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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 women´s 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 women´s 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.

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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 Gendered Politics of "Indianness" in Post-Apartheid South Africa.- Chapter 11 : Reflexivity and The Diaspora: Indian Women in Post-indenture Caribbean, Fiji, Mauritius and South Africa.- Chapter 12 : The Indo-Fijian Woman´s Story: Violence Against Women.

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Professor Prem Misir, Vice-Chancellor, The University of Fiji, Fiji.

Contributing Authors:


Ashrufa Faruqee, formerly of St. Anthony´s College, University of Oxford, UK.


Brij V. Lal, Professor Emeritus, School of Culture, History and Language at Australian National University, Australia.

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