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. CONTENTS 1. Introduction and Overview: Indian Indentured Women as Human Agency / Prem Misir 2. Devoted Wife/Sensuous Bibi: Colonial Constructions of the Indian Woman, 1860–1900 / Indrani Sen 3. Conceiving the Coolie Woman: Indentured Labour, Indian Women and Colonial Discourse / Mishi Faruqee 4. Female Indentured Labor in Suriname: For Better or for Worse? / Rosemarijn Hoefte 5. The Position of Indian Women in Surinam / P.C. Emmer 6. Kunti’s Cry: Indentured Women on Fiji Plantations / Brij V. Lal 7. Kunti, Lakshmibhai and the “Ladies”: Women’s Labour and the Abolition of Indentured Emigration from India / Karen A. Ray 8. Fallen Through the Nationalist and Feminist Grids of Analysis: Political Campaigning of Indian Women Against Indentured Labour Emigration / Shobna Nijhawan 9. Constructing Visibility: Indian Women in the Jamaican Segment of the Indian Diaspora / Verene A. Shepherd 10. “Time to Show Our True Colors”: The Gendered Politics of “Indianness” in Post-Apartheid South Africa / Smitha Radhakrishnan 12. Reflexivity and the Diaspora: Indian Women in Post-Indenture Caribbean, Fiji, Mauritius and South Africa / Ravindra K. Jain 13. The Indo-Fijian Woman’s Story: Violence Against Women / Prem Misir