In recent years, several rich histories of South Asian migration to Southeast Asia have been published, yet the analysis of gender has been extremely limited.1 Women are usually a fleeting presence in these histories. Moreover, few historians have examined how gender norms, expression or relations shaped the lives of South Asian men in Southeast Asia. In his study of “untouchable” Tamils in colonial Singapore, John Solomon identified gender analysis as a “limitation” of his own study and called for future research on “untouchable female migrants who had to contend with intersectional identities as laborers, untouchables and women”.2Fleeting Agencies, Arunima Datta’s account of Indian “coolie” women who toiled on rubber plantations in British Malaya, has addressed this gaping lacuna in the field. This fascinating book also shows that gender was central to the making of Indian labor migration, and more broadly, imperial and inter-Asian networks.

Fleeting Agencies engages with one of the most enduring questions of historical debate over the last four-five decades: how to write histories of marginalized people? It will thus be of interest to scholars in a wide range of fields, including South and Southeast Asian studies, gender history, and postcolonial studies. Datta is particularly interested in theorizing the agency of subaltern subjects. She extends the critiques of early Subaltern Studies by Rosalind O’Hanlon and others, who argued that this field had overemphasized direct, spectacular and collectively organized forms of resistance. Datta puts forward the term “situational agency” to theorize “a new layer to the concept”. While numerous scholars have similarly emphasized smaller scales of action, Datta’s key insight lies in her analysis of the temporality of agency, in conversation with Lila Abu-Lughod, Sumi Madhok, and others. She argues that many accounts of “subaltern agency … favor success, permanency, and longevity of the effects of an agential act over fleeting, episodic acts, which may or may not have ‘succeeded’”, or had “transformative goals”. The archival methodology combines reading colonial and nationalist stereotypes “against the grain”; an “active engagement with the silences” and “cracks” in the archives, from which situational agency emerges; and oral histories with coolie women (pp. 15–19).

Datta uses the term “coolie” in conversation with certain descendants of plantation workers, who argue that “coolie” evokes “hardworking laborers who were self-made men and women” (p. 7). Datta is similarly invested in recognizing women as “migrant laborers in their own right” (p. 29). In chapter 1, Datta charts planters’ increasing attempts from the early 1900s to recruit more women to rubber estates to ensure the reproduction of the labor force in the context of Indian nationalist pressure to halt unskilled labor migration. Writing against some historians’ emphasis on “kidnapping and fraudulent recruitment”, Datta argues that for many coolie women, migration was a “conscious act of decision-making” (pp. 29, 47). In chapter 2, which examines “women’s lives, roles, and experiences on the estates”, Datta critiques certain scholars’ reproduction of terms that appear in planter, official and nationalist archives—such as “dependent” or “secondary laborer”—which allowed planters to pay women less for doing the same work as men (pp. 49–50). Datta argues that “being counted as independent labor units enabled coolie women to earn individual wages, which also shaped their ability to ‚know‘ and negotiate their rights and situations as laborers“, through participation in protest, negotiation and situational agency (p. 63).

The next two chapters turn to narratives of coolies’ intimate ties. Chapter 3 examines colonial accounts of “domestic” violence, which positioned all coolie women as victims of violent coolie men. In problematizing these narratives, Datta presents a fascinating analysis of the coolie household as a multipurpose space of commercial enterprise, communal messing, and shared lodging. When physical violence occurred in these spaces, it was not necessarily “domestic” in the ways that colonial concepts of domesticity suggested. Moreover, Datta makes the vitally important point that the colonial archive’s amplification of “eventful visible” violence between coolie men and women obscured the constant and “more routine but less visible form[s] of violence generated by the Empire and an exploitative plantation economy”, including planters’ everyday forms of punishment and the inaction of the police when women sought redress (pp. 97–8). There is one questionable element of this chapter: Datta’s analysis partly rests on the unnecessary claim that violence between coolie men and women was “exceptional” (pp. 79–81), which fails to consider how the physical violence against women that did occur on estates was related to multiple forms of gendered violence with structural underpinnings.

Chapter 4 turns to the colonial and nationalist discourse surrounding “wife-enticement”. In these court cases, colonial judges ignored the possibility that women might choose to leave their partner for another man. In contrast, Datta argues that in their intimate lives, “Indian coolie women often consciously acted upon fleeting opportunities to forward their own interests, but not necessarily to challenge or change the societal order” (pp. 106–8). Moreover, when women presented themselves as “victims” in court cases, this could be a “strategic … camouflage” of their agency to safeguard “survival” in a patriarchal context (pp. 109–10). In both chapters 3 and 4, Datta critiques Indian nationalists’ augmentation of colonial narratives of coolie sexual immorality and violence, showing how nationalist men and women “other[ed] the ‘socially backward’ classes” to criticize labor migration and advance their own political agendas (pp. 121–3).

Drawing on various oral history narratives, chapter 5 explores the Rani of Jhansi Regiment (RJR), the women’s force which Subash Chandra Bose formed in 1943 to fight the British Empire alongside the Indian National Army (INA), in alliance with the Japanese. Datta is interested, first, in examining the “politicization of gender” in the RJR and INA, and second, in exploring why women who worked on rubber plantations joined the RJR. She argues that estate women’s enlistment was more about survival, than nationalist political ideologies: “the RJR offered a situational opportunity to RJR recruits to access survivance [agential acts of survival] within the context of uncertainty, suffering, impoverishment, and danger resulting from the Japanese occupation” (pp. 128–9, 168). Moreover, Datta critiques elite RJR women’s narratives for “devalu[ing] the agency of the estate women” and shows how the RJR reproduced class and caste hierarchies (p. 138).

Occasionally, Datta appears to construct a heroic subaltern subject—for instance, by emphasizing the “courage” of coolie women (p. 75)—detracting from her more sophisticated analysis of situational and temporally fleeting forms of agency. Datta reads colonial and nationalist archives “against the grain” to retrieve coolie women’s experiences, agency and “voices” from archival “silences” and stereotypes. This analysis is open to critiques of “recovery” modes of gender and sexuality history,3 notwithstanding Datta’s analysis of the politics of knowledge production. Some recent South Asian gender histories have taken a different approach to Datta. Durba Mitra, for instance, presents a “concept history” of female sexual deviance in “forms of modern social scientific thought” to “account for the way that sexual norms shape the descriptive practices, methods, and categories we use in writing marginalized subjects into history”4. Whichever approach one finds more convincing—and I could mention several more—the varying responses that gender historians have recently offered to the problematic of writing histories of the “marginalized”, is an indication of the vibrancy of this capacious field in South Asian and South Asian diaspora studies.

In sum, in centering women in histories of labor migration between South and Southeast Asia, Fleeting Agencies is a path-breaking addition to the field. Datta presents a thoughtful theorization of agency and a granular analysis of the complexities of coolie intimacies and households, as well as illuminating new aspects of trans-imperial networks.

Notes:
1 Rajesh Rai, Indians in Singapore, 1819–1945. Diaspora in the Colonial Port City, New York 2014; John Solomon, A Subaltern History of the Indian Diaspora in Singapore. Gradual Disappearance of Untouchability 1872–1965, Abingdon 2016; Anand A. Yang, Empire of Convicts. Indian Penal Labor in Colonial Southeast Asia, Oakland 2021.
2 Solomon, Subaltern History, p. 213.
3 Anjali Arondekar, For the Record. On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India, Hyderabad 2010.
4 Durba Mitra, Indian Sex Life. Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought, Princeton 2020, p. 20.