Finding a voice: Literary representations of indentured women

Abstract

While the complex threads of the historical narrative surrounding indenture continue to be investigated, their representations in the literature have been less comprehensively explored. As much of the pain of indenture is unwritten and undocumented, art comes to the aid of the subject, giving voice to the imagination and recreation of past experiences. It acts as a cathartic experience, capable of facing, questioning as well as coming to terms with the past. The process of remembering, expressing and documenting has created spaces for those whose struggles and narratives have remained marginal in literary history and critique. This paper will explore the multiple ways in which gender in indenture is being documented, archived and represented through a range of writers who have taken on the task of exploring new ways of presenting the past and filling in the silences of the unrepresented. In doing so, new ways of conceptualizing transoceanic feminism are presented, going beyond the binary understanding ofWestern and Indian models of gender. By giving agency to imagined characters and contexts, the literature assumes a subversive voice and becomes a causal agent for change.