‘coolie belle’

Postcard

“coolie belle,” taken in Port of Spain, Trinidad, circa 1890 by Felix Morin.

Courtesy of the Michael Goldberg Collection, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad.

“Often, the postcards carry captions or even hand-written notes suggesting how people may have identified or perceived the portraits at the time. Many were simply titled “Coolie Belle.” One from Trinidad reads: “Dressed Coolie Woman. All Gold.” Another describes its subject as: “A wealthy coolie woman awaiting her husband.” On one postcard, the daughter of an American missionary in British Guiana scribbled to a friend: “This gives a good idea of their costumes. The women wear round flat yellow metal ornaments on the side of the nose, three or four silver bracelets on each arm, and often silver bracelets on each ankle.”

The text accompanying the postcards reflects a preoccupation with how these women looked, especially with their jewelry and the wealth that it suggested. But the irony of the word “coolie”—conventionally used to refer to manual laborers on the Indian subcontinent—being juxtaposed with such riches was clearly lost on the caption writers. In these plantation societies on the verge of becoming tourist paradises, the word had acquired a new meaning—as ethnic slur.

The interior lives of these women went undocumented, but their bodies did not—the written archives are filled with descriptions of both their physical allure and the physical trauma they suffered. But what distinguishes the colonial photographs of indentured women as a historical source is that, unlike descriptions found in a traveler’s tale or an immigration agent’s report, we see them, and they—seemingly—look back at us. These images don’t simply document, they enact a struggle—between the imaginations of colonial-era photographers and the real lives of the women behind the portraits.

Various businesses were happy to profit from the tourist boom, and so the images achieved wide circulation. The United Fruit Company, haberdasheries, and newspapers subsidized postcards that subliminally promoted the colonies as tropical paradises while directly advertising their own companies through sponsored tag-lines. Professional photographers marketed the Caribbean as “picturesque,” and therefore, as worthy of being photographed; this in turn inspired tourists with their Kodaks.

Meanwhile, studios continued to thrive by processing amateur snaps as well as selling their own scenic views and portraits of local people as filler for vacation albums. As interconnected as colonial photography became with tourism, it was deeply tied to imperialism from the start. Not long after Louis Daguerre made the details of the photographic process publicly available in 1839, it was used in the service of the pseudo-science of race. The first daguerreotypes compared enslaved Black people in South Carolina, U.S. to those in Brazil in a format that became generic: “specimens,” often naked, were photographed from the front, back, and side, focusing on their anatomy and physical characteristics in order to document perceived racial differences.

At about the same time and with similar ethnographic intentions, British colonial administrators in India commissioned a photographic field survey of the subcontinent’s tribes, castes, and cultures, published as the multi-volume The People of India.”

-Postcards from Empire, Gaiutra Bahadur; published online at Dissent Magazine 2015