanese-born broadcaster, novelist, poet and academic. He was formerly Guyana's Ambassador to UNESCO from 1997 to 2010, and was the youngest Member of the UNESCO Executive Board (1993–1997), elected by the General Council of all Member States of UNESCO. He was appointed Guyana's Ambassador Plenipotentiary and Extraordinaire to China, from 2010 to 2015. He is one of the longest serving diplomats in the history of Guyana, most of his work done in a voluntary unpaid capacity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Interracial marriage</span> Marriage between individuals of different racial/ethnic backgrounds

Interracial marriage is a marriage involving spouses who belong to different races or racialized ethnicities.

The Indian indenture system was a system of indentured servitude, by which more than 1.6 million workers from British India were transported to labour in European colonies, as a substitute for slave labor, following the abolition of the trade in the early 19th century. The system expanded after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, in the French colonies in 1848, and in the Dutch Empire in 1863. British Indian indentureship lasted till the 1920s. This resulted in the development of a large South Asian diaspora in the Caribbean, Natal, East Africa, Réunion, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Fiji, as well as the growth of Indo-Caribbean, Indo-African, Indo-Mauritian, Indo-Fijian, Indo-Malaysian, and Indo-Singaporean populations.

Chindian (Hindi: चीनी-भारतीय; Chinese: 中印人; pinyin: Zhōngyìnrén; Cantonese Yale: Jūngyanyàn; Tamil: சிந்தியன்; Telugu: చిండియన్స్; is an informal term used to refer to a person of mixed Chinese and Indian ancestry; i.e. from any of the host of ethnic groups native to modern China and India. There are a considerable number of Chindians in Malaysia and Singapore. In Maritime Southeast Asia, people of Chinese and Indian origin immigrated in large numbers during the 19th and 20th centuries. There are also a sizeable number living in Hong Kong and smaller numbers in other countries with large overseas Chinese and Indian diaspora, such as Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Suriname and Guyana in the Caribbean, as well as in Indonesia, the Philippines, the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.

Girmitiyas, also known as Jahajis, were indentured labourers from British India transported to work on plantations in Fiji, South Africa, Eastern Africa, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Caribbean as part of the Indian indenture system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Katherine Boo</span> American investigative journalist

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Rajkumari Singh was an Indo-Caribbean, Guyanese writer, political activist, educator, and cultural leader. She is the author of the essay "I am a Coolie". Singh was the first published Indian woman from the Caribbean and although she never used the term "feminist," her life's work contributed to feminist literature of the Caribbean, in addition to her advancement of a national Guyanese culture of integration while still upholding Indian culture within this new construct.

<i>Coolie Woman</i> 2013 book by Gaiutra Bahadur

Coolie Woman is a book written by Gaiutra Bahadur and co-published in 2013 by Hurst and Company of London in Europe and the University of Chicago Press in the US. Editions from Hachette in India in 2013 and Jacana in South Africa in 2014 followed.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Royal Northern Infirmary</span> Hospital in Highland , Scotland

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Wendell Steavenson is an author and journalist. She received a Nieman Fellowship in 2014 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021. In 2016, her book Circling the Square was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Books, and in 2023, she was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Journalism for four articles published in The Economist.

References

  1. 1 2 "Orwell prize shortlist headed by Thatcher biography". the Guardian. 2014-04-24. Retrieved 2021-03-02.
  2. 1 2 "Gaiutra Bahadur". Pulitzer Center. Retrieved 13 February 2017.
  3. ↑ "Gaiutra Bahadur: enigmas and arrivals - Caribbean Beat Magazine". Caribbean Beat Magazine. 1 May 2014. Retrieved 13 February 2017.
  4. ↑ Bahadur, Gaiutra (14 June 2016). "Gaiutra Bahadur: 'How could I write about women whose existence is barely acknowledged?'". The Guardian. Retrieved 13 February 2017.
  5. ↑ "Gaiutra Bahadur". Hutchins Center. Archived from the original on 6 June 2017. Retrieved 11 February 2017.
  6. ↑ "The Best Scholarly Books of the Decade". The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 23 April 2020.
  7. ↑ Khan, Aliyah. "Lalbihari Sharma, I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (Book Review)". Journal of West Indian Literature 27.2.
  8. ↑ "I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara |". Kaya Press. Retrieved 2021-03-01.
  9. ↑ Bahadur, Gaiutra. "Rescued from the Footnotes of History: Lal Bihari Sharma's "Holi Songs of Demerara"". Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved 2021-03-01.
  10. ↑ "Creative Nonfiction Writing | Gaiutra Bahadur | Centre for African Studies". zasb.unibas.ch. Retrieved 2021-03-02.
  11. ↑ "Captcha | Turing Test 1.0". www.coursicle.com. Retrieved 2021-03-01.
  12. ↑ "Go Home!". Feminist Press. Retrieved 2021-03-02.
  13. ↑ "The Rockefeller Foundation Announces Selected Bellagio Center Resident Fellows". The Rockefeller Foundation. Retrieved 2021-03-02.
  14. ↑ "Current Fellows: Schomburg Center Scholars-in-Residence Program". The New York Public Library. Retrieved 2021-03-02.
  15. ↑ "Alumni Fellows". hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu. Retrieved 2021-03-02.
  16. ↑ "Gaiutra Bahadur - Artist". MacDowell. Retrieved 2021-03-02.
  17. ↑ "Coolie Woman". Trinidad Express Newspapers. Retrieved 2021-03-02.
  18. ↑ NJ.com, Peggy McGlone | NJ Advance Media for (2013-02-21). "N.J. Arts Council awards 22 grants to individual artists". nj. Retrieved 2021-03-02.
  19. ↑ "2019 Individual Artist Fellowship Awards" (PDF). artscouncil.nj.gov. Retrieved 2021-03-01.
  20. ↑ "Nieman Foundation Announces U.S. and International Fellows for 2007-2008". Nieman Foundation. Retrieved 2021-03-02.
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