Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya by Arunima Datta (review)

In British Southeast Asia, the term “coolie” conventionally evokes an image of a laboring Indian or Chinese man. In Fleeting Agencies, Arunima Datta critiques this trope by vividly presenting and analyzing evidence that Tamil coolie women were not just hapless victims dependent upon the migrating men they accompanied. Rather, they were active producers and reproducers of labor on British Malaya’s rubber plantations from the first decade of the twentieth century onward, when planters and civil servants began encouraging the recruitment of coolie women to address plantations’ skewed sex ratios that alarmed colonial administrations and Indian nationalists alike (38–41). Marshalling a wide range of material, including newspapers, census data, planters’ autobiographies, government reports and transcolonial governmental correspondence, Datta uncovers coolie women’s fleeting agencies by reading these predominantly elite sources against the grain and critically examining their silences. Through this method, she models for historians of colonial Southeast Asia—for whom sources in workingclass persons’ own voices are relatively sparse—a compelling way to write social history.