What draws me specifically to this kind of engagement is its implication of history and by extension the importance of the first-person perspective. So often in the United States brown and black bodies are erased in the white world of poetry. I think the assertion of my brownness coupled with my complicated history is important since the de facto subject position is no longer cishet white and male.
What draws me specifically to this kind of engagement is its implication of history and by extension the importance of the first-person perspective. So often in the United States brown and black bodies are erased in the white world of poetry. I think the assertion of my brownness coupled with my complicated history is important since the de facto subject position is no longer cishet white and male.
The term Coolitude is derived from “coolie,” a word originating in Tamil that means “laborer” with the implication that the labor provided is physical in nature. The British started taking Indians into their colonies in 1838, a trade that lasted until 1917, created to provide labor needed in sugar plantations after slavery was abolished. Its roots are in labor and works to reclaim an identity that acknowledges histories of labor and the British labor trade in the colonies. This type of movement that faces Asia from spaces where overseas Indians live counters common wisdom that holds that fictions of “race” create identity.
This year marks a century since the system that displaced over three million South Asians ended. From 1838–1917, the British, after slavery was abolished, transported 341,600 indentured laborers from India to British Guiana. Worldwide they displaced 3.5 million Indians who they recruited to work sugar plantations in the Caribbean, South Africa, Réunion, Ile de Maurice, Fiji, and South America.
Some of the migrants, the girmitiyas, the kantrákis, the coolies, chose to sail across the seas into a life of new adventure.
Coolitude: Poetics of the Indian Labor Diaspora